How Mr. Ungit Lost The Thread
Why utilitarianism comes away from the encounter rather unscathed
Mr. Ungit seems like a rather good Christian. However, as part of the Christian tribe—someone whose every idea is filtered through the interpretation of a text written by cranks before the year 100 CE, he sometimes departs rather dramatically from reason—and, it would seem, from his rocker.
The modern Christian tradition is rather robust in many ways. They do manage to make a valiant and impressive effort, generating some interesting arguments for god—defending god is a difficult task that requires all the intellectual firepower they can muster. However, as a result of their reference frame for morality being such a deranged, archaic, cauldron’s brew of confusion and malevolence—they tend to perform rather poorly when it comes to thinking deeply about morality. This was on full display recently.
The final statement in my debate with Mr. Ungit was released. This final statement failed to track many of the points that had been made earlier. But alas, such is to be expected from the critics of utilitarianism. For if they truly understood the arguments, it’s far from obvious that they’d remain critics of utilitarianism. At the very least, they would cease being the type of critics whose primary objection to utilitarianism relates to the inability to define or measure happiness. That is an objection that’s not taken particularly seriously in academia.
So, let us go through Ungit’s rather confused essay and respond to it. Note, my concluding remark here is not a part of the debate and Mr. Ungit is under no obligation to respond to the critiques presented. I would be rather surprised if he does.
Mr. Bulldog seemed upset that I didn’t address every one of his premises in his various arguments writing, “Many of my points were not addressed, those that were were not addressed adequately.” But the reason I didn’t is because that is not how logic works. When you build a logical argument, your premises build upon each other. If your first or second premise is wrong, I don’t need to then respond to your third or fourth premise. It is like trying to build on a foundation made of sand. You can’t do it. Your building tips over.
This response sounds rather devastating. What kind of Benthamite canine would claim that a person had to address all of his premises—that’s now how logic works!! If this were true, well—this Bentham’s bulldog character would sound like quite the moron.
Well, it would sound rather devastating if one had not read the rest of the exchange. I at no point claimed that every premise had to be addressed. I claimed every argument had to be addressed. If there is a successful argument, the conclusion of which is utilitarianism’s correctness—well, that means a debate has been lost. Consider the litany of arguments presented which were not addressed in Ungit’s final posts—every response he gave to them was responded to by me.
Harsanyi’s argument.
My argument preceding from the premises
The historical argument
The argument from theoretical virtues.
An abductive argument based on lots of cases about which only utilitarianism can successfully reason.
I presented a series of arguments—Ungit ignored them. So now, one needn’t object to every single premise. But they must object to every argument. It is Ungit who leaves Chevkov’s proverbial gun in act 1—never to move over to acts 3 or 4.
So what I would like to do with this conclusion is not argue every fine point but just note again the fatal flaws with Mr. Bulldog’s argument. These are foundational flaws. He cannot ask me to look at other arguments until he can answer these questions and…
he cannot answer these questions.
One rather amusing preliminary point is that they are not phrased as questions. But I shall answer the objections presented. I already have yet I shall be more thorough, now unconstrained by dastardly word counts. These also don’t grapple with any of the premises of the arguments, so even if true, they wouldn’t matter.
To the extent that one fails to grapple with any argument for utilitarianism, they have—as the title of my post suggests, lost the thread.
Utilitarianism Foundational Error #1 - The inability to define happiness
In an earlier post I pointed out that happiness is impossible to define and impossible to measure.
Keen readers will note that this is only an objection to hedonistic utilitarianism—if one is, for example a preference utilitarian (not that you should be of course!!), then happiness based considerations are wholly irrelevant. But Ungit’s repeated conflations of utilitarianism and hedonistic utilitarianism aren’t much to worry about—for I am a hedonistic utilitarian (as I’m sure was rather obvious both from my extensive writings on the subject and from my substack domain name).
Let’s take these concerns one by one. First, the claim that it’s impossible to define happiness is false—I specifically defined happiness as desirable mental states. We all recognize that there’s a workable definition of happiness. When you ask someone if something made them happy, presumably they understand what you mean.
We measure happiness through introspection. We imagine whether, if we lived the life of every single person who would ever life, we’d rather do that if we took action one or action two. To the extent that we imagine being a person who will experience everything that is ever experienced, interpersonal comparisons of utility become no more baffling that personal comparisons of utility. When deciding whether to push 500 people into poverty or kill one person (assuming one has to be chosen), you imagine whether you’d rather live everyone’s life if the 500 were in poverty or if the one was dead.
There are lots of difficult decisions when it comes to such matters. However, this is to be expected. The correct moral theory should make moral questions difficult. When a person decides upon a college, they in large part decide which one will make their life go better. Interpersonal comparisons of utility, while difficult, are conceptually necessary.
To illustrate why they’re necessary, suppose we are deciding a difficult real world question. Consider the one above—500 in poverty or 1 death. If we had to pick one, we would have to have an answer to which one is worse. One can’t be undecided in the real world.
If a person thinks that they’re literally equal—then they could just flip a coin. However, if they hold a different claim, like that they’re impossible to compare even in principle, so we shouldn’t try, as Von-Neuman and Morgenstern showed, that would not do.
If one thinks that you can’t evaluate between the comparative desirability of
A) 500 people in poverty
and
B) 1 person dying
then suppose they compare B to
C) 520 people in poverty.
If they think that neither A to B or B to C can be compared such that they’re indifferent between them in both cases—well, that leads to a problem. If B=A and B=C then C=A. However, C is clearly worse than A—it has 20 extra in poverty.
Thus, we have to make interpersonal comparisons of utility. Because in the real world, we often have to make decisions between different things. We can’t throw up our hands and not decide unless we want to be indifferent between extra bad things and no extra bad things.
Simply asking people how happy they are is deceptive (sometimes things that make us happy in the moment end up having the opposite effect in the longer term and vice versa). And every marketing executive realizes that often people have no idea what will make them happy.
To quote Plantinga, “that’s not in dispute at all.” People can be wrong about what will make them happy. But that doesn’t mean nothing will make them happy. There are some judgements we can be can be rather confident in. For example, I’m quite confident that if a person set me on fire it would make me less happy overall. Certainly in expectation. While there are judgement calls that must be made about tough cases, the same is true of every single system. How would Mr. Ungit propose we decide upon colleges, for example or what food to eat? How would we decide how to spend our time?
The point that I raised repeatedly about the VNM axioms also applies clearly here. In order to avoid Dutch Book arguments, we must have a coherent utility function. If a person does not have a precise utility function that is able to compare different states of the world, they can have their money taken. If you say, for example, that too colleges are literally incomparable, but also that college 1 if slightly better would still be incomparable to college 2, then college 1’s choice worthiness=college 2’s choice worthiness=college 1+improvements choice worthiness, which means that you’re indifferent to 1 and 1+improvements.
If we’re indifferent between X and Y and between Y and Z but X is better than Z, then we’d rationally take a slight benefit to move from X to Y, and then another slight benefit to move from Y to Z, even though the differences between X and Z are greater than the two slight benefits accrued. We can keep doing this infinitely to bring about an infinitely undesirable state of affairs.
Thus, this objection to utilitarianism just boils down to complaining that difficult decisions are difficult, it’s not much of an objection.
And yet Ungit ignores a second damning objection, namely that this is entirely irrelevant. Even if utilitarianism can’t apply adequately in the real world, that wouldn’t negate its truth. Quantum physics is accurate even when describing higher level phenomena—this is true even though it’s not particularly useful for modeling them. Utilitarianism is a theory about what things matter. Thus, even in a world where modal realism were true and none of our decisions mattered, utilitarianism would still be true.
None of the points raised were objections to utilitarianism as a theory. They were merely expressing random ancillary confusions—yet not seriously grappling with the arguments presented.
TLDR in terms of my objections
Making such interpersonal and personal comparisons of utility is inevitable and we do it all the time. It’s just basically complaining about hard decisions.
Dutch book, money pump arguments, and similar prove that we must make similar decisions or based on our values, an infinitely bad state of affairs can be brought about through trades preferrable on our current values.
Reasonable social utility functions must satisfy vnm axioms—making the type of aggregation that was objected to inevitable.
We can employ introspection to come to such verdicts and employ similar reasoning.
The fact that people apply a moral theory incorrectly is not an argument against it. Lots of Christians have used Christianity to justify slavery, subjugation of women, and other attrocities. If we look at historical Christians their track record was waaaaaaaaay worse than that of the utilitarians, who have used belief in god to justify all sorts of horrors. How, for example, should we parse out intractable biblical disputes?
Theories that don’t rely on utility can’t make decisions that we need to make like where to go to college, what job to get, and where to live. The bible gives no guidance there.
Even if we couldn’t apply utilitarianism that wouldn’t make it untrue.
Continuing
And shockingly, Mr. Bulldog agrees with me here. He writes, “I agree that it’s sometimes hard to make decisions [based on happiness calculations]. But what’s the alternative?” But later he writes, “The fact that there are some cases in which we’re wrong about what would bring happiness doesn’t mean we can’t apply utilitarianism.”
Yes it does. It does mean we cannot apply utilitarianism.
It obviously does not mean that. What a bizarre confusion. X can’t be easily applied in every situation does not mean X should never be applied. Ungit did not quote the article in full. Here it is in full. Multiplication with sufficiently large numbers would become impossible—the universe would lack the computing power. However, that doesn’t mean that multiplication wouldn’t apply to those numbers—just that we couldn’t calculate its results. It certainly would not mean that we can’t apply multiplication in any situation.
Ungit explicitly defends the notion that if it’s hard to apply X to all situations then X is nonsense. By this standard, rationality is nonsense, being hard to apply.
I age that it’s sometimes hard to make decisions. But what’s the alternative? How would Ungit propose we decide whether to adopt a child, get a degree, or get married? The fact that happiness is hard to measure doesn’t mean we have no clue. There is a fact of the matter about what will bring the most happiness, so any measurement error on our part is irrelevant. A moral system shouldn’t hand waive away difficult decisions.
(age should be agree). I didn’t adequately edit my earlier posts.
None of the arguments contained here were addressed about the difficulty of making such decisions. Instead, Ungit just repeats his little mantra about the impossibility of comparing utility—while ignoring every objection given. He repeats it time and time again like a prayer to ward off those vicious arguments for utilitarianism.
And he, without proper explanation, minimizes the problem with the word “sometimes.” No. Not sometimes. All the time. All the time we do not have a good definition for happiness.
Ungit would do well to read the definition given—namely, desirable mental states. Repeating that there is no definition of a word after a definition was provided explicitly is a rather strange slight of hand.
If we have no definition of a word then the word is meaningless. And yet happiness is clearly not meaningless. When a person says that watching movies makes them happy, it’s very clear what they’re saying. What about this does Ungit find confusing? It’s not clear.
The second claim is also false. We do not always have trouble figuring out what would maximize happiness. For example, when deciding whether or not to stab oneself in the eye with scissors for no reason—it’s very clear that doing so would not maximize happiness. But the fact that the correct moral system doesn’t give us easy answers to what we should do in every single situation is a feature, not a bug.
This can be analogized to rationality. It’s sometimes unclear what’s rational, how to be rational, and rationality can be difficult to apply. But that doesn’t mean that rationality isn’t good. It certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t be or try to be rational in any situation.
All the time we do not know if the decisions we make will make us happy. All the time. Happiness is not a scientific idea. It is not something that can be measured.
Oh really?
It is extremely subjective from person to person and even in a single person’s life a choice may make us both happy and unhappy depending on when you ask the question.
The fact that at T1 something makes us happy but at T2 makes us unhappy has no significant implications that go against utilitarianism. An object can weigh 50 lbs at T1 and 100 at T2. Its average weight (assuming identical intervals) would be 75 lbs.
Our memory of our mental states is infallible. Thus, it’s quite unsurprising that something would be described as making us happy at one point but not at a different point. This is no more surprising than the fact that we might describe an object as big at one point but small at another point, based on our memory. This does not, however, mean objects have no objective (pun intended) size.
The reports one gets about whether something made them happy is very similar to the reports one would give about whether something is bright. It’s rather imprecise and could certainly be misremembered later. Yet that neither means brightness nor happiness are subjective and false.
This is a giant problem not a small one for utilitarianism. It is a system of thought that is built on an undefinable concept. This is a fatal problem with it.
This is false for the reasons described above. However, even if it were true, it wouldn’t make utilitarianism false. Knowledge is notoriously tricky to define as is reality. However, that doesn’t mean we should distrust an ideology built on knowledge.
And he asks, what the alternative is. With utilitarianism there is no alternative. But with religion, there is. You follow divine rules with religion. Be faithful to your wife even if she makes you unhappy. Love your enemy even if that makes you unhappy. Show up to church even if it makes you unhappy. Do not lie about your neighbor even if it makes you unhappy. Do these things not out of happiness calculations (which are impossible anyway) but because they are duties. Then trust that somehow your life (and afterlife) will be better off as a result. This is an ethical system built not on impossible happiness calculations but on ancient wisdom.
While I thank Mr. Ungit for explaining how his ethics solves a random mish mash of things that I didn’t ask about, I would appreciate if he had responded to how to make decisions about the particular things I did, in fact, ask about. I asked “How would Ungit propose we decide whether to adopt a child, get a degree, or get married?”
None of these were answered. How do we even decide what to eat, if it is not at all out of concern for utility? Why choose tastier food over less tasty food? If we, like Ungit, reject any concern for utility at all, thinking the concept is incoherent, why try to make people happy? Why treat depression?
I’ll summarize this with a limerick.
“You can’t define happiness,” is Ungit’s reply
He misses the points said by I
by which I mean me
“What is bad?” says he
“About a pain in my eye”
In reply I would say
Suffering is obviously bad
It’s a thing that shouldn’t be had
While hard to define
The structure’s affine
Despite all of Ungit’s pizazz.
Utilitarianism Foundational Error #2 - Repeated confusion in thinking IS can get us to OUGHT
This reminds me of the meme—are those utilitarians in the room with us now? Where have I equated those things. We can’t derive an ought from an is. That is, unless we’re moral naturalists, in which case facts about what ought to be are just specific facts about what is. However, that is not the argument I’ve given. I provided a series of philosophical arguments for why well-being is desirable.
In a previous post I noted that you cannot get an ought from an is. This is a logical fact. Utilitarianism says:
‘Because most people prefer happiness to pain and suffering that it is logical to have a system that promotes happiness and minimizes suffering.’
This is not a statement that’s been made by me. The fact that something is desired is some evidence that it’s desirable but it doesn’t necessitate that it’s desirable. Generally if people want P that makes it more probable that P is desirable than if they don’t, given that P is desirable if and only if we’d care about P if we were fully rational and impartial.
But consider alternative statements using this same logic.
‘Because most people are suspicious towards those that look different from them it is logical to have a system that promotes racism and minimizes race mixing.’
‘Because most people are greedy, it is logical to have a system that promotes greed and minimizes altruism.’
‘Because most people are horny, it is logical to have a system that maximizes promiscuous sex.’
The first 2 would be absurd. The fact that people have X doesn’t mean X is good. However, the fact that people desire X serves as some evidence that X is desirable. If people were not horny, the value of sex would be lower.
We are all born with many different impulses and inclinations. Empathy and the desire to be happy are some that we consider good but they are not the only ones. We are born with a desire to hate, to hurt, and to destroy as well. The fact that an impulse “is” tells us nothing whether something “ought” to be. This is the IS/OUGHT problem.
It doesn’t tell us nothing about it. For example, if it is the case that every single ethicist is a utilitarian, that would be evidence for the claim that we ought to be utiltiarians. Additionally, I gave dozens of arguments for hedonism, ones that were not addressed. Here they are.
1 When combined with the other arguments, we conclude that what a self interested person would do should be maximized generally. However, it would be extremely strange to maximize other things like virtue or rights and no one holds that view.
2 Any agent that can suffer matters. Imagine a sentient plant, who feels immense agony as a result of their genetic formation, who can’t move nor speak. They’re harmed from their pain, despite not having their rights violated or virtues. Thus, being able to suffer is a sufficient condition for moral worth.
We can consider a parallel case of a robot that does not experience happiness or suffering. Even though this robot acts exactly like us, it would not matter absent the ability to feel happiness or suffering. These two intuitions combine to form the view that hedonic experience is a necessary and sufficient condition for mattering. This serves as strong evidence for utilitarianism—other theories can’t explain this necessary connection between hedonic value and mattering in the moral sense.
One could object that rights, virtue, or other non hedonistic experiences are an emergent property of happiness, such that one only gains them when they can experience happiness. However, this is deeply implausible, requiring strong emergence. As Chalmers explains, weak emergence involves emergent properties that are not merely reducible to interactions of the weaker properties. For example, chairs are reducible to atoms, given that we need nothing more to explain the properties of a chair than knowing the ways that atoms function. However, strongly emergent properties are not reducible to weaker properties. Philosophers tend to think there is only at most one strongly emergent thing in the universe, so if deontology requires strong emergence, that’s an enormous cost.
3 As we’ll see, theories other than hedonism are just disastrously bad at accounting for what makes someone well off, however, I’ll only attack them if my opponent presents one, because there are too many to criticize.
4 Hedonism seems to unify the things that we care about for ourselves. If someone is taking an action to benefit themselves, we generally take them to be acting rationally if that action brings them joy. This is how we decide what to eat, how to spent our time, or who to be in a romantic relationship with—and is the reason people spend there time doing things they enjoy rather than picking grass.
The rights that we care about are generally conducive to utility, we care about the right not to be punched by strangers, but not the right to not be talked to by strangers, because only the first right is conducive to utility. We care about beauty only if it's experienced, a beautiful unobserved galaxy would not be desirable. Even respect for our wishes after our death is something we only care about if it increases utility. We don’t think that we should light a candle on the grave of a person who’s been dead for 2000 years, even if they had a desire during life for the candle on their grave to be lit. Thus, it seems like for any X we only care about X if it tends to produce happiness.
5 Consciousness seems to be all that matters. As Sidgwick pointed out, a universe devoid of sentience could not possess value. The notion that for something to be good it must be experienced is a deeply intuitive one. Consciousness seems to be the only mechanism by which we become acquainted with value.
6 Hedonism seems to be the simplest way of ruling out posthumous harm. Absent hedonism, a person can be harmed after they die, yet this violates our intuitions,.
7 As Pummer argues, non hedonism cannot account for lopsided lives.
If we accept that non hedonic things can make one’s life go well, then their life could have a very high welfare despite any amount of misery. In fact, they could have an arbitrarily good life despite any arbitrary amount of misery. Thus, if they had enough non hedonic goodness (E.G. knowledge, freedom, or virtue), their life could be great for them, despite experiencing the total suffering of the holocaust every second. This is deeply implausible.
8 Even so much as defining happiness seems to require saying that it’s good. The thing that makes boredom suffering but tranquility happiness is that tranquility has a positive hedonic tone and is good, unlike boredom. Thus, positing that joy is good is needed to explain what joy even is. Additionally, we have direct introspective access to the badness of pain when we experience it.
9 Only happiness seems to possess desire independent relevance. A person who doesn’t care about their suffering on future Tuesdays is being irrational. However, this does not apply to rights—one isn’t irrational for not exercising their rights. If we’re irrational to not care about our happiness, then happiness has to objectively matter.
10 Sinhababu argues that reflecting on our mental states is a reliable way of forming knowledge as recognized by psychology and evolutionary biology—we evolved to be good at figuring out what we’re experiencing. However, when we reflect on happiness we conclude that it’s good, much like reflecting on a yellow wall makes us conclude that it’s bright.
11 Hedonism is very simple, holding there’s only one type of good thing, making it prima facie preferrable.
Next, Ungit says
And Mr. Bulldog attempted to hand wave this giant problem away by stating this confusing assertion: “While you can’t get an ought from an is, if it is the case that lots of people think x is wrong, that is evidence that x is wrong.” Why would that be evidence of that? Most people in history didn’t think slavery was wrong. Is that evidence that it is not wrong?
The fact that people think X is good for them is certainly some evidence that it’s good for them. People are unlikely to be totally mislead about what makes them well off. The answer to Ungit’s question would be yes, it would be some evidence. However, it would be very very very weak evidence, compared to the overwhelming evidence for the wrongness of slavery.
Being a good bayesian, let’s plug it into the formula. P(people thinking X)|X>|~X.
The existence of Zeus is more probable than the existence of Shmeus—an isomorph of Zeus but merely with a different name. This is because people have believed in Zeus but have not believed in Shmeus.
If a simple majority is all that is needed to determine morality, many horrible human rights abuses in history would have remained in place forever.
This is a confusion.
People thinking X is good for them is good evidence that X is, in fact, good for them. It’s not as good of evidence that X is good all things considered.
People thinking X is good does not mean necessarily that X is good. Rather, it serves as some evidence that X is good. This is because people are more likely to be right than random chance. The odds that a random person is right about morality is higher than the odds that a random metaphysically possible moral view would be correct.
Ungit makes a rather elementary mistake—one that he keeps making. Evidence is not the same as decisive proof. B is evidence for A if the probability of B given A is higher than the probability of B given not A. Mr. Ungit would do well to look into Bayes theorem.
No. How reform happens is when a reformer notices that the majority is wrong and proceeds to convince a greater and greater number of people that the majority is wrong until that is not the majority view anymore. How would the reformer be able to do that if right and wrong were determined by the majority.
Right and wrong are not determined by the majority. Nobody beyond cultural relativists in Phil 101 seem to think it is. Rather, majority view can serve as some evidence for the truth of a proposition. Ungit has lost the thread here. He is failing to track. Thus is the tragic tale of Ungit’s pwnage.
And Mr. Bulldog is wrong when he says that, “The is ought problem as a meta-ethical stopping point to dispel with any normative claim is a total nonstarter.” But this too is wrong. It is as though Mr. Bulldog has never considered the ability of a Divine law to work. The Divine law is by definition a great Ought. It is the solution to the Is/Ought problem. As Plato explained with his divine forms, the Divine law is a picture of how things Ought to be. The Is/Ought problem is only an issue for atheists.
If you’ve read the articles in our written debate, dear reader, you will realize that I have in fact considered the ability of divine law to work. I have explained a series of reasons why divine law is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad account of morality. But we’ll get to that later.
Mr. Ungit has additionally missed my responses to the is ought problem. I’ll quote them in full.
This totally misrepresents my argument. The claim is not that its truth ontologically hinges on many people thinking it. The claim is merely that lots of people finding it intuitive counts in favor of believing its true. While you can’t get an ought from an is, if it is the case that lots of people think x is wrong, that is evidence that x is wrong. My opponent would presumably hold that one thing favoring Christian ethics is that it seems plausible upon reflection, yet that doesn’t run afoul of the is ought problem.
The is ought problem as a meta-ethical stopping point to dispel with any normative claim is a total nonstarter. One who is a moral realist is either a moral naturalist, in which they think that moral claims are a type of is claim so we can get them from other is claims, or non naturalists in which case they won’t get an ought from an is because they think it’s non natural. Either way, it’s fully impotent.
Perceptive readers will note that this reply was not addressed by Mr. Ungit. So will non perceptive readers. All who read will note this fact.
Utilitarianism Foundational Error # 3 - Unworkable in Real Life
I have repeatedly pointed out that utilitarianism fails dramatically because rather than having set rules it has endless happiness calculations for every situation. Setting aside the inability to calculate happiness at all (see foundational error #1) we have a giant moral hazard of the person being tempted and the person making the very subjective happiness calculation being the very same person.
Mr. Ungit would do well to consult the historical record and compare the track record of the early utilitarians to the early non utilitarians to see which of them did better. Look at the life of Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick—compare them to the ancillary moral views of Aristotle. As I have pointed out earlier in the debate, it is very clear that Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick did better.
Another limerick.
{{“Utilitarianism is unworkable.”
Says Ungit whose reasons are circular
You’d calculate frequently
With no time for being free
No! That would hurt those who are hurtable. }}
Spending all of ones time calculating would not make things go well. If we spent all of our time calculating, we’d have no time for doing good things. Your objection to utilitarianism can’t be that it would lead to people not maximizing utility. For any action if that action is bad in terms of utility then utilitarianism wouldn’t endorse that action.
If you look at modern utilitarians, they manage to make it work rather well. The most mainstream effective altruism movement is effective altruism, which has saved vast numbers of lives and dramatically improve the conditions of vast numbers of factory farmed animals.
This explains why utilitarians rely on moral heuristics—general rules that tend to make things go best. Even if they’re not perfect always, adhering to them makes things go best overall.
If one is likely to be tempted to do evil then, following Aristotle, they would do well to hedge against benefitting themselves when in difficult moral conundrums.
Mr. Bulldog states that there is a right answer to my specific examples (of adultery, judicial rulings, etc). He states that “…people have misapplied Christianity, so this would take out Ungit’s moral system.” But this is absolutely false. With utilitarianism there is no “right” answer. It is a happiness judgement. What makes me happy is not what makes you happy. What pleases me is not what pleases you. My calculation and your calculation are going to be different. And both are very subjective. You don’t get to tell me what will make me happy.
This paragraph additionally represents profound confusion on a multitude of distinct fronts.
There is a right answer to what would make happiness the most overall. Different things make different people happy but utilitarianism is about maximizing overall happiness.
As I pointed out, this applies to Mr. Ungit’s views. People disagree about what god thinks we should do. So this would eviscerate Mr. Ungit’s morality.
The fact that people disagree doesn’t mean there’s no right answer—as any moral realist would accept. People disagree about theism, morality, and even scientific questions—but that doesn’t make it subjective.
No utilitarian that I know of have held that what maximizes happiness is subjective. There is, as I pointed out earlier, a science of happiness.
This is, something that my friend has referred to as the who chooses fallacy. Obviously, whoever is making decisions will be the one who chooses. We sadly are unable to consult an omniscient being when we make decisions. But, if utilitarianism makes better average decisions that other theories that’s a reason to prefer it. Even if utilitarianism instructs us to only commit adulty in wildly implausible situations while Christianity says we should never commit it—Christianity has no magic enforcement mechanism that guarantees people will adhere to it. So it’s a draw on that front.
If the problem is about application, then let’s compare the application. Ungit has granted that utilitarianism has produced people who are overwhelmingly on the right side of history like Bentham and Mill, who supported women’s suffrage and legalization of homosexuality in 1798—a rather impressive feat. Utilitarianism also has the theoretical infrastructure to go against every atrocity in history—all of which have come from excluding some sentient beings from our moral circle. Modern utilitarians like Singer and MacAskill take important actions to reduce existential risks and improve conditions of animals on factory farms—unlike those dastardly Christians which Mr. Ungit represents.
Ungit confuses “what would make me happy,” with “what would make the world happiest overall.” One shouldn’t just do what makes them happy—this is rather obvious to anyone with even an elementary understanding of utilitarianism.
People can, in fact, tell others what will make them happy. The fact that a person thinks X will make them happy doesn’t mean that X will actually make them happy. Duh!
And this is a giant problem in practice.
And this is very different from moral questions with a divine law (such as Christianity). When someone commits adultery within Christianity, they are violating a clear rule given in the bible and taught throughout the centuries by the church. There are rules. Like them or not they are there. No calculation is required once the church has ruled on something. You can follow the church or not.
But the Church is silent on most important questions in your life. The Church will not tell you who to marry, where to go to college, what job to get, how to spent your days, or resolve any important issue. They merely give demands—whose piety is matched only by their vacuity.
The church, unlike utilitarianism, has nothing to say about what you should do with most of your time or your money. Given that some charities are thousands of times better than other charities, being indifferent to which charities are given to is a rather big problem for a system, if it is to provide a holistic account of how to live.
We don’t need the cathedral to tell us what to do in most cases. In the cases where decisions are difficult, we generally implicitly use utilitarianism.
I won’t rehash the points about why this would be irrelevant even if true or heuristics, no need to beat a dead horse.
This is a philosophy that can constrain us in our moments of temptation. Committing adultery, killing a prisoner, or stealing something from the corporation might make me happy but I have a rule that says not to do it anyway.
Utilitarianism is also opposed to doing such things in all plausible realistic situations. However, there are clear counterexamples to all of those. If committing adultery, killing a prisoner, or stealing from a corporation would prevent infinite child rape, it would clearly be good. Thus, we’ve already established what kind of person Mr. Ungit is, we’re just haggling over the price.
Thus, Ungit would do well to give cases where utilitarianism actually gives incorrect results, rather than cases where wrong utilitarianism would get the wrong result. The fact that wrong people could apply a theory incorrectly is not much of a problem for a theory. Fools could misread the bible and think it sanctions torturing people—yet that wouldn’t be an argument against the bible.
Indeed, Christians have frequently used the bible to justify killing. It isn’t the utilitarian foundational text (not that there are such things), that explicitly permit killing “everyone, men and women, young and old, everyone except Rahab and the others in her house.” Utilitarians don’t frequently defend genocide in the modern age. Nor do they defend the vicious beating of slaves—something the bible holds is only a punishable offense if people don’t get up after three days. We don’t believe in a nearly omnicidal deity, who drowned kittens allegedly.
Foundational Error # 4 - People do not generally speaking seek happiness
I would recommend Mr. Bulldog read Dostoevsky’s great Notes from the Underground. In that book, the author took on the utilitarian thinkers of his day that claimed that if we could just teach people what would make them happy they would act rightly. A perfect society could result from education. Dostoevsky told a story of a man who - over and over - makes self destructive choices. Dostoevsky is making the point that many people know very well what will make them happy but often make other choices for other reasons (often irrational ones).
If Mr. Ungit is giving me book recommendations—I shall give him similar writing recommendations. I would recommend Mr. Ungit read the blog posts I wrote in response, as part of the debate. After all, this was not a point I failed to address.
Here is what I said “NO!!!! Let me make one thing very clear—I am not rehashing John Stuart Mill’s mediocre argument. I do not think it works. I do not think that happiness is all that’s desired. If Ungit responded to my argument rather than the replica of Mill living rent free in his head, this would be obvious.”
I agree people often make self destructive choices and that sometimes the thing that will bring about the most well-being overall won’t bring about the most well-being for you—sometimes morality and self interest conflict.
None of my arguments rely on the premise that people seek happiness. However, as a side point, it’s obviously true that people generally do seek happiness all else equal, in most situations. People tend to prefer happiness to sadness, joy to misery, bliss to unpleasantness. Pointing out that sometimes people don’t desire happiness doesn’t prove that they usually do desire happiness. When deciding upon foods, for example, people primarily select them on the basis of what foods they’d enjoy.
I do not think that people tend to be utilitarians—nor that they tend to maximize their overall happiness. I employed over a dozen arguments for hedonism—if Ungit thinks this is my augment then I question whether he has truly read my opening statement.
As Pascal says, people tend to be drawn to what is beautiful not what is true. And in the same way, people often pursue many other things besides happiness. Duty, beauty, momentary joy for long term suffering, habit, tradition, etc etc etc. The utiltarian often responds to this by saying we choose these things because they make us happy but as I noted in previous posts this has the effect of making the word happiness all encompassing and is essentially saying that every choice is always done out of a happiness (and if this is the case, what is utilitarianism).
Alas, this is not what I’d say—certainly not across the board. I think it’s caused by
People being wrong about what things matter (thinking things other than happiness matters, more specifically).
Sometimes, people are wrong about what will make them happy.
Sometimes, people are just plain irrational, for example, when they procrastinate.
The definition of happiness is desirable mental states. Anything that is not a desirable mental state wouldn’t be happiness.
Other loose ends:
Euthyphro’s dilemma: He says my response is not adequate but he missed the point: God is good. We know what good is because of God. Having hypothetical on what it would be like if God was not good is nonsensical. This is like debating what squares would be like if they had round sides. Definitionally it is nonsensical.
Euthyphro’s dilemma seems to induce collapse of reasoning in the mind of those who ponder it. The question is, is X good because god says so or does god say so because X is in fact good. If the former is true, then if god decreed that we should torture infants for fun, we should torture infants for fun. It doesn’t involve asking what if god weren’t good—it instead asks about what things would be like if god’s character were different. If the latter is true, morality is outside of god.
The statement god is good is ambiguous. It’s either
A) A tautology, saying god is godly. This runs into the first horn of the dilemma. If true this would mean that saying god is good is not a meaningful statement and god could decree anything. If god sanctioned the grisly scenario described here, it would be objectively moral.
B) Substantive. But if it’s substantive then morality is outside of god. For god is good to not be a tautology, there must be an extra concept of goodness outside of god.
On the analogy about squares, a square by definition can’t have round sides. A square with rounds sides is incoherent—it entails a contradiction—both 4 and not 4 sides. However, there’s nothing incoherent about god having different whims, unless his whims are fixed by the concept of goodness, but if that’s true then goodness couldn’t depend on god.
Ungit has not clarified which horn of the dilemma he is taking. He has also ignored my numerous other objections to divine command theory. I’ll quote them in full.
1 God cannot solve the problem of morality, if morality would be subjective absent a god then god could not make it objective. If morality is simply a description of preferences, then god cannot make objective morality any more than he could make objective beauty, or objective tastiness.
2 Utilitarianism could be the best moral view even if morality were subjective (though I do think it’s objective). Additionally, there’s a robustly realist account of the goodness of pleasure. Much like mental states can have properties like brightness they can have normative properties.
3 This runs into Euthephro’s dilemma is it good because god decreed it or did god decree it because it’s good. If the former is true, then good is just whatever god decrees and there’s no reason good is binding, if satan were ultimate he could decree that things were good. However, if god decrees it because it’s good then it proves that good exists outside of god. Some try to avoid this problem by saying that gods nature is good, so it’s not true either because of or in spite of divine decree. However, this just raises the deeper question of whether it’s good because it corresponds to his nature or whether it corresponds to his nature because it’s good. Thus, it doesn’t avoid the problem because if gods nature were evil than evil would be justified.
4 Either God has reasons for his commands or he doesn’t. If he does then that would ground morality and if he doesn’t then it’s arbitrary and lacks reason giving force
5 There already has to be objective morality for there to be an objectively moral being. Thus, this is like arguing that we should believe that Millard Filmore was a good president because it accounts for goodness.
6 God is presumably not the objective standard for Glubglosh—which is gibberish. Yet if one thinks that morality wouldn't exist without God, then saying God is good is like saying God is the standard for Glubglosh. God needs objective morality to exist.
7 This seems to obviously misidentify what morality is. Morality has to have reason giving force. However, it’s not clear how theistic morality does. God’s character being anti child murder misidentifies why child murder is bad. If God disappeared the badness of child murder would not disappear. The theist has to say that the badness of brutally torturing children has nothing to do with harm to children and everything to do with God’s character being disapproving. This is not a plausible account of moral ontology.
8 If God grounds morality then morality can just be grounded in what God would decree if he existed.
9 Morality has to either be true in all possible worlds or true in none. God can’t affect things that are true in all possible worlds any more than he can ground mathematics or logic
10 In order for God’s commands to give us morality, we have to already have a moral obligation to obey God’s commands, which means God needs morality to exist. This argument came from none other than Mackie, the guy Craig quoted to prove atheists can’t have objective morality. He doesn’t think theists can either.
These arguments were, as we say in collegiate debate “Dropped.” Ungit did not supply a rebuttal to them.
In this article, I have listed multiple fatal flaws in Utilitarianism. In my conversation with Mr. Bulldog, he has done nothing to explain any of these fatal flaws. I don’t blame him for this as people have been pointing out these logical and practical flaws for centuries. The only surprising thing to me is that there are people out there that still genuinely believe this system of thought. My guess is that the reason it is still held is that it proceeds from atheism. People start by assuming there is no God (clearly wrong) and then are forced to try to get the Oughts that only a divine law can provide. This leaves the atheist with either some form of Utilitarianism (a fatally flawed philosophy as I have shown here) or nihilism. Most atheists are uncomfortable with nihilism so they end up being forced to cling to a fatally flawed philosophy.
These flaws are as far from fatal as any could be—they don’t even qualify as flaws in my mind. If Ungit thinks his arguments haven’t been addressed, he would do well to reread my responses to his arguments—they were, in fact addressed.
Ungit also shows immense ignorance of the history of philosophy. There are lots of atheist philosophers who are not utilitarian—Wielenberg, Huemer, Parfit, Nagel, and many others. One need not be a utilitarian to avoid nihilism. Nothing about utilitarianism makes it an especially helpful lifeboat for maintaining belief in robust morality through the vicissitudes of belief. Well, nothing other than the potent arguments favoring it over other theories.
So here are the lines of argument favoring utilitarianism, presented in bayesian form for maximum fun.
U will denote Utilitarianism
S will denote simplicity
E will denote explanatory power
EMC is expanding moral circle
RSOH is right side of history
IOR is incoherence of rights
POB is permissibility of birth
POC2 is permissibility of case 2 (described here)
POC3 is permissibility of case 3 (described here)
POC4 is permissibility of case 4 (described here)
POC5 is permissibility of case 5 (described here)
HA is Harsanyi’s argument
US is utilitarian syllogism (the one with 12 premises).
1 P(S)|U>P(S|~U).
Thus, S favors utilitarianism.
2 P(E)|U>P(E|~U)
Thus, E favors utilitarianism
3 P(EMC)|U>P(EMC)|~U
Thus, EMC favors utilitarianism
4 P(RSOH)|U>P(RSOH)|~U
Thus, RSOH favors utilitarianism
5 P(IOR)|U>P(IOR)|~U
Thus, IOR favors utilitarianism
6 P(POB)|U>P(POB)|~U
Thus, POB favors utilitarianism
7 P(POC2)|U>P(POC2)|~U
Thus, POC2 favors utilitarianism.
8 P(POC3)|U|P(POC3)|~U
Thus, POC3 favors utilitarianism.
9 P(POC4)|U>P(POC4)|~U
Thus, POC4 favors utilitarianism.
10 P(POC5)|U>(POC5)|~U
Thus, POC5 favors utilitarianism.
11 P(HA)|U>P(HA)|~U
Thus, HA favors utilitarianism
12 P(US)|U>P(US)|~U
These are the arguments that should be responded, rather than random, ancillary extra points. I EVEN MADE THEM BAYESIAN, for fun and for clarity.
There are serious critiques to be had of utilitarianism—Heumer’s were sufficiently potent that I dedicated ten blog posts to dispatching them. Yet the nonsense Ungit churns out is not the way to criticize utilitarianism. He has brought sorites paradox to a gun fight.
The first questions you have when you hear about utilitarianism are not potent objections to it—and if they’re all that’s presented by a critic of utilitarianism—things will end up going rather poorly for them. To really grapple with utilitarianism, one needs a better understanding of the theory—as well as various concepts in economics.
While I appreciate his writing ability and gusto—Ungit seems unwilling or unable to truly grapple with what’s being said. He levies ill thought out objections about application—while ignoring the ways utilitarianism ACTUALLY is applied in the real world. He invokes the alleged impossibility of applying it, while ignoring the economic analysis provided. He apparently is able to deduce a priori what god would want him to do in every situation—no thinking needed—and takes utilitarianism’s absence of revelation directly from god about various matters—ones which god never seems to directly comment on—to be a mark against it.
It’s abundantly clear—this is not the worldview-shattering type of devastating objection that should cause any utilitarian on the face of this earth to abandon their views. Least of all me.