Geoffrey Plauché’s essay provides a fine synthesis of insights into the sustaining myths of statism: the myth of the Founder-Legislator and the fatal conceit of central planning. In the temples of the state cult there invariably stands an idol of the law-giver. The legends can be divided into those of legendary founders–such as Lycurgus of Sparta and Minos of Crete–and those of legendary reformers–such as Solon of Athens and Numa of Rome. (We might also add some indubitably historical figures to the list–in particular, the sanctified marble Founders who are so gaudily memorialized a few metro stops down from where we sit.) But while the stories differ, the use to which they are put is always the same–as Plauché notes, they serve to perpetuate and to sanctify the notion that a city or a nation is something to be deliberately crafted and worked on to serve a particular end–whether by the great founders or by lesser mortals who muddle through the business of legislating today. Plauché’s efforts to challenge these myths draws from many sources. He challenges the presumption of knowledge involved in statist efforts, drawing from Ferguson’s and Hayek’s work on the importance of spontaneous order and the power of unintended consequences. He traces the planner’s conceit to the corrupting effects of a professionalized political class, and the loss of the distinction between praxis and poesis. He also challenges the moral propriety of the mythological picture–deriving a theory of rights from (a suitably modified version of) Aristotle’s account of freedom and human flourishing. Both the epistemic humility called for by evolutionist insights, and the respect for individual freedom called for by Aristotelian liberalism, ultimately demand not only the containment or minimization of government force, but in fact anarchy–a demythologized society, where freedom is a recognized as a matter of the arrangements that people make with one another, rather than a law given by a Founder, Reformer, or Legislator. Demythologizing legislation ultimately means conceptually divorcing law from authority, and order from the State

There are two main sets of questions that I have at the end of Plauché’s essay. The first turns on his discussion of Aristotelian rights theory, and his endorsement of a supply-side view of justice (or, more precisely, of the reasons for being just). Plauché suggests that Aristotelianism grounds the obligations of justice primarily in facts about the agent, rather than the patient, of just activity. But it seems to me that for all the theoretical advantages of a supply-side approach, the costs of the way that Plauché spells out the approach are just too high. It seems intuitively wrong to suggest that the primary reason for me not to sock Geoffrey in the nose has more to do with my rational nature than it does with Geoffrey’s nose. Of course it’s true that I’d be betraying my rational nature, living life beneath what I am capable, etc. etc. But the primary reason not to sock Geoffrey in the nose is that that would hurt him. It is precisely the indifference to his suffering and the disregard for his wishes that makes the injustice a betrayal of my own rationality.

This is not to say that I think a purely demand-side account of virtue would do better at capturing our moral experience. In fact I think neither standpoint could adequately account for certain sorts of hypothetical cases. Imagine, for example, that you are dropped into a Holodeck, without your knowledge, and while you are there–thinking that you are living and acting in the real world–you decide to go on a pillage-and-murder spree and shoot 50 people to death. Unbeknownst to you, your massacre had no actual victims: the 50 people you attacked were in fact, holographs, and the injuries you did to them were completely fictional. Now it seems in a situation like this, a purely demand-side account of justice will go wrong by being inappropriately lax. Since there were no actual moral patients for you to mistreat, there was nothing directly wrong with going on the rampage. (At the most, you might be faulted for putting others at risk by cultivating and indulging nasty dispositions.) On the other hand, a purely supply-side account goes wrong too, by being inappropriately harsh. Since nobody was harmed for real, it would be grotesque to suggest that you ought to be treated no differently from an actual mass-murderer.

Perhaps the best way forward here is to look to what Aristotle says about another constitutive part of eudaimonia: the value of friendship. Aristotle famously suggests that in the truest form of friendship, your friend is like another self; her welfare is, in some sense, taken up into your own welfare. You care about your friends’ welfare not just because her welfare may turn out to promote some further goal of yours. Nor is it because the concern is virtuous. (Caring about your friends is virtuous and it may have good results, too. But neither of those is the point of caring about them.) In the highest form of friendship, your friend’s well-being enters directly into your own well-being, as an irreducible constitutive part. But where this is the case, it seems like it would be a serious mistake to offer either a supply-side or a demand-side account of the reasons you have to care about your friends. It is neither one side or on the other of the I/Thou divide; if anything, the reason you have for caring about your friends is precisely that that divide has, in some important sense, disappeared.

Now, friendship is a particular relationship that any one person has to a limited number of other people. It is something that you choose to cultivate with some people and choose not to cultivate with others. But perhaps the general duty of respecting the rights of your fellow human beings involves a similar constitutive relationship, where at least part of the eudaimonia of another person enters into your own. If so the way that A should treat B should not be determined primarily by facts about A alone or by facts about B alone, but rather by facts about the relationship that obtains between them.

The second set of questions that I have turns on Plauché’s discussion of spontaneous order and the conceits of planners. I quite agree with Plauché about the importance of spontaneous orders, and I share the suspicion about those who set out to plan others’ lives, and the mythical history that they construct to sanctify their activity. (As Bastiat said, the plans may differ, but the planners are all the same.) But there is a danger here, as well as an insight. Libertarians often speak as if spontaneous order were a synonym for a voluntary arrangement, and constructed order a synonym for coerced arrangement. (Notice how de Jasay, in the passage quoted by Plauché, simply equates constructed orders with orders imposed by authority or the threat of force.) But in fact these two distinctions are independent of one another. In particular, constructed orders need not be coercive orders (you can make plans for coordinated action without coercing anyone, so long as you don’t impose your plans on those unwilling to cooperate). What I wonder, then, is whether the lesson that Plauché want us to draw from Ferguson and Hayek counsels abstinence, or merely temperance when it comes to co-operative efforts at deliberate social change? Of course, the moral case against coercive orders is absolute; it is never justifiable to seize the person or property of the unwilling in order to remake society according to your own plans. But is there any place for non-coercive efforts to make deliberate changes to the order of society? Is there, in an important sense, any place for politics in a free society?

I think this is a point that it’s important to be clear on, because a lot of important questions turno n how severe one takes the problems facing constructivist projects to be. Spontaneous orders have proved very good at some things–the emergence of money, for example, or futures markets and other forms of arbitrage, or large portions of conventional property law. But since Plauché criticizes efforts to deliberately craft social outcomes through the making of legislation, it’s important to note that historically, legal systems that favored the spontaneous order of conventional law over the framing of legislation (as, for example, in Anglo-Saxon common law) have done a fairly good job of developing legal norms that respected the rights of those who were recognized as having standing in legal proceedings–free men. But they also did a very poor job of respecting the person and property of those who were not recognized as having the same standing — women, children, servants. In order to reverse the provisions of the common law that, for example, allowed husbands to summarily seize all or part of their wives’ property as their own, or to substitute their own legal decisions for their wives, or to beat and rape their wives with impunity, first-wave feminist activists organized and made a concerted effort to change the coercive order that had emerged from centuries of conventional law. The results of these efforts could not be criticized on the grounds of being coercive–insofar as the reforms protected rights that had thus far been unprotected, they created new space for voluntary orders rather than overriding them. But in the name of women’s rights to liberty and property, they did overturn a spontaneous order of man-made legal conventions that had emerged gradually over the course of centuries. Did these deliberate campaigns to remake society indulge in the same dangerous conceits as those Plauché criticizes in the Founder-Legislator mythos? If not, then what are the salient differences that set aside the appropriate forms of conscious political activism from the objectionable forms of social engineering? If so, then how much caution do we need to apply in campaigns that deliberately aim at greater liberty? And how far should we avoid even the most voluntarily organized efforts at deliberate, nonviolent social reform?

… Well, I, for one, have no opinion whether Marxists should be interested in exploitation. If Matt MacKenzie is right, though, perhaps a better question would be, Should exploitation theorists be interested in Marxism? If critiques of exploitation have heretofore been reserved for the use of state socialism–and Marxism in particular–then, as MacKenzie ably shows, that is the result more by default than by anything inherently statist in the notion of exploitation. Drawing from the work of Alan Wertheimer, MacKenzie offers a neutral concept of exploitation based on the virtue of fairness, and develops a libertarian conception of exploitation that compares favorably to the more familiar Marxist and Progressive theories. Thus, through MacKenzie’s insightful analytical work, exploitation joins class, oppression, dialectics, state capitalism, and other concepts that left-libertarians have swiped from the theoretical lexicon of the statist Left, and rehabilitated for anti-statist purposes.

Not surprisingly, this dialectical strategy tends to drive both state Leftists and right-wing libertarians bonkers. The statist Left may complain that we are plundering their private property; and the anti-statist Right may complain that we are trying to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. But the fact is that left-libertarian efforts are, in terms of the history of ideas, more like expropriating the expropriators: if we today sometimes find Marxian notions useful, it is usually because those Marxian notions were themselves swiped from anti-state, pro-market theorists–especially those in the French tradition of industrialism (out of which arose both Proudhon’s mutualist anarchism, and the radicalized classical liberalism of Bastiat and Gustave de Molinari). Although twentieth century libertarians often identified themselves with the economic Right, and treated complaints of exploitation with either indifference our outright contempt, nineteenth century libertarians–Benjamin Tucker, for example–drew directly from their industrialist heritage, and wrote extensively, even obsessively, about economic exploitation (or, as Tucker most often called it, usury), which they saw as pervasive, systemic, destructive, and indeed one of the chief evils for principled libertarians to confront. Thus MacKenzie’s efforts, insofar as they are successful, merely reclaim a word for liberty that we never should have given up to the statists to begin with.

MacKenzie’s careful analysis of the forms of exploitation represents some of the most important work in the essay. He uses this taxonomic backdrop to set out and defend a claim which is far more controversial than it ought to be: that there can be economic relationships which should be condemned as exploitative even though they are both mutually consensual and mutually beneficial (relative to a no-exchange baseline). For any principled libertarian, proving that an economic relationship is consensual is enough to show that no-one has any right to suppress it by force. But if MacKenzie is right, then that is very far from being enough to prove that it should not be condemned and opposed by non-violent means. This point has some import for the applied policy debates that libertarians have often involved themselves in: consider some of the more common libertarian apologetics for third world sweatshops against the objections of Leftists and so-called Progressives; or, to take another example, for the so-called sex industry against the objections of radical feminists. Libertarian writers have all too often suggested that if piece work or sex work is agreed to voluntarily, and if it benefits the workers more than other realistically available lines of work would have, then there must be nothing objectionably exploitative about either industry. But if our conception of exploitation refers not only to respecting rights, but also to questions of fair dealing and to the background conditions that enlarge or constrain the options that are realistically available, the defense of these industries against charges of exploitation must, at the very least, become more sophisticated than they have so far largely been. (I think, in fact, that libertarians who want to defend the so-called sex industry will find their position almost completely indefensible, and those who want to defend neo-liberal development policies in the third world will find that they have an eminently sensible position in some cases and a ludicrous position in others. But let’s try to postpone those quagmires until at least the question and answer period.)

For now, in the name of diabolical advocacy, I would like to prod MacKenzie a little on the applicability of his notion of fairness in exchange, and thus the applicability of his conception of exploitation. The concern that I’d like to raise, though, is not a logical but rather an epistemological concern. While I know some libertarians who would dig in and argue that there just is no tractable notion of harm, or unfairness, beyond the violation of individual rights–and thus no form of exploitation beyond transactions forced through direct coercion–I think that that claim is simply indefensible in light of any robust theory of human virtues. Here’s an objection I find much more plausible, though: if an economic relationship is both mutually consensual, then it may be very difficult to reliably judge whether or not it is exploitative. There are many virtues that are important for the sustainability of a free society, and while I think fairness is one of the most important of those virtues, tolerance is arguably another; one of the things that libertarians would be wise to cultivate is a certain amount of deference to other people’s judgments about the arrangements that they have voluntarily entered into, and exercising this virtue may make it correspondingly difficult to pick out exploitative economic relationships independently of workers’ decisions about whether or not the arrangement is worth staying in. The example that MacKenzie gives of an exploitative labor contract doesn’t help alleviate the worry, either: if it’s true that a worker making $6.50 an hour might make $11.00 if her bargaining were done against the backdrop of a free market, there remains the question of how we would ever know that this is true. Unless socialist calculation is possible (and it’s not), the hypothetical price of a good or service in a hypothetical free market will never be something that we can quantitatively predict, and orders of magnitude or even directions of change will be, at best, difficult to reliably judge. So might it not be difficult, at best, to identify concrete cases of mutually-consensual-but-exploitative economic relationships? And if so, would that not demand a great deal of caution, if not outright abstention, from putting exploitation to use in political debates?

I should say two things about this epistemological worry. First, I’m not actually convinced by it myself. Second, if it does have any bite, it’s important to note that the uncertainty involved affects only the question of moral force, not moral weight. Exploitation would be no less bad even if we could never figure out where it does and where it does not occur. Uncertainty may be a reason to qualify your judgments about what is or is not exploitative; it is not a reason to abandon your conviction that exploitation, wherever it may occur, is seriously wrong. Still, this may be an important caveat on the theoretical fruitfulness of exploitation within a pro-market theory; and I’d be interested to hear more about how MacKenzie would deal with it.

The second important claim that MacKenzie sets out to defend is that in the political economy of state capitalism, the exploitation of labor is systemic and pervasive. He favorably cites the work of Benjamin Tucker and Kevin Carson, identifying state violence as the basis of class conflict, and government-enforced monopolies for politically-favored businesses as the root of economic exploitation. It’s important to note that, for MacKenzie as for Tucker and Carson, the exploitative economic relationship may not be itself coercive, even though the conditions that make it exploitative do involve coercion. For most of his life, Tucker pretty clearly suggested that exploitation (or usury) could only survive as long as the background of government privileges for the monopolists was sustained, and that if the privileges were once repealed, the exploitative arrangements would quickly crumble under the pressure of free competition. But while government intervention in the economy is one of the most important ways in which economic options can be restricted, it seems like there are other factors that could have the same effect. For example, if widely-shared cultural prejudices tend to constrain women to lower-wage or no-wage work — such as mothering, housekeeping, nursing, teaching, or acting as a secretary or assistant — when they would otherwise be willing and able to take on better-paying careers, then arguably the sexist cultural norms sustain a form of exploitation that has little if anything to do with government intervention, either directly or indirectly. MacKenzie suggests that he recognizes cases such as these when he says that a genuinely free market will dramatically undermine existing systems of exploitation, but will not be enough to do them in entirely. Later in the essay he offers a number of reasons why libertarians should be concerned with the forms of exploitation that are closely linked with the background of government privilege and regimentation of the economy; but I wonder whether he thinks that libertarians, qua libertarians, should also be concerned with forms of exploitation where not only the transactions but also the background conditions are non-aggressive, e.g. the result of objectionable but non-coercive cultural norms. And, if so, I’d also be interested to know whether the grounds for libertarian objections to these forms of exploitation, which might persist or even flourish even in a free society, are significantly different from the grounds for libertarian objection to exploitation that directly or indirectly depends on government-enforced privilege.

Third, in a brief but important section of the paper, MacKenzie suggests that where exploitative economic relationships are systemic, prevalent, and seriously morally wrong, it deserves organized political efforts to undermine it. Since he includes non-coercive forms of exploitation in that suggestion, it’s important for him to make it clear that he rejects the identification of politics with the employment of systematic force; thus, while it may be appropriate to enlist organized force in order to suppress coercive forms of exploitation, the sort of politics involved in undermining the non-coercive forms of exploitation need not involve any use of force at all, either from the government or from organized private efforts. Instead he endorses a conception of politics that I’ve elsewhere characterized in terms of organized efforts to address problems of social coordination through deliberate, co-operative action (rather than through the spontaneous orders that emerge from unintended consequences of private actions). MacKenzie suggests that non-coercive forms of exploitation can appropriately be met through working to develop and maintain anti-explotiative cultural norms, values, and practices, and supporting efforts to challenge and develop alternatives to exploitative institutions and social relations. I’d like to hear more about what, in particular, he has in mind here, particularly since he suggests that at least some political activism against exploitation will be necessary even in a genuinely free market. What sort of concrete institutions should we look to, join with, and build up as part of the way forward?

Finally, MacKenzie ends his essay by suggesting several ways in which a critique of exploitation–even when the exploitation is not, in itself, aggressive–might be connected with the libertarian commitment to non-aggression and the decentralization of political power. To frame the discussion he uses five forms of thick connections between libertarianism and other cultural or political projects in my remarks at this session last year. While I think MacKenzie’s right that a libertarian critique of exploitation involves each of these forms of thickness, I’d actually like to suggest that, when exploitation depends on a background of government intervention to survive, it suggests yet another form of thickness, which addresses the issue more directly but which did not make it into my earlier list of five. (Fortunately the list wasn’t intended to be exhaustive, so I’m happy to welcome one more into the family.) You might gloss the form of thickness here as something like this:

Consequence thickness: Libertarians should commit to opposing E because even though E is not in itself coercive, (1) E would be very difficult to carry out or sustain over time if not for background acts of government coercion that sustain it; and (2) there are independent reasons for regarding E as an evil.

If aggression is morally illegitimate, then libertarians are entitled not only to condemn it, but also to condemn the destructive results that flow from statist aggression–even if those results are, in some important sense, external to the actual coercion. Now, there are a lot of details and caveats that I am skipping over, but I do wonder whether something like consequence thickness, as I’ve roughly described it, might better explain the immediate concerns that folks like Tucker, Carson, and MacKenzie have about (at least some forms of) exploitation–concerns which seem to arise well before questions about instrumental supports for statism or the ultimate grounds of libertarianism even get raised.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, meeting with troops in Qatar, 28 April 2003:

And there have not been large numbers of civilian casualties because the coalition took such great care to protect the lives of innocent civilians as well as holy sites. … When the dust is settled in Iraq, military historians will study this war. They’ll examine the unprecedented combination of power, precision, speed, flexibility and, I would add also, compassion that was employed.

General Tommy Franks, Bagram Air Force Base, 19 March 2002:

I don’t believe you have heard me or anyone else in our leadership talk about the presence of 1,000 bodies out there, or in fact how many have been recovered. You know we don’t do body counts.

Donald Rumsfeld, interview on FOX News Sunday, 9 November 2003:

Well, we don’t do body counts on other people ….

Gilbert Burnham, Shannon Doocy, Elizabeth Dzeng, Riyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts (principal authors): The Human Cost of the War in Iraq: A Mortality Study, 2002–2006:

A new household survey of Iraq has found that approximately 600,000 people have been killed in the violence of the war that began with the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

The survey was conducted by an American and Iraqi team of public health researchers. Data were collected by Iraqi medical doctors with analysis conducted by faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. The results will be published in the British medical journal, The Lancet.

The survey is the only population-based assessment of fatalities in Iraq during the war. The method, a survey of more than 1800 households randomly selected in clusters that represent Iraq's population, is a standard tool of epidemiology and is used by the U.S. Government and many other agencies.

The survey also reflects growing sectarian violence, a steep rise in deaths by gunshots, and very high mortality among young men. An additional 53,000 deaths due to non-violent causes were estimated to have occurred above the pre-invasion mortality rate, most of them in recent months, suggesting a worsening of health status and access to health care.

Methods: Between May and July 2006 a national cluster survey was conducted in Iraq to assess deaths occurring during the period from January 1, 2002, through the time of survey in 2006. Information on deaths from 1,849 households containing 12,801 persons was collected. This survey followed a similar but smaller survey conducted in Iraq in 2004. Both surveys used standard methods for estimating deaths in conflict situations, using population-based methods.

Key Findings: Death rates were 5.5/1000/year pre-invasion, and overall, 13.2/1000/year for the 40 months post-invasion. We estimate that through July 2006, there have been 654,965 excess deaths–fatalities above the pre-invasion death rate–in Iraq as a consequence of the war. Of post-invasion deaths, 601,027 were due to violent causes. Non-violent deaths rose above the pre-invasion level only in 2006. Since March 2003, an additional 2.5% of Iraq's population have died above what would have occurred without conflict.

The proportion of deaths ascribed to coalition forces has diminished in 2006, though the actual numbers have increased each year. Gunfire remains the most common reason for death, though deaths from car bombing have increased from 2005. Those killed are predominantly males aged 15-44 years.

…

Deaths were recorded only if the person dying had lived in the household continuously for three months before the event. In cases of death, additional questions were asked in order to establish the cause and circumstances of deaths (while considering family sensitivities). At the conclusion of the interview in a household where a death was reported, the interviewers were to ask for a copy of the death certificate. In 92% of instances when this was asked, a death certificate was present.

White House Press Conference, 11 October 2006:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq. A group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December, at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure, and do you consider this a credible report?

George Bush: No, I don’t consider it a credible report. Neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me and it grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate. And it’s now time for the Iraqi government to work hard to bring security in neighborhoods so people can feel at peace.

No question, it’s violent, but this report is one — they put it out before, it was pretty well — the methodology was pretty well discredited. But I talk to people like General Casey and, of course, the Iraqi government put out a statement talking about the report.

Q — the 30,000, Mr. President? Do you stand by your figure, 30,000?

Bush: You know, I stand by the figure. A lot of innocent people have lost their life — 600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is just — it’s not credible. Thank you.

Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (1986/2005):

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. …The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept.

Further reading:

• Lindsay Beyerstein, Majikthise (2006-10-11): Over half a million additional deaths in Iraq since US invasion
• Glenn Greenwald, Unclaimed Territory (2006-10-11): Counting Iraqi Deaths

Here’s part of a recent reply to my post on the use of the phrase moral relativism. The original post discussed a controversy over whether or not Harry Truman should be called a terrorist for knowingly and willingly slaughtering civilians — orders of magnitude more civilians than Osama bin Laden (et al.) slaughtered in the attack on the World Trade Center — for the sake of military and political strategy. Here’s how Jamie DeVries tried to make the case that we cannot draw any moral parallels between the two figures:

Here is the question we ought to ask ourselves: )Did Truman have the ability and power to incinerate each and every Japanese citizen, even after a surrender was declared? The answer is: yes. Did he or the U.S have the WILL to do so? The answer: of course not.

Well, that was mighty white of him.

In all seriousness, how much lower could the bar possibly be set for rulers of the Allied governments in World War II? Is there absolutely any atrocity in the name of unconditional surrender that the Court Intellectuals and their countless acolytes would not rush to defend, or at least to excuse? I wish this were merely a bit of pointed rhetoric. But actually I’m asking it as a serious, open question.

Further reading:

• Dulce Et Decorum Est (2006-09-16): Mozi on war and the rulers of the world

Over at Catallarchy, Professor Miller proposes a challenge:

Okay, then, here’s my challenge: give me an instance of a pleasure that is bad. Not a pleasure that’s bad because it leads to other pain, but a pleasure that is itself bad. Do that, and I’ll happily admit that I’ve simply lept the is/ought gap.

The challenge is actually ill-framed, since hedonism (and thus hedonistic utilitarianism) would be proven false by any instance of a pleasure that failed to be good — either by being bad, or by being simply neutral. But anyway, here is how another notable consequentialist answered Professor Miller’s challenge, 103 years before he posed it:

That the value of a pleasurable whole does not belong solely to the pleasure which it contains, may, I think, be made still plainer by consideration of another point in which Prof. Sidgwick’s argument is defective. Prof. Sidgwick maintains, as we saw, the doubtful proposition, that the conduciveness to pleasure of a thing is in rough proportion to its commendation by Common Sense. But he does not maintain, what would be undoubtedly false, that the pleasantness of every state is in proportion to the commendation of that state. In other words, it is only when you take into account the whole consequences of any state, that he is able to maintain the coincidence of quantity of pleasure with the objects approved by Common Sense. If we consider each state by itself, and ask what is the judgment of Common Sense as to its goodness as an end, quite apart from its goodness as a means, there can be no doubt that Common Sense holds many much less pleasant states to be better than many far more pleasant: that it holds, with Mill, that there are higher pleasures, which are more valuable, though less pleasant, than those that are lower. Prof. Sidgwick might, of course, maintain that in this Common Sense is merely confusing means and ends: that what it holds to be better as an end, is in reality only better as a means. But I think his argument is defective in that he does not seem to see sufficiently plainly that, as far as intuitions of goodness as an end are concerned, he is running grossly counter to Common Sense; that he does not emphasise sufficiently the distinction between immediate pleasantness and conduciveness to pleasure. In order to place fairly before us the question what is good as an end we must take states that are immediately pleasant and ask if the more pleasant are always also the better; and whether, if some that are less pleasant appear to be so, it is only because we think they are likely to increase the number of the more pleasant. That Common Sense would deny both these suppositions, and rightly so, appears to me indubitable. It is commonly held that certain of what would be called the lowest forms of sexual enjoyment, for instance, are positively bad, although it is by no means clear that they are not the most pleasant states we ever experience. Common Sense would certainly not think it a sufficient justification for the pursuit of what Prof. Sidgwick calls the refined pleasures here and now, that they are the best means to the future attainment of a heaven, in which there would be no more refined pleasures—no contemplation of beauty, no personal affections—but in which the greatest possible pleasure would be obtained by a perpetual indulgence in bestiality. Yet Prof. Sidgwick would be bound to hold that, if the greatest possible pleasure could be obtained in this way, and if it were attainable, such a state of things would be a heaven indeed, and that all human endeavours should be devoted to its realisation. I venture to think that this view is as false as it is paradoxical.

— G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903), § 56

Moore, at least, was one exception to Nietzsche’s pithier response:

If we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how. — Man does not strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that.

— F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows #12.

In any case, I should note that many pleasures that have historically been identified as lower, coarse, vulgar, mindless, empty, decadent, or depraved, are not actually so; but pointing this out will not support Miller’s point. Being very often wrong about which pleasures are worth pursuing, and which pleasures are not, does not at all entail that the distinction should not be made, or that no value attaches to the distinction when correctly applied. (People were once largely wrong as to whether the earth was a round or flat; that hardly throws the categories of roundness and flatness into disrepute.)