(print by James Gillray, 1797).
In class we were discussing G.E. Moore’s “Ideal Utilitarianism”, and this brought us to reflect back upon Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The question posed is of utmost importance to arts policy: if the silly game of push-pin really is as good as poetry, so long as it brings the same pleasures to the players, the justification for public funding for the arts is on a very shaky foundation indeed. What did Bentham actually say about this?
Jeremy Bentham’s The Rationale of Reward was published in 1825. Here is the passage that puts his push-pin claim in context:
The utility of all these arts and sciences,—I speak both of those of amusement [by which he earlier lists music, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture…] and curiosity,— the value which they possess, is exactly in proportion to the pleasure they yield. Every other species of preeminence which may be attempted to be established among them is altogether fanciful. Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music are relished only by a few. The game of pushpin is always innocent: it were well could the same be always asserted of poetry. Indeed, between poetry and truth there is natural opposition: false morals and fictitious nature. The poet always stands in need of something false. When he pretends to lay has foundations in truth, the ornaments of his superstructure are fictions; his business consist in stimulating our passions, and exciting our prejudices. Truth, exactitude of every kind is fatal to poetry. The poet must see everything through coloured media, and strive to make every one else do the same. It is true, there have been noble spirits, to whom poetry and philosophy have been equally indebted; but these exceptions do not counteract the mischiefs which have resulted from this magic art. If poetry and music deserve to he preferred before a game of push-pin, it must be because they are calculated to gratify those individuals who are most difficult to be pleased.
I had always thought Bentham was simply making a claim that for the utilitarian, pleasure is pleasure is pleasure, and not that he had also launched a Platonic attack on poets as those who do nothing but misrepresent the world. The last sentence here reminds me of the old debate over “expensive tastes”: If Abi gets 10 units of pleasure from push-pin, which costs nothing, but none from chamber music recitals, and Ben gets 10 units of pleasure from chamber music recitals, for which the musicians need to be paid, but none from push-pin, should the state subsidize chamber music recitals so that Ben has a more equal chance as Abi at getting some pleasure? There was a lengthy debate between Ronald Dworkin (no) and G.A. Cohen (yes) on this - I won’t add to it.
John Stuart Mill raised the push-pin issue in his essay on Bentham, first published in 1838 (and available in a nice volume along with Mill’s essay on Coleridge, edited and introduced by F.R. Leavis (and discussed at length in Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society 1780-1950)). Mill on Bentham:
Much more has been said than there is any basis for about his contempt for the pleasures of imagination, and for the fine arts. Music was throughout life his favourite amusement; as for painting, sculpture, and the other arts addressed to the eye, he was so far from holding them in contempt that he occasionally recognises them as means to important social ends; though his ignorance of the deeper springs of human character prevented him (as it prevents most Englishmen) from suspecting how profoundly such things enter into the moral nature of man and into the education of the individual and of the race.
But his attitude towards ‘poetry’ in the narrower sense, that which employs the language of words, was entirely unfavourable. Words, he thought, were perverted from their proper role when they were used in uttering anything but precise logical truth. He says somewhere in his works that ‘quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry’: but this is only a paradoxical way of saying what he would equally have said of the things he most valued and admired. Another aphorism attributed to him is much more characteristic of his view of this subject: ‘All poetry is misrepresentation.’ Poetry, he thought, consists essentially in exaggeration for effect, in proclaiming one view of a thing very emphatically and suppressing all the limitations and qualifications. This trait of character seems to me a curious example of what Mr. Carlyle strikingly calls ‘the completeness of limited men’. Here is a philosopher who is happy within his narrow boundary as no man of indefinite range ever was; who flatters himself that he is so completely emancipated from the essential law of poor human intellect, by which it can only see one thing at a time well, that he can even turn round on the imperfection and solemnly condemn it. Did Bentham really suppose that it is only in poetry that propositions cannot be exactly true, cannot contain in themselves all the limitations and qualifications they need when applied to practice? We have seen how far his own prose propositions are from realising this Utopia; and even the attempt to approach it would be incompatible not merely with poetry but with oratory and popular writing of every kind. Bentham’s accusation is perfectly true; all writing that undertakes to make men feel truths as well as see them does take up one point at a time, seeking to impress that one point, driving it home, making it sink into and colour the whole mind of the reader or hearer. It is justified in doing so, if the portion of truth that it is enforcing is the one called for by the occasion. All writing addressed to the feelings has a natural tendency to exaggeration; but Bentham should have remembered that in this, as in many things, we must aim at too much if we are to be sure of doing enough.
Suppose we put poetry to the side, since Bentham is so worried about it, and ask “if it gives the same pleasure, is push-pin as good as music?” Mill did not think so, and departed from Bentham in describing higher and lower pleasures. Here is Mill in his essay Utilitarianism:
… there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect; of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation. It must be admitted, however, that utilitarian writers in general have placed the superiority of mental over bodily pleasures chiefly in the greater permanency, safety, uncostliness, &c., of the former—that is, in their circumstantial advantages rather than in their intrinsic nature. And on all these points utilitarians have fully proved their case; but they might have taken the other, and, as it may be called, higher ground, with entire consistency. It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognise the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone.
And so now we have a hierarchy of pleasures, but it remains in Mill, as a utilitarian, that pleasure (and absence of pain) are the consequences by which we would evaluate any action.
G.E. Moore, in his Principia Ethica (1903) takes a further step away from Bentham. Moore’s “Ideal Utilitarianism” holds that pleasure is only one desirable end as we morally evaluate the consequences of our actions, but there are other ends, intrinsic goods. In order to find out what these intrinsic goods are,
… it is necessary to consider what things are such that, if they existed by themselves, in absolute isolation, we should yet judge their existence to be good ...
once the meaning of the question is clearly understood, the answer to it, in its main outlines, appears to be so obvious, that it runs the risk of seeming to be a platitude. By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor, if we consider strictly what things are worth having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that any one will think that anything else has nearly so great a value as the things which are included under these two heads.
Moore cannot, and does not claim to, prove that these are intrinsically good, nor that this is an exhaustive list (followers of Moore often added the pursuit of knowledge and understanding to the intrinsic goods set).
As to what “appreciation” means, it is something beyond what our contemporary surveys call “arts participation”:
It is plain that in those instances of aesthetic appreciation, which we think most valuable, there is included, not merely a bare cognition of what is beautiful in the object, but also some kind of feeling or emotion. It is not sufficient that a man should merely see the beautiful qualities in a picture and know that they are beautiful, in order that we may give his state of mind the highest praise. We require that he should also appreciate the beauty of that which he sees and which he knows to be beautiful—that he should feel and see its beauty. And by these expressions we certainly mean that he should have an appropriate emotion towards the beautiful qualities which he cognises. It is perhaps the case that all aesthetic emotions have some common quality; but it is certain that differences in the emotion seem to be appropriate to differences in the kind of beauty perceived: and by saying that different emotions are appropriate to different kinds of beauty, we mean that the whole which is formed by the consciousness of that kind of beauty together with the emotion appropriate to it, is better than if any other emotion had been felt in contemplating that particular beautiful object. Accordingly we have a large variety of different emotions, each of which is a necessary constituent in some state of consciousness which we judge to be good. …
That such a cognitive element is essential to a valuable whole may be easily seen, by asking: What value should we attribute to the proper emotion excited by hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, if that emotion were entirely unaccompanied by any consciousness, either of the notes, or of the melodic and harmonic relations between them? And that the mere hearing of the Symphony, even accompanied by the appropriate emotion, is not sufficient, may be easily seen, if we consider what would be the state of a man, who should hear all the notes, but should not be aware of any of those melodic and harmonic relations, which are necessary to constitute the smallest beautiful elements in the Symphony.
What are the implications?
I was raised as an economist, and the method of economics is, at its core, Benthamite. Preferences are data, and the economist, at least when it comes to the arts and entertainment and amusements, as an economist cannot rank some preferences as in any way better than others. I point out in Chapter 2 of my book (an ungated working paper version is here) that this presents a real problem for people who would find a way to advocate for public subsidies of the arts through the use of economic method. Because even when it comes to valuing public goods and externalities, we are still left with undisputable tastes.
Economists can of course, outside of the economic method, make claims about what is valuable in the arts - this piece from Tibor Scitovsky does so, in the AER no less. I lean towards the Moorean view. But that means that anyone setting the mission of a publicly funded arts council needs to make decisions as to what things are intrinsic goods worth funding, and what things are modern day equivalents of push-pin, which commercial markets seem perfectly capable on their own of producing in great quantities. My intuition is that this belief is actually held, though never voiced, in arts councils, since the last thing these agencies want is the accusation of, god forbid, elitism. But if pleasures are all alike, why bother with arts councils at all?
Footnote: for a more scholarly discussion of Bentham and Mill on push-pin and poetry, here is Martin Bronfenbrenner.