Contra Huemer on utilitarianism part 6
Against cookies for desert.
(Let’s all take a moment to be amused by the cleverness of the pun).
Like most of you, I frequently have the opportunity to distribute cookies between Ted Bundy and Mother Teresa. Huemer worries that utilitarianism gets the wrong result, writing “e. Cookie
You have a tasty cookie that will produce harmless pleasure with no other effects. You can give it to either serial killer Ted Bundy, or the saintly Mother Teresa. Bundy enjoys cookies slightly more than Teresa. Should you therefore give it to Bundy?”
Those who have the intuition that it should be given to Ted Bundy presumably think so on the basis of thinking that reward should be proportional to how much one deserves the reward. However, the concept of desert runs into thorny ethical questions.
1 If it is good to punish bad people, then we should trade off a certain amount of pleasure with the punishing of bad people. To give an example of a metric, imagine we say that a year of punishment for bad people is good enough to offset an amount of suffering equivalent to one punch in the face. If this is true, googolplex bad people being punished for a year each, combined with as much suffering of benevolent people as googol holocausts, would be better than a world where everyone, including the unvirtuous bad people is relatively happy. Given the absurdity of this, we have reason to reject this view.
The retributivist may reply by arguing that there’s some declining value of retributivism, such that punishing one bad person is worth a punch in the face, but repeated punches in the face outweighs any amount of punishments of bad people. However, this is implausible, given the mere addition paradox. It seems clear that one torture can be offset by several slightly less unpleasant tortures, each of which can be offset by several even less unpleasant tortures. This process can continue until we get a large numbers of “tortures'' equivalent in pain to a punch in the face, being worse than a torture. If the number of bad people punished is large enough, it could thus outweigh the badness of horrifically torturing galaxies full of people.
They might hold the view that happiness for bad people is neither good nor bad. However, if they hold this view then they’d have to think that the moral relevance of one’s happiness doesn’t scale in proportion to how moral they are. If Ted Bundy’s happiness is morally neutral, then he would be equally deserving of happiness if he’d killed 100 extra people. This is implausible.
They might think that no one deserves to suffer but people deserve well-being inversely proportional to how moral they are, such that as a person tends towards being as immoral as Bundy, the moral relevance of their happiness tends towards zero. This runs into a few problems.
1 It would say that a great enough differential in cookie taste quality is worth giving to Bundy over Teresa, which is about equally counterintuitive.
2 It would say that the more bad things one does, the less marginal effect bad things have on their moral character.
They could bite the bullet, however, this is a view that’s so unintuitive that we have decisive reasons to reject it.
Here are some more objections.
2 (Kraaijeveld 2020) has argued for an evolutionary debunking of retributivism. It’s extremely plausible that we have an evolutionary reason to want to prevent people from doing bad things. It’s unsurprising that we feel angry at bad people, and want to harm them.
3 There’s an open question of how exactly we determine who to punish. Do we punish people for doing bad things? If so, should we punish politicians who do horrific things as a result of bad ideas? Would an idealistic communist leader who brings their country into peril be worthy of harm? If it’s based on motives, then should we punish egoists, who only do what makes them happy, even if they help other people for selfish reasons? If we only punish those who possess both characteristics, would we not punish nazi’s who truly believed they were acting in the greater good? Additionally, should we punish people who think meat is immoral, but eat it anyways? If so, we’d punish a large percentage of people.
4 Our immorality is largely a byproduct of chance. Many serial killers would likely not have been serial killers, had they been raised in a different family. Additionally, many violent criminals would not have been violent criminals had there not been lead in the water. Is it truly just to punish people for things that occurred outside their control, that are causally responsible for their crimes. As we’ve seen throughout history, if we’d been in nazi germany, we’d likely have been nazi’s. In scenarios similar to the Stanford prison experiment, we’d do horrible things. It seems arbitrary that one deserves to suffer because of particular events, such that in the absence of those events they wouldn’t intrinsically deserve to suffer. Desert should not be held captive to real world contingencies. Mother Teresa’s happiness shouldn’t matter hundreds of times more than the happiness of the average person.
5 This view runs into some other issues. Suppose that a person has thirty second every day when they turn evil. Would they deserve to suffer, but only for those thirty seconds? If they killed someone during those 30 seconds, would they deserve to suffer, even not during those thirty seconds. What if Ted Bundy had a change of heart? Would he still not deserve cookies? Suppose a person takes ADHD medication, which incidentally makes them more moral. Should they try to eat cookies when they’re on ADHD medication, because during that time they’re more moral. What if a person took a drug that made them temporarily a psychopath. Should they not eat tasty food during that time, so as to redistribute happiness towards themselves when they’re more moral. Either horn of the dilemma poses problems.
If they say that ones desert waxes and wanes over time based on how moral they are, this has several counterintuitive implications.
1 It would say that people’s happiness doesn’t matter during their dreams, to the extent that they do immoral things in dreams. At one point I had a very strange dream in which I killed many people (it occurred in a way that made no logical sense—as dreams often do. I think it has to do with a button or something that caused people to cease existing—it was hard to explain). In that dream, I clearly had no moral qualms about anything. (Note, this doesn’t reflect anything about me broadly, just like dreams make some nonsense ideas seem to make sense, this one made moral constraints not even factor into my consideration). It seems like my happiness in that dream is no less relevant morally than my happiness in any other dream.
2 It would say that people should redistribute the rewards that they’ll receive to occur when they think they’ll be maximally moral. For example, if one is planning on taking an ethics class, and thinks it’s more likely that they’ll be extra moral after the ethics class, this would say that they should save cookies for after the ethics class is done, even if they’d enjoy them less.
3 It would also say that a person who takes a drug that turns them into a psychopath who wants to kill people for a half hour deserves to suffer during that time (even if they’re locked up so that there’s no risk that they kill anyone).
4 It would say that the happiness of babies and small children matters proportionately less, because they’re less moral.
However, if they take the other horn of the dilemma, and argue that one’s desert remains unchanged over time, this runs into problems of its own.
1 It would say that Ted Bundy would become no more deserving of happiness if he reformed completely.
2 It would say that if Ted Bundy and mother Teresa switched morals, such that Ted Bundy became compassionate and mother Teresa became interested in killing lots of people, Teresa would be less worthy of cookies.
3 It becomes impossible to measure how moral someone is. If one starts out moral but becomes immoral, this metric doesn’t give us a way of determining what they deserve.
Perhaps you think that what matters is someone’s average moral character. Well, in that case, Bundy would be no more worthy of happiness prior to reforming than he would after reforming. Additionally, this view runs into a problem with mostly benevolent beings with very long lives. Suppose that a person is a horrendous serial killer for 1000 years, but after that they become perfectly moral. Given that not even mother Teresa is perfectly moral, on this account, this person would be more worthy of a cookie than mother Teresa, even when they’re going around murdering people.
Utilitarianism gives a perfectly adequate account of why punishing bad people is justified. Punishing bad people deters bad things. We develop an emotional attraction to punishing bad people, so we can feel good about it, as if we’re punishing those who deserve it. Yet the concept of desert is, at the end of the day, not what matters. Dessert, on the other hand, does matter.