Philosophical Zombie Hunter is Wrong About Utilitarianism

Very, very, very wrong

Philosophical Zombie Hunter (henceforth referred to as PZH) wrote a post titled “Utilitarianism is Evil.” This post will address accusations of utilitarianism being evil — explaining why this charge is unjustified.

Sentence 1 of the article is “Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that determines right from wrong by focusing on outcomes.” This is confusing consequentialism with utilitarianism — utilitarianism is more specific; it holds that one ought to maximize how well the lives of conscious creatures go.

Sentence 2 of the article is “Utilitarianism holds that the most ethical choice is the one that will produce the greatest good for the greatest number.” This is ambiguous and, I think, not a good definition. Utilitarianism holds that the most ethical choice is the one that will produce the greatest overall good for sentient beings — not just good for the greatest number.

How do I define evil? Something that is anti-life. Anti individual life and anti allowing people to live their life fully or live the best life they set for themselves.

This is a really weird definition. On this account, it would seem that anti-natalism is evil by definition. While I do think that anti-natalism is wrong, it’s not by definition evil — whether anti-natalism is right will depend on substantive ethical claims. There are obviously some cases in which one should take life — if the person would be infinitely tortured if they survive, for example — but this bizarre definition rules this out by definition.

So lets go over why it may be evil:

Doing Extreme Things

In a lot of philosophical conversations, you can always get utilitarians, to agree to what might seem to regular human beings, deeply immoral things. Here are some examples:

1. Killing 1 healthy person to then give all their organs to 5 unhealthy people

This is common sense.

2. Committing necrophilia

Utilitarians have a good reason to be opposed to actually existing necrophilia. After all, it risks spreading disease, causes emotional harm to the friends and family of loved ones, causes emotional harm to people prior to death who don’t want their body to be defiled, etc. Thus, we have great instrumental reasons to be opposed to necrophilia.

But I don’t think that it’s very plausible that necrophilia is bad independently of the consequences. Consider the following case. There are vast numbers of aliens who will be in horrific agony. However, each time they commit necrophilic acts on a human, their agony will be lessened slightly. Thus, if they commit 100^100 necrophilic acts, their agony will be reduced to zero.

If we hold that each necrophilic act is deeply wrong then, given that each of the 100^100 actions only produces a very small amount of utility, it would be very wrong to do this. Thus, all of the aliens — suppose that there are 10 quadrillion of them — should be sentenced to unfathomable misery. This is not plausible. Not only non-utilitarian necrophilia opponents have to hold that this would be deeply terrible, they’d have to hold that this is the worst thing in the world, if we accept that all bad things are commensurable, which I argue for here.

3. Mass rape

Utilitarianism is obviously opposed to mass rape. If the claim is that there’s a possible world in which mass rape is good, this is true, however, it’s not a problem. Mass rape to prevent infinite other mass rape would be good.

4. Pressing a red button that destroys all life in the universe, but no one will feel pain as it is done (negative utilitarianism)

I’m not a negative utilitarian.

Basically, you can get utilitarians to ‘bite the bullet’ on the worst things possible as long as you frame it that it brings the most utility to the most people.

Just like you can get threshold deontologists to ‘bite the bullet’ on the worst things possible as long as you frame it that it is justified by threshold deontology.

Sacrificial Sheep

Utilitarianism doesn’t help you live your own life. It doesn’t give you a set of guidelines to live a better and moral life. It kind of leaves it to yourself to figure it out. Some would say that you are operating on previous morals in the culture left over from religion.

Utilitarianism is a theory of what makes actions right, so it obviously doesn’t tell you how you decide which actions are right. However, there are clear ways for a utilitarian to make decisions that follow from utilitarianism.

This in itself is anti your life. There is an added layer that you need to think about everyone, but yourself. You are supposed to think about what would bring about the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Even here, I am not clear about how you decide that. The way I see it, it falls into two possible categories:

1. You can intuitively know what would do the greatest good for the greatest number of people - and take actions based on that knowledge

2. Someone external tells you what is the best action to take for the greatest number of people for the greatest good and you follow their instructions.

The claim that it’s anti your life is silly — while it does proscribe making sacrifices, those sacrifices help others. Thus, while it potentially harms your life, it more than makes up for it by benefitting the lives of other people.

The next dichotomy is a false one. You can make decisions by considering the evidence, though there won’t just be one method. For example, the way you make a decision about which math problem is correct will be totally different from the way you make the correct decision about which charity to donate to.

The second option is something I will expand on shortly. But in both cases, you stop your brain from focusing on how to live your life, focus on something external to you and that doesn’t (typically) effect you in any way.

It seems to me like utilitarianism turns you into a sacrificial sheep for benefit of the rest of the herd. I suppose that once you are in the herd, you would expect everyone else to fall in line and be the same. Ie, acting for yourself is selfish and ‘immoral’.

This is now pretty much the demandingness objection — I’ve responded to it here. Worth noting this doesn’t apply at all to the very plausible scalar utilitarianism.

Most people have bought into utilitarianism. It sounds convincing. It sounds ‘good’.

This is almost certainly false. Most people haven’t heard of utilitarianism and do not have a sophisticated normative view!

However, how do you know what’s the best action to take for the greatest number of people? This is where other people come in.

It obviously depends on the circumstances. Utilitarianism proscribes that you should use various heuristics (e.g. be generally kind) to make decisions. But also, how difficult utilitarianism is to apply is wholly irrelevant to whether or not utilitarianism is a good thing.

Now, I would imagine that the types of people utilitarians would accept might be experts in some field that effects a lot of people. This could mean leaders of some collective who understand the people in it or experts in academic fields. This means to me that you outsource your thinking to these experts and most people would follow them blindly.

Assuming I am an expert in such a field, I can amplify my control over your actions by “catastrophising” the perceived end result if no action is taken. You can see this happening in todays discourse and has been happening for decades now. I would say, however, that this sort of catastrophising has been especially bad since 2015.

This is a reason why we should be skeptical of catastrohpizing claims. Like in other domains, we should consider the arguments on both sides. Worrying too much ends up being harmful.

Thus, utilitarianism is not evil. None of the objections are successful.