Lots Of Bad Things Are Like Drunk Driving

Clearing up a confusion about utilitarianism

Content Warning: Sexual Assault

Consider the question: is drunk driving always bad? In a trivial sense—no, there have no doubt been some cases in history in which a person was slightly drunk but needed to drive to, for example, rush a wounded person to a near-bye hospital. However, this question is really asking about negligent drunk driving, where someone drives drunk for no greater purpose, posing significant risks.

In this case, there seems to be a clear distinction that needs to be made between being bad and being wrong. Drunk driving for trivial gains is always wrong, it poses dramatic risks for little benefit. However, drunk driving isn’t always bad—if it harms no one then it was an unnecessary risk, but it ended up not being bad.

Thus, we need to be clear about the distinction between badness and wrongness. An action can be called wrong if it shouldn’t have been done by the agent, knowing what they knew at the time. On the other hand, an action is bad if it ends up causing more harm than benefits, such that it would be better for it never to have taken place. Hitler’s grandmother having sex was bad, but it wasn’t necessarily wrong.

With this distinction in place, many of the counterexamples to utilitarianism end up dissipating. Worries that utilitarianism says that attempted murders that fail aren’t necessarily wrong are false, when wrongness is understood this way. It could turn out that they might not end up being bad. However, they are always bad in expectation, such that they’re the type of thing that ought not be done. Oftentimes, our judgments going against utilitarianism rely on oversimplifications of the real world, such that we imagine a more realistic real world stand in, in place of the bizarre stipulations of the hypothetical.

Consider the case of the sexual abuse of a comatose patient who will never find out. In any realistic situation, there will always be some risk that the person will be harmed. First of all, there’s a high chance that you will be discovered sexually assaulting them. To rule this out, god himself would have to appear to you and guarantee that you won’t be found out. Second, there’s a high chance of inducing pregnancy or spreading an STD. Thus, there needs to be some 100% safe method of having sex that leaves no risk of any harm. Third, there must be total certainty that the person will never find out. Fourth, there must be a guarantee that it won’t have any negative effect on your character—something that would never be true in a realistic situation. Realistically, sexually assaulting a comatose patient would make someone a worse person. Fifth, there must be some absolute guarantee that you will never feel guilty about it. Sixth, there must be some absolute guarantee that violating the norms against such acts in this case won’t spill over to other acts. Seventh, there must be a guarantee that the subjective experience of every single person except you will be no different if you take the act—so no else’s mental states will be any different. In such a bizarre case that involves divine revelation, the absolution of guilt or other negative character effects, and many others—would we really expect our intuitions to translate over? Especially because taking such an act would be clear evidence of vicious character—something our moral intuitions tend to find objectionable.

This case is thus much like the drunk driving case. Drunk driving is wrong because it’s harmful in expectation—you shouldn’t do it. However, if we somehow stipulate with metaphysical certainty that no one will be harmed by your drunk driving, then it becomes not objectionable. The act will still be morally wrong in any realistic situation—it just may not end up being bad. To be bad, it must be bad for someone.

To show the intuition, imagine if every second aliens were constantly sexually assaulting all humans, in ways that the humans never found out about. The aliens committed about 100^100^100 sexual assaults per second. In the absence of any sexual assault, the aliens would subjectively experience the sum total of all misery experienced during the holocaust every single second. However, each assault (which no one ever finds out about) reduces their misery by a tiny amount, such that if they commit the 100^100^100 assaults per second, their subjective experience will be equivalent to the sum total of all human happiness ever experienced, experienced every second. In this case, the marginal utility from each assault is very small. Yet it seems quite intuitive that the aliens’ actions would be permissible. When it’s sufficiently divorced from the real world that we understand clearly the ways in which the act is optimific, it becomes quite clear that the act can be, in certain bizarre counterfactual cases, permissible.

Thus, we need to be much clearer when conceptualizing thought experiments. Sometimes bad things aren’t wrong and wrong things aren’t bad. When we mix those up, we get false beliefs and confusion. Lots of wrong things end up not being bad—in most cases drunk driving probably doesn’t cause harm, but it still shouldn’t be done, because it causes harm in expectation.