‘The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small voice' within me'
The Benevolent Dictator: Rousseau & Bentham on Morality & 'Its' Demands
Living the Good Life as the Conscious Means to the Kingdom of Ends
by Max Ramsahoye
Embedded Files
E. McKnight Kauffer From the series Great Ideas of Western Man (1953)
"Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience. But nothing is a greater cause of suffering."
– Fyodor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
To represent the nature of morality and the mind, Rousseau and Bentham anthropomorphise conscience and 'the pleasure principle' as powerful and benevolent rulers:
❝ Too often does reason deceive us; we have only too good a right to doubt her; but conscience never deceives us; she is the true guide of man; it is to the soul what instinct is to the body; he who obeys his conscience is following nature and he need not fear that he will go astray… Let us obey the call of nature; we shall see that her yoke is easy and that when we give heed to her voice we find a joy in the answer of a good conscience. ❞
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau Emilie, or On Education
♔
❝ Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. ❞
– Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation
Utilitarian morality is often criticised for being too demanding. This ‘demandingness objection’ prompted by Singer’s ‘principle of sacrifice’, articulated in his classic essay Famine, Affluence and Morality, states that certain normative actions that come at a great cost to our own welfare are not morally obligatory; such as sacrificing most of our own time, money and pleasure for the lives of (spatially and temporally) distant strangers.
The framing of this piece metaphorically represents the demandingness of Effective Altruism - the philosophy of using one’s life to do the most good - through the personification of morality as ‘the benevolent dictator’: a ‘more-than-human’ ‘egregore’ projected from the human mind (‘the conscience’) out into the world like a secular God to rule over our lives.
This ‘benevolent dictator' demands we act in certain ways and not in others, instructing us on how we ought to act for our own good (our sense of virtue) and the good of others (the wider consequences of our actions). Upon failure to adhere to its demands, as aspiring ethical subjects, it punishes us with guilt, self-hatred and depression (anhedonia, absence of positive affect). Upon success, it rewards us with relief (absence of negative affect) and perhaps even pride and gratitude for our existence (second-order goods).
Overall, the idea of the ‘benevolent dictator’ aims to bring divine command theory and the theory of the bicameral mind into a secular context; to reflect philosophical conceptions of memetics and doxastic involuntarism (‘that we do not have beliefs, but beliefs have us’); the ethics of being an object and the inverse instrumentality of morality (‘the hands of God or the Good’); and the almost theological character of ‘the moral landscape’ (that ‘heaven - and hell - is a place on Earth’) and the ‘messiah complex’ of Effective Altruism (‘saving the world’). Most importantly, the metaphor serves to imaginatively capture the EA experience of self-moralisation and to aid others in forming a healthy relationship to living the good life, as the conscious means to the 'kingdom of ends'.
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