Subtitle is based on this.
“Then the Nazi’s tortured…”
—A story that never ends well
“What if (really bad thing) maximized utility. Utilitarianism says it would be good in that case."
—A lot of arguments against utilitarianism.
I, like Michael Huemer, don’t like Nazi’s. Huemer’s next objection to utilitarianism is the following.
“f. Sadistic pleasure
There is a large number of Nazis who would enjoy seeing an innocent Jewish person tortured – so many that their total pleasure would be greater than the victim’s suffering. Should you torture an innocent Jewish person so you can give pleasure to all these Nazis?”
A few things are worth noting about this case.
1 Making them sadistic Nazi’s makes it seem like a larger bullet to bite. Defending sadistic Nazi’s is never a good look.
2 In any plausible case in the real world torturing an innocent Jewish person will not make things go best. Even if Nazi’s pleasure that they experience when they torture an innocent Jewish person is prima facie good, it’s instrumentally bad. It would plausibly result in more torturing of Jewish people and require millions of Nazi’s who take immense pleasure in their suffering for it to increase overall suffering.
However, thought experiments don’t have to be realistic, so it’s perfectly fair game for Huemer to stipulate an unlikely situation. However, intuitions about farcical situations, where the net utility is precisely opposite of what it is in real world cases are likely to be unrealistic. Much like our intuitions about physics are likely to be less reliable if we stipulate very different situations—our intuitions about ethics are similar.
If the Nazi pleasure is good, then enough Nazi pleasure outweighs the pain of Jews being tortured. Thus, the person who holds Huemer’s view would seemingly have to accept that sadistic pleasure of bad people is not morally good.
Maybe you think that sadistic pleasure is necessarily bad. Well, this principle has compelling counter-examples. We can consider a man called Tim. Tim derives immense satisfaction from watching scenes that appear to depict tortures. Tim would never torture anyone and abhors violence. In fact, he sometimes feels guilty about his strange desires and donates vast amounts of money to charities. Tim also makes sure that the content that he watches that depicts people being tortured does not actually involve people being tortured. Tim spends hours searching for content that looks like people being tortured but has no actual people being tortured. Additionally, we can suppose that this is the highlight of Tim’s life. He enjoys it so much that, without it his life would be miserable. Despite suffering clinical depression, Tim finds the experiences so enjoyable that he regards his life as generally good. It seems in this case, Tim is truly made better off by the joy he derives from this sadistic content.
However, suppose additionally that, despite Tim’s incredibly careful selection process, Tim is deceived by an evil demon, who manipulates the laws of physics to make people actually be brutally tortured, despite any reasonable observer concluding that no one was truly being tortured. It seems that in this case, while the person who is tortured is made worse off by the torture, Tim is made better off by it. All else equal, it seems that making Tim enjoy viewing the torture less (assuming he’d view the same amount of torture) is bad.
Imagine another case of an alien civilization who views the suffering of humans. This alien civilization starts in a state of vast agony, yet becomes less miserable each time they watch a human suffer. If they view all human suffering their overall hedonic state drops to zero, when it starts off significantly worse than being boiled alive. Again, it seems like the aliens' sadism is not a bad thing.
If we think that enjoying the suffering of others is actively bad, independent of the suffering of others, then it would be morally good to make the aliens unable to see suffering. This is deeply implausible.
One might object that deriving pleasure from sadism is morally neutral, neither good nor bad. However, in the scenarios both posited, it seems obvious that the world is better because the aliens enjoy suffering enough to not be as miserable as beings being boiled alive. If the only way for the aliens to relieve their unfathomable agony was to torture one person this seems justified.
We can imagine another case of a person, Wyatt, who takes immense satisfaction in eating meat because he knows that the animal suffered. He feels deeply guilty about this fact, but cannot enjoy eating meat unless he knows that the animal suffered. Wyatt continues to eat meat, but donates to charities that help animals because he feels guilty. In this case, it seems that Wyatt enjoying the meat, assuming it won’t cause him to eat any more meat, is not a bad thing. To the extent that Wyatt enjoys meat because he knows about the suffering, and others enjoy meat that causes enormous suffering, but don’t care whether or not they know about the suffering, it’s hard to see how Wyatt’s meat enjoyment is any worse than any of ours. Much like there seems to be no morally relevant difference between a person who tortures other because they like when others suffer and one who likes the taste of people after they’ve been tortured, there’s no difference between one who enjoys the suffering of animals that they eat and one who merely enjoys the taste of the animals.
If Wyatt is morally no different from the rest of people when he eats meat, then either Wyatt’s sadistic meat eating is morally good or the joy that most people get from eating meat is morally neutral. However, this is deeply implausible. If meat tasted less good, but people ate the same amount of meat, that would be a worse world. If sadistic pleasure can be good, then enough sadistic pleasure can outweigh the badness of torture.
Additionally, there are many cases where people enjoy the suffering of others, which are not found objectionable. If the parents of a murder victim derive satisfaction from knowing that the murderer is rotting in prison, it wouldn’t be desirable to deprive them of that satisfaction.
Additionally, we can imagine a world exactly like our own, except humans would never be happy in their lives unless they, upon their sixth birthday, slap someone in the face and revel in the enjoyment. In this case, all of their enjoyment is coming from the fact that they slapped someone, but it wouldn't be good to condemn everyone to never being happy.
Additionally, we can imagine a scenario where every person will be given an extra year of happy life by torturing one person. In this case, their happy life is only existing because of the torture, but this case seems clearly justified.
Our anti-sadism intuition comes from the fact that sadism is not conducive to happiness. However, if it were conducive to happiness, it would be justified. In the cases like Schadenfreude, where we derive joy from the suffering of others in ways that make things go best, we don’t find it counterintuitive.
Maybe you think that what matters is avoiding sadistic pleasure from bad people. However, as the last article argued, attaching moral relevance to desert cannot be justified.
Perhaps you think that it’s actively bad when people derive sadistic pleasure from torturing people. If this were true, then in Huemer’s case most of the badness of the torture wouldn’t come from the torture—most of it would come from the Nazi’s getting pleasure. On this account, enough Nazi’s getting pleasure from the holocaust would be worse than the holocaust itself. This is deeply implausible.
Maybe you think that sadistic Nazi pleasure is morally neutral. This view runs into issues. Consider the above case about aliens. This alien would be horrendously miserable absent deriving pleasure from suffering. Let’s also stipulate that the alien is a Nazi’s and the only way to relieve their suffering is to torture one Jewish person. Absent one Jewish person being tortured the aliens hedonic state is more negative than the sum total of all suffering experienced by Jews during the holocaust. There is just 1 alien. In this case, it seems intuitively like the torture is justified.
Now we can switch up the case. Instead of there being one Nazi alien who experiences 100^100 times as much suffering as an individual, now there are 10^10000000 Nazi’s who start at a state of moderate unpleasantness which turns positive if a Jewish person gets tortured. In this case, there are so many Nazi’s that there’s more total Nazi utility. It doesn’t seem like lots of Nazi’s getting a little bit of pleasure is morally different from one Nazi getting a little bit of pleasure. Thus, if we accept that the Nazi alien should torture the Jewish person, we should also accept that the cluster of all the aliens should collectively torture the Jewish person.
This case may still seem a little bit counterintuitive. However, remember a few things.
1 If you had an equal chance of being all of the affected parties you would torture the person.
2 If you lived the lives of all of the people affected you’d be in favor of torturing the person. If we think of all bad things in the real world these two characteristics are not pleasant. If one was equally likely to be Ted Bundy’s victim as they were to be Ted Bundy, they would oppose Ted Bundy killing people. Likewise if you lived the lives of both Bundy and his victims.
Maybe you’re still not convinced and you think that it’s intuitively just too counterintuitive. I think your strong intuition is caused by a few separate intuitions that all combine in this case.
1 Retributivist intuitions, that say that bad people deserve to suffer.
2 Anti sadism intuitions, that say that it’s bad when people derive pleasure from the suffering of other’s.
3 General opposition to Nazi’s and to torture.
However, I think I’ve argued persuasively against the first two and the third is perfectly compatible with this view. Nazi’s and torture are bad because they cause lots of suffering.
A lot of people eat meat. When they eat meat, particularly from factory farms, they are getting pleasure from the suffering of others. Maybe not directly from the suffering, but that’s not morally relevant. If Nazi’s got pleasure from Jews being tortured because they thought it would deter more insidious Jews from doing bad things, rather than from pure sadism, that would presumably not change the moral status of the torture. So getting pleasure from a byproduct of torture seems morally equivalent to getting pleasure from torture. Thus, it seems like this view would likely commit you to thinking that torturing and killing one animal to give the entire world meat would be unjustified. This is deeply counterintuitive.
Maybe you think that there’s some fundamental difference between humans and animals, such that it’s fine to revel in a byproduct of the torture of animals. Then the question arises—in virtue of what does that difference arise (lots of arising in this sentence)?
I offer the following lengthy dialogue (signature of Bentham’s Bulldog posts).
Jim: “There’s a morally relevant difference between humans and animals that justifies the difference.”
Michael Huemer appears from nowhere with a bang (Huemer, like me, is strongly ethically opposed to current meat eating practices).
Huemer: “What’s the cause of the morally relevant difference?”
Jim: “Well, they’re a different species.”
Huemer: “Would it be ethically permissible to revel in the suffering of aliens that look exactly like us, but are different species from us.”
Jim: “I guess not. Well, they’re not as intelligent as us.”
Huemer: “Would it be ethically permissible to revel in the suffering of severely mentally disabled people.”
Jim: “It would depend on how mentally disabled.”
Huemer: “Animals like cows and pigs and chickens are certainly smarter than babies.”
Jim: “Well, babies become smart.”
Huemer: “What about terminally ill babies.”
Jim: “Hmm… well, but it’s natural to eat meat.”
Huemer: “If it were natural to eat terminally ill babies, it would still presumably be unjustified.”
Jim: …
Presumably most of you think that if every year only a single animal had to be factory farmed and slaughtered to feed everyone meat, killing that animal would be justified. Thus, deriving pleasure from a byproduct of torture is sometimes worth a torture.
Maybe at this point you think that I’m anti-semitic. Well, I’m Jewish. I merely include everyone, even horrendous people and Nazi’s in my moral circle.
Contra Huemer on Utilitarianism part 7
I liked the Kershnar reference, I wonder sometimes if he's just like messing around or he actually holds his beliefs. I wonder. He's a fun character all things considered.