Utilitarianism Debate Part 4
Responding to Ungit's response my response to his opening statement
“my arguments weren’t addressed,”
—William Lane Craig
“He did mention premise 1 and I’m grateful for that.”
—Alvin Plantinga
Ungit has responded to my response to his article. Many of my points were not addressed, those that were were not addressed adequately.
I stated that most people would not take a pill that just made you happy for the rest of your life. I made this observation as part of my argument that most people do not actually pursue happiness as their ultimate goal. Mr. Bulldog states that a failure to take the pill is a mistake. He writes,
“The pill objection is very much like the experience machine. While people mgiht not want to take the pill, hat would be an error on their part. What makes a pleasure real and genuine, making it worthwhile? Simulated pleasure is still pleasure.”
He then goes on an extended argument explaining why we should want it.
But yet I don’t want it. I would rather death than a happiness pill without meaning and reality. Mr. Bulldog’s argument is that everyone wants happiness and yet when I say I don’t want that sort of happiness he says I am mistaken. That is not how this works. If we are going to build a whole philosophy on innate desire for happiness you can’t complain that my other innate desires (for meaning, reality, purpose, etc) are wrong.
I will restate what I have said before. Most people do not pursue their own happiness. They pursue other things. They pursue what is beautiful. They pursue meaning. They pursue duty. You can argue that they get happiness from these things but I would argue that happiness just becomes a meaningless term at this point. Happiness is rarely pursued. We are almost always pursuing other things. Claiming that all these things just bring happiness speaks to the meaningless of the phrase ‘the pursuit of happiness’ is. It is now the pursuit of anything is the pursuit of happiness.
For the umpteenth time let me reiterate, I AM NOT JOHN STUART MILL. I do not agree with Mill’s argument, nor have I made it. Thus, the question is not what we desire but what we should. There is no response to the multitude of reasons I gave to why we should take the pill. 5 year olds don’t want to get shots but they should still get shots. This pill is the same for all of the reasons I gave in my article.
A Fatal Flaw: We Cannot Define or Measure Happiness
In my opening statement I made the point clear: we cannot define what happiness is. We do things we think will make us happy (enjoying a day at the beach), it does make us happy (we take a poll and put our happiness at 10), and yet later we regret doing it because we missed doing something else (it makes us sad). Did sitting on the beach bring happiness?
We have no way of answering this. We have no clue. We don’t know what will make us happy. We do not even know what happiness is. C.S. Lewis wrote that heaven and hell reach backward changing our experiences that we thought were good or bad at the time and reversing their effect on our happiness.
Mr. Bulldog attempts to hand wave this objection by writing,
“There may be tricky edge cases in which it’s unclear which action creates more happiness, but we can know introspectively that, for example, being set on fire causes lots of suffering and being in love causes lots of happiness.”
I think it is funny that he talks about the “tricky edge” and then jumps to an extreme (being on fire or being in love). What about the countless things not on the edge. Like will getting this degree make me happy? Will having adultery make me happy? Will adopting a child make me happy? Will going to the beach make me happy? The answer to all those questions is that we have no idea. And we might never be able to truly answer them even after we do them. We might do something like adopt a child and it might make us happy for a while but then the kid grows up and hates us and we then are sad then in our old age we might remember the best memories and forget the painful ones and it makes us happy again. Was the adoption a net positive in happiness? Was it good or bad? Did it make us happy?
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.
Happiness is not a measurable thing. We don’t know anything about it. Even in his extreme case of fire versus love, it is possible that the fire taught us how to endure pain and the love made us weak and that later in life we view the fire as the thing that brought the most possible happiness to our lives because it made us better people and that the love turned out to be a bad thing that wasted time and ended poorly. Even that extreme example is not as simple as Mr. Bulldog claims.
This is possible, but getting set on fire minimizes expected happiness. 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. Lots of people are applying utilitarianism in the real world: that’s the whole point of effective altruism. Dutch book arguments show we have to do expected utility calculations.
In my opening statement I gave a few examples to display why Utilitarianism doesn’t work in practice. I noted that Utilitarianism requires an endless number of very subjective calculations based on what would bring the most happiness. As predicted, he objected to the decisions made in those scenarios (I intentionally wrote them so that the calculation caused the person to do something traditionally thought to be immoral). He then wrote,
“The fact that people apply a moral theory incorrectly is not an argument against it.”
But this is absolutely wrong. When you are talking about how effective a moral framework is in practice, whether or not it can be reliably followed is absolutely an argument for or against it. Utilitarianism is not a practical basis of morality. There are no precepts. Every single moral decision has to be made real time by the actor and it is his judgment not yours that matters. This is a giant problem in that the people making those decisions are the very people wanting to do those things. There is a giant moral hazard
For one as I pointed out, which was not responded to at all, people have misapplied Christianity, so this would take out Ungit’s moral system. Additionally, utilitarians tend to be better as I showed in my opening statement (another point I raised which was unadressed). Finally, this would just show that we shouldn’t be utilitarians in the real world, not that it’s false. This isn’t contradictory, it could be the case that religion is false but it’s good to be religious in the real world. Ungit also didn’t address my calculations showing that these wouldn’t be optimific or my argument that constantly calculating doesn’t make things go best (it’s only when analyzing from the armchair counterexamples that it makes sense to do rigorous calculations).
Where does good come from? If you answer, "God defines what good is," I might answer, “but what if God said something was good that was not good? If God said killing innocents was good would that make it good? It would seem that the concept of good cannot come from the concept of God.”
This is what philosophers call the Euthyphro dilemma. It was originally found in Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, in which Socrates asks Euthyphro, "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" Although this dilemma is old, it is still often quoted by atheists and is quoted again here by Mr. Bulldog.
If Euthyphro's Dilemma holds, morals cannot come from God but must find its source elsewhere.
But I think this philosophical dilemma is solved very simply: goodness equals God-ishness. In other words, if instead of saying that morals and God are two separate things, let us consider that morals are simply us observing God himself. They are attributes of him. What we call good is actually us observing various aspects of God in the world around us.
Since no man sees God face to face, we tend to see his attributes more often. We know what those are and we call them good. Then you have atheists who deny that God exists but cannot deny the attributes. And, in their mind, they start to separate good from God conceptually. But they should not be separate.
To understand my point, imagine a sculpting class where the goal of the class is to make clay dogs. But the class if full of people from a remote island who have never seen a dog. Instead of saying, "we are going to make clay dogs (which they would not understand)" the teacher says, "make four legs, floppy ears, a long snout and etc." And at the end of the class he grades each work based on its doggishness. Later, the class gets their grades and they come to recognize that "good" equals something that (to us) looks like a dog (even though they do not know what a dog is or the word dog). After a while, the teacher brings in a dog and shows them. They all say "that is very good!" For them, good equals dogish. And the actual dog, is the perfect representation of dogishness.
A class member stands up and says "aha! I now realize that everything we considered good is based on attributes of this dog. Good equals dogish."
We humans do not see God. But we have come to accept his attributes (God-ishness) as things we call good. Everything we consider good is based on attributes of God. Kindness. Love. Peace. Healing. Laughter. Generosity. Etc. All are part of who God is. When we look at God and in particular at his incarnation (Christ) we see God-ishness and what we call goodness converge. We see an answer to Euthyphro's dilemma. It is an answer to the question "where does good come from?" in God incarnate. We see that although we have been molding our clay gods trying to make good in the world around us, the perfect representation of good is found in God incarnate.
This is not an adequate response to Euthyphro’s dilemma. In this case, if the dog were different, dogishness would be different. Yet if god’s character was such that he was in favor of torturing infants for fun, it seems like it would still be bad. Thus, goodness can’t be grounded in god in this way. Now you might say that if god were different our conception of good were different, but we can stipulate that no facts about the world are changed, only god’s preferences are changed. In that case, would it be objectively moral to torture infants for fun? Probably not.
Additionally, I gave 9 other objections to divine command theory which weren’t addressed at all. So even if Eythyphro fails, THERE ARE 9 OTHER OBJECTIONS ON THE TABLE.
Final Point of Clarification: That I Focused on Hedonistic Utilitarianism but That He Holds to Another Form of Utilitarianism
Mr. Bulldog states that I focused on hedonistic utilitarianism but he is quick to note that there are other important goals besides hedonism that can bring happiness (he lists desire fulfillment and objective list fulfillment in his opening paragraph). He later notes that good actions are not what is hedonistic but actions that “help others more.” That true happiness is brought by “The things that bring the most happiness are the deep meaningful things like significant relationships, knowledge, and contentment.”
I don’t think any of that changes any of my arguments. There is hedonism in pursuing goals. There is hedonism in pursuing “meaningful relationships” and knowledge. If you are doing it only for your own happiness, all of my arguments would apply. Distinguishing between pleasure and happiness was never my intent nor was it important to anything I wrote.
Mr. Ungit would do well to google objective list theory. The claim is that there are things other than hedonic value that make people well off. One could be an objective list theorist and a utilitarian—utilitarians do not have to be hedonists. Again, utiltiarianism doesn’t have to maximize happiness, it just requires saying we should maximize the types of things that make people well off, whatever they be. An objective list theorist would say that they are not just happiness, but things like virtue, meaning, and connection.
Additionally, I gave a series of objection to both objective list theory (Even though it’s compatible with utilitarianism, I still thought it was worth arguing against because it seemed to be the view defended arguing against hedonistic utilitarianism) and virtue ethics. They weren’t addressed. I’ll just quote my earlier article given how little the arguments were rebutted.
Objective list theory has lots of problems.
First, it’s difficult to give an adequate account of what makes something part of the objectively good list. Hedonism is monist, saying that there’s only one type of thing that is good. Objective list theories problematically say that there are a series of unconnected things that are good. This is less parsimonious and fails to provide an adequate account of how things are good. It seems a priori more plausible that there would be some good experiences than that there would be an unrelated bundle of good things that aren’t tied to experience.
Second, objective list theories can’t account for why things are only good for sentient beings. It seems conceivable that, on objective list theories, non-sentient beings could fulfill things on their objective list. Objective list theories just say that things are good in virtue of being part of an objective list, however, there’s no necessary correlation between beings experiencing happiness or suffering and things being able to be part of the objective list.
Third, objective list theories can’t account for why all the things that are on the objective list are generally conducive to happiness. Virtue, friendship, love, and decency are generally conducive to happiness.
Fourth, objective list theories are elitist, holding that things can be good for people even if they neither want them nor derive any positive experience from them. It’s counterintuitive that an unenjoyable experience that one doesn’t want can be good for them.
Fifth, all of the things on the objective list only seem good if they’re generally conducive to happiness. We might hold that knowledge is good, but it would be strange to suppose that arbitrary facts that benefit no one are good. The world would not be a better place if we all had the information about whether the number of particles in the universe were even or odd. Friendship might be good, but only if the friends are made mutually better off.
Sixth, it runs into all of the issues that I highlighted supporting hedonism, especially the problem of lopsided lives.
Virtue ethics was also highlighted, however, it has many problems of its own.
1 It just plugs in our intuitions, but the track record of moral failures shows our moral intuitions are unreliable.
2 It leaves us with no method for deciding upon what the virtues are.
3 It gives us no way to make decisions because there will always be virtues on both sides. How, for example, would we use virtue ethics to decide upon tax policy?
I lay out more objections here.
And for my objections to divine command theory, they can be found here
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.
Additionally, I defended hedonism at great length in my original article arguing for it. To quote the arguments that weren’t addressed
This has several supporting arguments.
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.
Thus, Ungit has failed to grapple with the vast majority of points made. This is a common trend in those arguing against utilitarianism—they’ll start with a mediocre objection like Omellas, organ harvesting, the repugnant conclusion, or organ harvesting, and then ignore every single thing utilitarians have written in response to it.
Is this really the best that the critics of utilitarianism have to offer?