Introduction
Freddie deBoer has written a relatively short article criticizing utilitarianism. The basic critique is similar to Huemer’s — utilitarianism gets allegedly repugnant results and therefore should be rejected. I disputed the first premise — utilitarianism doesn’t get repugnant results.
A First Case
In this country, there are thousands of people in persistent vegetative states. These are people who we have every reason to believe have no consciousness. Most of them are in long-term care facilities. People work at those long-term care facilities. And it may happen that some of those who work at such facilities would like to rape women in vegetative states. I’m afraid that we know that this happens. They also are likely to have the opportunity to rape these women and get away with it. So: what does utilitarianism demand? Since the women lack consciousness, they cannot generate utility; they have no pleasure/mental well-being/happiness through which to generate utility. The would-be rapists, on the other hand, are conscious and would derive pleasure from raping these women. I think any minimally honest vision of utilitarianism would thus insist not only that these men can morally rape the women in vegetative states but must rape them. That’s the action that generates utility.
This claim is false. For one, there is a risk of STD’s or pregnancy if someone in a vegetative state is raped. For another, if anyone finds out about it, that would clearly have terrible consequences. Thirdly, raping an unconscious person desensitizes one to the horrors of rape — leading to worse actions in the future. Fourth, other desirable norms seem to entail that one has a disposition that would prevent them from raping those in vegetative states.
However, one can clearly imagine a scenario that eliminates those features. Unfortunately, given that our moral intuitions were generated from reflecting on cases, making the case too much like the one described causes the intuitions to overlap. To get really clear intuitions about the case, let’s consider a modified one.
Suppose that, every second, aliens rape every person an unfathomable number of times. No human ever finds out about this and no one is ever harmed. There are 100 quadrillion aliens, and their suffering decreases by some small amount each time they conduct a sexual assault. The aliens start out in a state of unfathomable agony — say, equivalent to being burned alive. However, each time they rape a human, their suffering diminishes slightly. Each alien rapes 100 trillion humans per second. The first 50 trillion eliminate their agony (each rape only very slightly diminishes their suffering) and the next 50 trillion makes it so that their mental states are as pleasant as being burned alive is unpleasant. In this case, it seems that the aliens wouldn’t be acting wrongly — 100 quadrillion aliens shouldn’t have to experience constantly the feeling of being burned alive to prevent humans from having an action done to them that they never find out about. However, each rape only produces a bit of utility, so it seems that the person who is a non-utilitarian, and thinks that raping people in ways that never cause harm or are discovered for trivial pleasure is wrong, would have to think that the aliens act wrongly. Not only do they act wrongly, given that there are 10^29 undiscovered rapes per second, they’d seem to have to hold that this is the worst thing ever, by orders of magnitude — it would be worth instituting a global holocaust to delay the aliens for just a few seconds. This is very implausible.
When we reflect on why rape is bad, the answer is very clear — it harms the victim. If we imagine fanciful cases in which it doesn’t harm the victim, it no longer becomes wrong. However, in any conceivable real world case, it will turn out to be wrong. When something is wrong in all real world cases, it’s totally unsurprising that we’d have the intuition that it’s always wrong. There are incredibly plausible debunking accounts of this intuition based on the overwhelming accuracy of the heuristic. For more on this, see this article.
The Second Case
Go up a level. A security guard works at such a facility. He sees on a security camera that a janitor is raping a patient in a vegetative state. What is his moral duty? If he stops it from happening, he’s denying utility to a human being and doing nothing for a being that cannot feel or think or experience happiness. And if he reports the janitor and gets him arrested, he’s creating significant negative utility for that janitor. The utilitarian calculus is very obvious: the security guard has a profound moral duty to allow the janitor to rape the disabled woman. How’s that sound to you, as a matter of basic morality?
DeBoer is wrong again here — the utilitarian answer would plausibly be to reveal what has happened. The type of person who will rape people in vegetative states is plausibly a danger to society and is much more likely to rape in the future. Also, society is better when we deter such acts, which are very harmful, in expectation. Third, things go best when you do your job as a security guard — rather than deciding on a case-by-case basis whether specific rules are worth enforcing. It seems the person who denies this would have to think that one should report what the aliens are doing, if that would result in the aliens being prevented from doing it, yet that’s clearly false.
A Third Case
There are of course many other examples where utilitarian logic violates our basic moral instincts. A classic one imagines a race riot in the South in the 1940s; a white woman has claimed that she was raped by a Black man, and white people are massacring the local Black population. You know that you can successfully frame an innocent Black man for the crime and that once he’s lynched, the riot and massacre will stop. Utilitarianism (again, of the honest variety) suggests that you have a moral duty to ensure the murder of this innocent person because the negative utility of killing him will be dwarfed by the positive utility of stopping the riot.
I’ve already responded to this here.
A Fourth Case
Or imagine that you’re walking home from buying a loaf of bread for your hungry children. A homeless woman and her three hungry children beg you for the bread. You can easily do a utilitarian calculus that insists you give it to them and let your own hungry children starve. Utilitarianism places no value on duty to personal responsibilities.
I’ve already addressed this basic argument here and here.
A Fifth Case
And you could take out a bunch of personal loans and spend the money on the global poor, then gleefully default on the loans under the theory that you’ve created more utility than you would by paying them back. Morally, I don’t have much issue with that, but if everyone followed such a project, the credit system would collapse.
This seems obviously permissible — ruining your credit score to save hundreds of lives is obviously good. I argue more for this basic conclusion here.
A Sixth Case
I’m sad that a person as generally right as deBoer believes Robinson’s lies. This is false — as I explain here. It’s almost totally opposite from the truth.
Contra DeBoer On Utilitarianism
I think thought experiments like this are not persuasive:
"There are 100 quadrillion aliens, and their suffering decreases by some small amount each time they conduct a sexual assault... Each alien rapes 100 trillion humans per second. The first 50 trillion eliminate their agony (each rape only very slightly diminishes their suffering) and the next 50 trillion makes it so that their mental states are as pleasant as being burned alive is unpleasant."
Is this something people are capable of imagining?