A Preliminary Note
Before we get into the details, it’s worth noting that Ungit’s case was just against hedonistic utilitarianism. However, he had quite literally nothing to say about any account of utilitarianism that holds we should maximize anything other than pleasure including desire fulfillment and objective list fulfillment
Dispensing Briefly with some nonsense
Ungit begins his case against utilitarianism claiming that we say that happiness is desired so we should all pursue it, which is a bad argument and one I don’t make.
Utilitarians do this under the assumption that all people want happiness and therefore it is an idea that requires no justification.
Nope.
Most people if asked will prefer a life lived well (according to their own definition) rather than a happy life. From a personal standpoint, some of my best moments are those moments when I passed on happiness to do what was right. That time I turned down a high paying job because I felt the company was unethical. That time I didn’t cheat on my wife because I care about fidelity. That time I spent time with my sick kid because I didn’t care at all about my own happiness in that moment.
Utilitarians would agree that those are your best moments because they produced a better world. The thesis of ethical hedonism is that what determines how good your life is for you is how happy you are, but a better life from a neutral standpoint is one that helps others more. Utilitarianism would trivially say that you shouldn’t do bad things that would cause harm.
For an illustration of this in the extreme, imagine living in some totalitarian state like the USSR. You get called before Stalin and are accused of not being sufficiently loyal. You are told to recant any disloyalty and express your love for Stalin and the USSR. Doing as you are told is certainly the thing that would promote the most happiness. No one would see a heroic stand in that moment and even if they did it would be highly unlikely that it would have a positive effect. And you are certain to suffer more if you do. The best thing from a utilitarian standpoint is to recant and go back to regular life. And yet I would hope that if I was in a similar situation I would bravely speak against tyranny in that moment. I would hope that I would forego happiness in pursuit of truth and virtue. I would hope that I would pursue the heroic and not safety.
Self immolation for no reason that benefits quite literally no one is not virtuous in the slightest. No one is better off, so I’d just reject the intuition here.
The pursuit of happiness as the ultimate goal is the philosophy of pigs. Pigs seek food. They seek sex. They seek leisure in the cool mud. But humans inherently realize that we should seek more than that. We should strive for something beyond ourselves. We should want goodness not happiness. I think most people if offered a pill that would leave them in a state of perfect bliss for the rest of their lives would choose not to take it. This alone proves that most people do not view happiness as the ultimate goal. But with utilitarianism happiness is goodness. And pigs are the most virtuous beings there could be.
Total nonsense. The major contributors to ones life are not how much sex they have. The things that bring the most happiness are the deep meaningful things like significant relationships, knowledge, and contentment. All of the good mental states are broadly included in a utilitarian conception of happiness. I am quite confident that my life will contain more total joy than the trivial pleasures of a pig.
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.
If we say that happiness is not at all good, absent virtue, then it would be morally neutral to press a button that would make people who have taken the pill only gain half as much happiness from it. This is a very counterintuitive view. Additionally, if we accept this view, we would have to accept one of two other conclusions. If the suffering of the people in the experience machine is morally bad, but their happiness is not morally good, giving them five million units of happiness and one unit of suffering would be morally bad, because it brings about something bad, but nothing good. This is a very difficult pill to swallow. However, if neither their happiness nor their suffering is morally relevant, then it would be morally neutral to cause them to suffer immensely (aside from issues of consent).
Additionally, if the only thing that makes people better off is authentic pleasure then
1) In what sense is pleasure gained by eating good food authentic (And if it’s not does it not matter)?
2) Why does heaven give authentic pleasure?
3) If a person didn’t want authentic pleasure and would take the pill would they be irrational?
4) What determines whether an instance of pleasure makes you better off.
Several factors count against our a about the experience machine. First, there is widespread status quo bias. As Singer and Lazari-Radek argue , most people wouldn’t want to take a pill that would make them happy only because of status quo bias. If you new your current life was the result of you having taken a pill that made you happy, most people wouldn’t unplug and return to another unknown life.
This strongly counts against the conclusion that we have an intrinsic preference for reality. Additionally, there is a strong evolutionary reason for organisms to have a preference for actually doing things in the real world, rather than wireheading.
Preference for the real can be explained on a utilitarian account; preferring the real tends to maximize happiness. In cases where it does not, this intuition seems to fade. It is counterintuitive to think that there would be something wrong about plugging into a virtual reality game, for a short time, because that is something we have familiarity with, and tends to maximize happiness.
There’s a major issue for any account which says that only “real” pleasures matter, but experience machine pleasures don’t.
The Problem In Question
Suppose we adopt a particular account of consciousness, according to which one’s experience of an object or event is wholly produced by their brain, and does not truly observe the external world. Instead, the brain receives inputs from the external world and hallucinates a conscious experience that best makes sense of the inputs. Regardless of the plausibility of this account of consciousness, it seems that objective list theory would hold that it would have significant normative implications. If one’s experience of being in love with their wife is truly a mental image generated entirely by their brain in a way that makes sense of the signals it’s receiving from the external world, then when one appreciates their loved one, they’re truly only appreciating the joy they get from the mental hallucination. On objective list theories, this would seem to dramatically undercut the value of all things, for being in love is truly just a mental hallucination that roughly tracks what’s going on in the external world. However, this is implausible. Whether or not we are directly observing things as they are, or our brains are making up the world that we see, in a way that roughly mirrors the real world but is understandable to us should not undercut the value of being in love.
To clarify the case, suppose that when one sees someone with whom they’re in love, the only inputs from the person that they’re truly seeing as they actually are in the real world are a series of photons. The rest of the person is hallucinated by their mind, in a way that roughly tracks what the other person is actually doing, but is not totally identical. If this is true, then consciousness is very much like the experience machine, with our mind creating an experience machine-esque experience in ways that roughly track what’s happening in the real world.
One might object that the well-being we’d experience if this were the case would still fulfill our objective list because it roughly tracks the real world. Thus, it is close enough to actual perception of the good things for it to count as appreciating the good. However, this reply runs into several problems.
First, the objective list theory holds that even if events roughly track what is going on in the real world, as long as they’re not in the real world, they don’t possess the value. Objective list theorists would presumably object placing one in a modified experience machine, where their actual self is replaced by a robot version of themself, which acts exactly like they would actually act but is not conscious and placing their actual self in an experience machine, where their experiences are identical to what they would be in the real world. Even if the experience machine caused one to experience a life exactly like the one they were living prior to being in the experience machine, and replaced them with a robot twin who acted like them, such that the world they hallucinated tracked perfectly the life they were previously living, an objective list theorist would presumably find that objectionable.
Additionally, we can modify the case slightly. Suppose that the version of the world that they hallucinated was subtly different from the actual world. For example, in the actual world their wife is relatively physically unattractive. However, their hallucination of the actual world perceives their wife as being very attractive. In this case, the reality that they’re experiencing does not truly track the external world. However, this still does not seem to have any significant normative implications.
To illustrate this point more, suppose that my true self is a million miles away. I am a brain in a vat, but I experience everything exactly as it would affect me if I were actually generated by the brain inside the body that I experience being part of, and the choices I make have exactly the same effects as they would if I were actually generated by the brain inside the body I experience being a part of. This case is exactly like the case of my actual self, except the thing generating my subjective experience is merely located out of my body and far away. This doesn’t seem to possess any significant normative implications.
Now suppose we accept epiphenomenalism--the view that consciousness is causally inert. Thus, while I’m still the brain in the far away vat, my thoughts don’t cause events. Instead, it’s the brain waves in the body that I feel like I’m part of that both generate my thoughts and the actions that the body takes. Surely epiphenomenalism wouldn’t undercut the value of objective list fulfillment. However, in conjunction these make it so that I’m a discombobulated brain millions of miles away that’s merely experiencing what life would be like inside my body, but that is causally unconnected from my body. The objective list theory holds that being a causally inert consciousness is not enough to undercut the value of love, but being a causally inert consciousness a galaxy away, whose experiences are projected information sent by observing brain waves does undercut the value of true love. This is deeply implausible.
It seems like if we accept
1 Having the true source of our consciousness be far away is morally irrelevant
2 Having the true source of our consciousness be causally inert is morally irrelevant
We’d also accept that having the true source of our consciousness far away and causally inert is morally irrelevant.
More Dispensing with nonsense
The next objection is that in brave new world they say they’re happy but their lives actually seem bad. However, this would just mean that in brave new world people would obviously not be happy if their lives are mostly meaningless. By its nature, one cannot not enjoy happiness when they’re experiencing it.
Further, even if I do pursue happiness for myself as the ultimate goal, the utilitarian assumption that I should therefore pursue happiness for others does not follow. Why should I care if someone that I don’t know living in a country I have never heard of is happy?
I don’t make that assumption, nor do other utilitarians. He’s basically exclusively going after Mill here, ignoring the numerous other arguments provided by utilitarians.
Further, why should we? Utilitarianism assumes that we should. But why? How can you use utilitarianism to prove utilitarianism? How does my looking out for a starving kid in Africa improve my own happiness?
Utilitarianism is an account of what is moral, not an account of why we should be moral. This is thus irrelevant to the topic of the debate, though I’ve explained why here. Utilitarianism makes no claims about whether we should be egoists—I think quite strongly that we shouldn’t be.
For countless people throughout history, the idea of pursuing universal happiness was a foreign idea. It was not obvious at all. Yet Utilitarianism is built on this being an axiom that requires no justification. How can something that few people in all of history have actually believed be taken as an axiom of truth?
Well, lots of people think it sounds intuitive at first. But quite importantly, I’m not claiming that it’s an axiom that we should accept, I provided robust arguments for it.
It also does seem intuitively obvious that things continue to matter even if people are far away. I would have a duty to stop a genocide, even a far away one.
Sometimes Utilitarians will state that by pursuing universal happiness it will increase the odds that every individual person is happy.
I do not say that.
But now we come to an even bigger problem with Utilitarianism: we have no good way to define happiness.
Sometimes we get the idea that we can measure happiness like we can measure mass. But consider the following: which is better? To be happy all day long (maybe sipping cocktails by the pool with a beautiful woman) or to be knee-deep in mud in a jungle with a bunch of stinky men? The answer is not as easy as you might initially think.
Suppose in the second case you are a soldier, and you are fighting for your country’s freedom. Suppose you are at that moment doing what you think God made you to do. If a social scientist handed you a poll asking how happy you were on a scale of zero to ten, you would probably put a negative number. But you would not trade places with the cocktail-sipping coward on the beach for anything - doing so would make you less happy, not more.
You can add up all the happy moments you have and find that a person who had considerably fewer happy moments actually had a happier life. Consider a missionary who lives in a mosquito-infested warzone feeding, clothing, and spreading the gospel with the poorest of the poor. Compare this missionary to our rich playboy on the beach. Who, as they lay down their heads to take their last breath, is happier? And how does a social “scientist” measure that? They do not. They cannot. And yet, Utilitarianism demands that we know the answer to this question.
Happiness is defined as mental states that are desirable. 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.
The playboy at the beach example isn’t a counterexample, because the person would clearly be happier at the beach (plausibly). However, it is sometimes good to make other people’s lives go well even at the expense of your own. The person who sacrifices themselves for others is being noble, but their life will be less happy. They should still be noble because one oughtn’t only maximize their own happiness.
Even if you grant the foundation, it fails. Let’s pretend for a moment that universal happiness was our goal and that we all agreed to pursue it. Would it work?
The answer is that there is no way it can work. It cannot work because it requires constant very subjective calculations on happiness. To illustrate why this is a problem let me offer a few scenarios.
Imagine that you are a businessman on a trip to Paris. You meet a beautiful Parisian woman who knows that you are married and does not care. She wants to have sex and you very much want to have sex with her. But you are a Utilitarian so you stop to determine if this is right. What action will maximize happiness? Because you are overseas and alone there is almost no chance that your wife will find out. And you will wear a condom to make sure that no STDs or pregnancy could result. So your wife’s happiness is extremely unlikely to be affected by your decision. On the other hand, your own happiness will be greatly increased. The memory of having sex with a beautiful woman in Paris will be something you can enjoy the rest of your life. And the Parisian woman says that this is what will make her very happy as well. You can tell the woman is lonely and are sure that this will be a net positive for her happiness. Further, you think, even if (one in a million chance) somehow your wife finds out, you are pretty sure whatever unhappiness she gets from this unpleasant discovery will not outweigh the great happiness that you will get. She will forgive eventually and all will be fine but you can eternally treasure this moment.
I think that having an affair is like driving while drunk when you made an oath not to. While it’s technically possible that there will be no harm done, you shouldn’t do it because the risk of harm is immense and its for trivial benefits. Things will go best if you’re the type of person not to cheat on your spouse. If you cheat on your spouse, let’s say there’s a 1% chance of getting caught and the sexual act lasts 15 minutes. Let’s even ignore everything else and say that there’s a 10% chance of divorce if that happens, and if not, no risk of harm at all. Well, that means that if you have an affair there will be a .001 chance of having a divorce. Let’s stipulate that you will be married for on average 15 more years if you don’t have an affair. Well, this would mean that the affair costs on average over 130 hours of marriage—a cost certainly not worth paying in utility for yourself or your wife. So no, utilitarianism doesn’t sanction affairs.
Now imagine the judge in a frontier town somewhere in the Old West. He has before him a notorious horse thief. As a judge in the Old West he knows that horse stealing is one of the worst offenses. A man’s horse is his means of living. If a farmer has no horse he can’t plow his fields. If he can’t plow his fields his family will starve to death. So what as a judge does he does with this horse thief? As a good Utilitarian, he sits down and thinks about it. He decides that the only moral punishment for this horse thief is to drag him to the town square and have him tortured to death. Yes the idea sounded harsh0 at first but then he did the calculation. He realized that starving to death is a one of the worst forms of torture. Therefore a single stolen horse could result in the torture of an entire innocent family. He knows that by torturing that horse thief to death, he is maximizing the deterrence to other potential horse thieves. And if by doing so he can avoid just a single family starving, the calculation will pay off. So it is clear: one man being tortured to death rather than a whole family (or more) being tortured to death.
What? For one, if stealing a horse really will kill someone, the person has effectively just committed murder and should thus be punished harshly. But second, if the claim is that utilitarians are too harsh on murders when it tends to be non utilitarians who want them to suffer intrinsically, whatever value it may bring, it’s just false. All of the deterrence based reasons for punishing would be considered by a non utilitarian, but they also want to harm bad people for its own sake.
I could provide other hypothetical scenarios. Times when dictators might humanely gas a certain portion of society to death in order to maximize the happiness of the whole. Times when stealing from a big corporation might hurt no one significantly but make one person much happier. Times when lying about accomplishments hurt no one but bring happiness and wellbeing. Utilitarianism can be used to justify every sort of degenerate and immoral act that you can think of if you do the calculation right.
But my Utilitarian readers might object: “You are not doing the calculation right!” They might explain why the adulterer in Paris was wrong or the judge of the horse thief was wrong. They might explain why the dictator, the thief and the liar were all wrong. But whatever objection you come up with isn’t relevant because you are not the one making the calculation in that moment! Utilitarianism requires constant very subjective calculations to be done by everyone all the time. There are no 10 Commandments. There is only one precept: maximize happiness. As a result, if we all lived as Utilitarians, no one could say, “adultery is wrong”. We could only say, “adultery that leads to a net unhappiness is wrong.” And the only person who is able to make that calculation in the moment is the person potential adulterer.
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.
It fails to provide morals without religion because the happiness calculation depends very much on whether or not any given religion is true. Let’s take the adultery example. If adultery sends you to hell where you are tortured with pitch forks for all eternity, then the calculus changes. Did the adulterer calculate hell in his equation? So determining what has the most utility to happiness also requires determining what God (or gods or whatever your religion tells you will lead to happiness) wants. Utilitarianism then has a very practical flaw of failing to do the very thing it was built to do: determine an ethical framework without regards to religion.
This is not the point of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism wasn’t developed to get around religious morality, it was developed because people thought it was true. Yes, you should add god to the calculation, but probably ignore it given the vanishingly small probability of his existence. A good ethical theory SHOULD include in its calculus the odds that an act will make you burn forever. Utilitarianism is a moral theory, so it doesn’t say anything about the causal facts like god.
So what is the alternative? The alternative is a Divine law.
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.
Divine command theory is a view of meta-ethics, not normative ethics. Thus, it’s not a rival to utilitarianism. The view of well-being espoused was objective list theory. However, it’s worth noting
1 You can be an objective list theorist and a utilitarian, just not a hedonist.
2 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.
I'm here again to distract you from your actual debate partner
Let's go through this:
"Utilitarians would agree that those are your best moments because they produced a better world."
Not the argument that's being made, if I'm understanding it correctly. The point here is that what was "good for them" was *not* to increase their own happiness but to do the right thing, even if it didn't make them happier.
"I’d just reject the intuition here."
As you can see, Utilitarianism is pro-Stalin!!!
"While people might not want to take the pill, hat would be an error on their part."
Utilitarians brag about 'expanding the moral circle' yet assert as forcefully as possible that they alone have the right to make decisions for others. Really makes you think.
"then it would be morally neutral to press a button that would make people who have taken the pill only gain half as much happiness from it."
If they consented to taking the pill, then presumably the act of interfering with their choices would itself be bad.
"This is a very difficult pill to swallow."
This is a Pill I would swallow. If you're making an experience machine, the least you can do is make it an actually good wireheader.
"(aside from issues of consent)."
This is sweeping aside literally everything lol.
"In what sense is pleasure gained by eating good food authentic"
The food actually exists. Though getting pleasure out of it is certainly minimal and possibly qualitatively lesser then other good things.
"Why does heaven give authentic pleasure?"
I'm an atheist, but if I were not...
Heaven (and God by extension) and more powerful then both logic or metaphysics, so the point is moot. In any event, Heaven could be Authentic because you are at minimum interacting with real people and things there that have objective existence.
"If a person didn’t want authentic pleasure and would take the pill would they be irrational"
I don't know what that last word means.
"If you new your current life was the result of you having taken a pill that made you happy"
If everyone in my current life was fake or an illusion, then I would probably go back to whatever life I had before. However, if I was told that I *willingly* took such a pill I would have to give the matter significantly more thought.
However, I do want to say that the concept of "you" taking a pill that somehow erased all your memories and your entire life sounds suspiciously closer to simply dying then being the "same person".
Moving on...
"Their actual self is replaced by a robot version of themself, which acts exactly like they would"
Presumably the existence of this robot would prove that free will is fake news. If that's true, then all of ethics is moot because we're just floating consciousnesses along for the ride. also, I have a strong intuition that the scenario you describe is in fact perfectly identical to normal life, as one is getting real time communication from a real person, and everything they say is being communicated in real time back to that real person.
"in the actual world their wife is relatively physically unattractive"
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder Mr. Bulldog.
"the brain waves in the body that I feel like I’m part of that both generate my thoughts and the actions that the body takes."
Again, mooting free will takes ethics down with it. Also, I'm not exactly sure how someone can simultaneously be the product of brainwaves in a body and also be millions of miles away from those very brainwaves. There are a lot more problems like this in our hypothetical, I can't understand what's going on here in all honesty.
> So what is the alternative? The alternative is a Divine law.
>.< bruh moment. Nvm Mr. bulldog. please destroy this clown.