Farsighted by Steven Johnson

Author:Steven Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

3

DECIDING

Mapping, predicting, simulating: they don’t quite add up to deciding. Once you’ve mapped the landscape, determined a full range of potential options, and simulated the outcomes for those options with as much certainty as you can—how, then, do you choose?

Ever since Ben Franklin outlined his “moral algebra” to Joseph Priestley, people have concocted increasingly elaborate systems for adjudicating decisions based on some kind of calculation. Priestley himself played a defining role in one of the most influential of these strategies. A few years before he wrote his letter to Franklin, Priestley published a political treatise that suggested a different approach for making the final call on group decisions, like the creation of laws and regulations: “It must necessarily be understood,” Priestley wrote, “that all people live in society for their mutual advantage; so that the good and happiness of the members, that is the majority of the members of any state, is the great standard by which every thing relating to that state must finally be determined.” A few decades later, the line would plant the seed of an idea in the mind of the political philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who used it as the cornerstone of the utilitarian ideology that would become one of the most influential political ideas of the nineteenth century. Moral decisions—both public and private—should be based on actions that produced the “greatest happiness for the greatest number,” in Bentham’s famous phrase. The problem of doing good in the world was a problem that could, in theory at least, be solved by doing a kind of emotional census of all those connected to a given choice.

The “greatest happiness for the greatest number” sounds like a vague platitude, but Bentham’s aim was to try to calculate those values with as much precision as possible. At first, he divided our experience of the world into two broad categories:

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