Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 43: Replying to the Deceived Businessman Objection to Hedonism

One of the better objections I think, though it's ultimately not decisive

Kagan (1997, p.34-35) imagines the case of the deceived businessman, who is happy, thinking that he is liked and respected.  However, he is not -- his wife, who he believes to be faithful, had many affairs, his children only pretend to value him for money, his business is about to be foreclosed.  Kagan points out that this man doesn’t seem well off, even if he is happy.  

Several things are worth noting about this case.  Let’s start by modifying the case slightly.  Let’s suppose that the businessman is liked in life, but becomes hated by his kids after he dies.   The intuitions about this case seem to be the same, but he can’t be posthumously harmed, as was argued previously.  Thus, our objections about this case are somewhat confused and involve posthumous harm intuitions, which we have reason to reject.  

Second, it’s not clear when it’s bad for him.  If every moment of his life was good, then it’s hard to imagine that he had a bad life.  However, it’s pretty hard to imagine that the time he spent happily with his children was bad, merely because of his children’s sinister motivations.

Third, our intuitions are very easily explained away instrumentally.  In general, in life, loving relationships are valuable.  This leads us to falsely assume that they’re valuable independent of hedonic considerations.  This explains many of the things that seem lacking about the businessman’s life: its lack of genuine loving relationships, real achievements, and so on.  I’ve described in the section of my up-to-date case for hedonism a way to debunk such intuitions, citing Nelson’s excellent thesis.

Fourth, if we really carefully reflect about the case, the intuition seems to go away.  It’s hard to imagine that he’s actually harmed, despite for all of his life having happy, seemingly loving relationships.  This is my experience at least, though presumably many will not share it.

Fifth, Weijers (2017, slide 12) notes “Reasonable people do not have 100% credence in their preferred theory of value.”  Thus, hedonists with any moral uncertainty shouldn’t reject the intuition -- they should think that you should rather have the non-deceived life, taking into account that they might be wrong.  This makes considering two hedonically identical lives which only differ in degree of deception misleading.  Thus, Weijers argues that to make the thought experiment pure, we must trade off pleasure against deception -- however, in that case, the intuition becomes much murkier.  Weijers propoposes we remake the scenario to the following deceiving businessman scenario.  

The Deceiving Businessman I Imagine Jenny and Fred, a recently deceased happily married atheist couple, who nevertheless experienced the typical ups and downs involved with any committed relationship. Jenny and Fred were intelligent and articulate. Throughout their relationship, they really enjoyed talking about religion because they always productively shared philosophical arguments and scientific evidence against various claims of religions without arguing against each other. Jenny, especially, found this delightful. 

A few years after getting married, Fred became curious about his spirituality. He began innocently browsing religious websites. Before long, he had become a firm believer in a relatively obscure religion. Jenny hadn’t noticed Fred’s innocent online research, and Fred decided that the right thing to do in the situation was to keep his newfound religious belief a secret, as that would be better for Jenny and for their relationship.

The Deceiving Businessman II One of the fundamental tenets of Fred’s new religion was in the personal nature of the relationship between oneself and God, a relationship that would be different for each individual, and possibly not always positive. So, even though his new religion brought him great joy, Fred did not feel compelled to tell Jenny about his newfound beliefs—she wouldn’t be swayed from her firm atheism, and even if she was, she may not benefit from the religion in the way Fred did. Furthermore, it would ruin their animated discussions about atheism. 

Indeed, even after becoming religious, Fred continued with these conversations as if he was still an atheist because Jenny enjoyed their agreement on this issue so much, and because he feared revealing the truth might cause a rift between them. In the past, they had had a disagreement about the degree to which climate change was caused by humans, and disagreeing about this important topic made them less keen to discuss things for a while, bringing about a low-point in their relationship that included fewer positive interactions than they were used to.

The Deceiving Businessman III Fred knew that telling the truth would not make Jenny love him less. Jenny has always had a great relationship with her parents, loving them dearly. After Jenny left home, her parents became openly religious, but Jenny still loved them just as much. You see, despite being a frim atheist, Jenny was also a humanist with a truly open heart for people of all beliefs. Fred’s worry about telling the truth was that it would take away Jenny’s favourite pastime, and cause them to have less positive interactions. 

Once Fred decided to make his religion a secret, he took all the possible steps to ensure that Jenny would never find out. The religion that Fred joined was based overseas but broadcast their services online. Fred watched these services in secret, always making sure of the whereabouts of Jenny, and any friends that might pop in, before watching a service. He was also careful to leave absolutely no trace of his religious practice or association with the group; he deleted his browsing history, never used hard copies of any religious texts, and never mentioned any of this to his wife or anyone else. 

The Deceiving Businessman IV Fred maintained this deception perfectly for his whole life. He left no evidence of his religious belief or practice whatsoever, and so it was no surprise that Jenny never noticed or suspected a thing. Indeed, Fred and Jenny died in a hot air balloon accident last year, so Jenny died with no idea that Fred was deceiving her about his religion, and no possible way to ever find out. 

You might think that Jenny would be disadvantaged by Fred’s deception. Perhaps Fred would be slightly less interested in Jenny and discussing atheism with her because of his new beliefs? The opposite is true. Fred’s new religious beliefs celebrated marriage and compelled him to place more effort into communicating and demonstrating his love and commitment to Jenny. Knowing how much Jenny enjoyed the conversations about atheism, Fred continued to engage in them, even putting in extra effort, because he wanted Jenny to happy. Fred’s new attitude towards marriage and his extra effort in his conversations with Jenny improved both their relationship and Jenny’s satisfaction with their marriage. 

The Deceiving Businessman V So, despite Fred’s deception being significant and ongoing, it was well-intentioned and actually made Jenny happier than she would have been otherwise. 

Now compare the lives of two possible “Jenny”s. 

First Jenny: The first Jenny lived the life described above. She was deceived by a person very close to her for most of her life, but she never experienced any negative effects from the deception, in fact she lived a happier life and had a better relationship because of the deception. 

Second Jenny: The second jenny lived a life very similar to the first, except her husband played an online game, rather than researched religion, and never became religious. As a result, this Second Jenny was not deceived by a person very close to her for most of her life, and as a result led a normally happy life with a normally up-and-down relationship with her husband. So Second Jenny, had no great deception in her life, but wasn’t as happy, and didn’t have as a good a relationship as First Jenny. (2017, slides 16-20).  

As Weijers notes, in this case, the wife doesn’t seem badly off.  This shows that our intuitions about the case are affected by various other psychological forces that don’t detract from overall well-being.  Deception is instrumentally bad, but it’s easy to confuse instrumental and intrinsic value.  

If the deceived businessman seemed poorly off because there is much that they don’t know, this would just be a repackaging of the knowledge objection.  What makes the deceived businessman objection distinct is that it seems that deception specifically makes people poorly off.  However, this runs into several problems.  

First, it raises traditional lopsided lives worries.  If we imagine a person who is supremely happy but is deceived about an arbitrarily large number of facts, if deception is intrinsically bad, then they’d be arbitrarily badly off.  However, it doesn’t seem increasing their deception can increase how well off they are.  

One might claim that pleasure from deception generates less well-being than non-deception-based pleasure.  However, this doesn’t capture fully our intuitions about the deceived businessman, for it would say that if they weren’t made happy by their loved ones, deception wouldn’t harm them at all.  However, as we shall see, this generates a paradox, as does the view that deception is intrinsically harmful.  

Imagine the following case.  One is informed that their life is bad overall.  They take comfort in this fact for some reason.  However, this comfort makes it so that the person deceived them about their welfare, because their life is only barely bad, so this extra welfare makes their life good.  This makes it the case that they were deceived in the past -- their life ends up being bad because of the deception, which would make it no longer deception.  Thus, holding deception is intrinsically bad leads to paradox -- this applies just as much to the multiplicative view. 

Third, there seem to be lots of cases in which one is not made worse off by deception. Suppose, for example, that one believes that there are an even number of atoms in the universe, but they’re deceived about this. That doesn’t seem to be bad for them. This is so even if they derive pleasure from thinking that they know the number of atoms in the universe.

While I think that these considerations don’t show that the deceived businessman is certainly not worse off, they serve as undercutting defeaters for the claim that he is worse off. Whether we judge him to be worse off will depend on whether we independently think that deception is bad or that absence of friends are good. Thus, it’s double counting objective list theorist intuitions — it should only seem compelling if we’re already compelled by those objective list theorist intuitions.