What Human Rights?

[The Grand Nudger]

I think we have to remember that Bentham and Mill's original utilitarianism was definitely a metaphysically normative system: it contains the principle that one should seek the greatest good for the greatest number. I think this metaphysical norm contradicts the underlying spirit of their philosophy, and I think we can dispense with it. 

Agreed entirely.   

Descriptively, every person actually does what he or she wants to do. Emotionally, we evolved to be social, so empathy logically precedes the system: we seek the greatest good for the greatest number not because we ought to, but because that's how our brains generally work. Normally, this is how things work. I do nice things for strangers not because I ought to, but because I like it: it gives me pleasure, both immediately and rationally: I know I'm happier in a generally cooperative society.

But as is the case with any other normative system, a person with very low empathy will not find the logical arguments at all compelling. People with high empathy have to make the (slightly) difficult choice of deciding between harming a perpetrator of harm to others, by denying him this pleasure, or allowing him to hurt others; both offend our empathy, and we have to choose. Then, by extension, a rational person without empathy has to decide between fulfilling his primary desires at the risk of retaliation (from his own perspective) of others.

Indeed, it's always the exceptions that bend these systems near to point break, but we can certainly handle those situations.  

I'm not sure that this is strictly true, that people prefer (at a basic level) simpler, less nuanced systems. A lot of intellectual and ideological production since the relatively recent abandonment of hunter-gatherer economics has gone into convincing people that these "simpler" systems -- which just so happen to (among other things) justify the privilege of the ruling class du jour, what a coincidence -- are actually true, and the penalties for violating them are severe. If people wanted simpler systems just for the sake of simplicity, there would be no need of hell (or prisons).

Catering to a market, nevertheless, I doubt that all of that ideological and intellectual work is actually the reason that people subscribe to those systems.  As our resident apologists find endless ways to remind us, it's rarely the argument they present that compelled them to fealty.  Seems to be a case of accepting first, rationalizing later...and the rationalizations aren't all that important.  Tear them to shreds and the acceptance persists. Perhaps I'm wrong, it's a -stroooong- possibility, but I'd stand by the statement even after the above considerations. Im not sure that "simpler for the sake of simplicity" really gets at what I was trying to express. I;d say that the simpler systems don;t appeal to us on -those- grounds, but something altogether less -intellectually- complicated. The simpler systems appeal to our simpler natures (I know you don't like the word, I don't mean it in an overarching way, only saying that there's some part of us that immediately suggests that we cave someones head in when they slap us on the face).