Rosa asked:

Why does Sartre say that we are "condemned to be free"?

Why don't utilitarians think that their position is degrading to human beings?

============

Part 1: Why does Sartre say that we are "condemned to be free"?

Imagine a criminal in front of a judge and jury, explaining that because of his abusive childhood, and
poor social conditions it is not his fault that he became a criminal. As a character witness he has his
Freudian therapist beside him. Or imagine someone saying that a person has a cowardly
temperament and is therefore unable to stand up to bullies. — Sartre hated this kind of description of
people, and he hated Freud even more. For Sartre, there are no excuses for our actions. If the
Freudian went to Sartre and said, “It's not the man's fault he did this but the pressures of society, his
upbringing, his genetic heritage,” Sartre (a boxer, in his university days) would probably smack him.

There are no excuses because we are free, free absolutely and entirely, free to think, believe, feel,
desire, do and choose what we want. We are free because we belong to what Sartre calls
Being-For-Itself or (roughly) consciousness. Being-For-Itself is contrasted with Being-In-Itself or
(roughly) matter. Now, matter is entirely and essentially deterministic and subject to causal laws,
whereas consciousness is not subject to any kind of determinism, internal or external. The past, my
personality, my circumstances, my genetic endowment, other people, my own body, none of these
things will or can determine what I do. Of course I cannot jump over the moon, but this is a limitation
of the being-in-itself, of which my body is a part, and not the result of causal laws acting on my
consciousness. I am free to choose what I want.

This is the ultimate kind of freedom, the freedom to create myself. In other words, consciousness is
self-determining. Whatever it does originates from itself. Everything is permitted and nothing is
unavoidable. And so Sartre thinks we are also absolutely responsible for whatever we do. This
freedom is unavoidable and inescapable. To be conscious is to be free. That is what Sartre means
when he says we are condemned to be free. Whatever we do is an exercise of our freedom.

But we should not think that this means that freedom is the essenceof being conscious. Sartre is
explicit that being-for-itself has no essence. It is not defined by what it is but what it will be, in the
future. The freedom to choose is not the essence or defining feature of consciousness, but rather it is
the choices that are made, which allow us to say what we will be (not what we are).

Of course we can escape our freedom, by becoming unconscious, we can faint or pass out, or even
commit suicide. But why should we want to? Sartre says, rightly I think, that this conception of
freedom and responsibility is frightening and leads to anguish. Anguish leads to the recognition that
we are free but it also troubling and disturbing and so we want to be rid of it. Sartre says that we do
this by thinking of the being-for-itself as a being-in-itself. In other words, we think of ourselves as
subject to the laws of determinism, influenced by our past and our psychology.

Part 2: Why don't Utilitarians think that their position is degrading to human beings?

Many people think that Utilitarianism is inadequate as a moral theory because it disregards the
interests of individuals. The principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, it is argued,
would allow us to walk over individuals and minorities, to use them in order to achieve the greater
good. Other objections are that it ignores the intrinsic value of people and that it sacrifices personal
relationships for the sake of impartiality. And on Utilitarian grounds it does not matter how the
greatest good is distributed over the greatest number, so that while some people may be living like
kings others may be only moderately happy, or even that the best situation would be a large amount
of people each having only a minimum level of happiness, but when added up would fulfil the greatest
happiness principle.

Now Utilitarians have an answer to these problems, a really simple answer actually. it is that if these
consequences did really occur and did make people unhappy then Utilitarianism explicitly says that
we should not perform the actions that would lead to these unwanted consequences. In other words,
the best way to be a Utilitarian would be to act as if we were not Utilitarians. Or to make this sound a
little less self-defeating, if the greatest good for the greatest number was better achieved by
promoting respect for individual persons, taking into account personal relationships and the rest then
this, as good Utilitarians is what we would have to promote.

The problem is then why should we consider ourselves Utilitarians at all? Why not bite the bullet and
say that the promotion of the greatest good for the greatest number leads to unwanted consequences
so we should abandon it for a more absolutist ethic?

One problem with this approach is that we have conflicting intuitions. On the one hand we think that
personal relationships are important and should be maintained, and on the other hand morality seems
to require us to adopt an impartial standpoint and treat everyone equally.

To make it worse I do not think we can settle the matter empirically. We could not test out both
intuitions and see which state of affairs was best. The only way forward would be philosophical
argument and this is what got us into the problem in the first place!

Brian Tee
Dept of Philosophy
University of Sheffield