Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 25
Another Argument for utilitarianism
This is the intuition that convinced me of utilitarianism—hopefully you will all find it persuasive too. I’ll lay it out in syllogistic form.
P1 The moral action is the one that would be taken by us if we were fully rational and impartial.
P2 If we lived the life of everyone and experienced everything, and maximized the value of our life, we would be fully rational and impartial.
P3 If we lived the life of everyone and experienced everything, and maximized the value of our life, the actions that would be taken by us would be the utilitarian actions.
Therefore, the moral action is the utilitarian action.
I’ll defend each premise.
Premise 1 seems to be true by definition. If we think about what it means to say someone is being immoral it seems to either mean
A They value things that aren’t actually valuable.
or
B They are not taking everyone’s interests into account.
I can’t think of a third thing they’d be saying.
P2 is pretty obvious. If we were a collective intellect that experienced the lives of everyone on earth, we’d obviously be impartial because we experienced everyone’s life, and if we were fully rational, we’d be fully rational.
P3 is true if we accept hedonism, which I’ve defended here, here, and here.
This just seems to really intuitively encapsulate ethics. When I think about how terrible the holocaust, it seems like what makes it bad is that if you lived the life of both the Nazi’s and the victims, you would obviously be opposed to it. If Jeffrey Dahmer had to bear the costs he imposed on others, rationality would have dictated that he not kill people. Animals matter because if you were rational and experience things from their perspective, you wouldn’t want them to be harmed. That’s why only sentient beings matter. Future people matter because if you had the opportunity to live the life of future people, you’d rather they exist and have good lives. This is why the counterexamples to utilitarianism are so uncompelling—they describe scenarios that sound bad until you realize that if you lived everyone’s life and weighted their interests equally, you’d agree with utilitarianism.
We’d be against retributivism from this position because if you lived the life of the evil person, you wouldn’t want them to be harmed for no reason. We’d accept the repugnant conclusion for the same reason.
One might object that the scenario is incoherent, arguing that it would be impossible to experience everyone’s life. However, it’s not clear what about this is incoherent. Even if we accept that it couldn’t be you living their lives, it could still be you experiencing what they experience. Additionally, it seems like it could be you experiencing what they experience. We could just stipulate a gradual morally neutral process of continuity as you slowly morph into each person and then experience their life. This seems possible on every view of personal identity.
Huemer responded to something similar here
More importantly, this argument requires a confusion between necessary conditions and sufficient conditions for justice. The claim of the luck egalitarians, presumably, is that fairness or equality or something like that is a necessary condition for justice, not that it is sufficient. But then, the fact that the OP starts with a fair/equal situation doesn’t imply that it leads to a just outcome.
You could try claiming that fairness & initial equality is sufficient for justice. But then you’d have to refute all other norms of justice. For instance, you’d have to refute the idea of natural rights to property, the idea of justice requiring rewards proportional to merit, etc. You’d have to do this before relying on the OP. Rawls makes no attempt to do this (which of course cannot be done).
However, neither of these objections apply to my version. The claim is not that rationality and impartiality are things that seem to be party of morality. It’s that they’re the only part of morality. What would you be saying when you call someone immoral other than that they’re wrong about what matters or ignoring some people who matter? The notion that things could be bad in a way that you wouldn’t care about if you lived everyone’s life is very unintuitive.
So here’s what convinced me of utilitarianism (I think, it’s a bit fuzzy given that it was when I was like 11). Hopefully it will convince you too.
Everything you just said is wrong.
Premise 1 is wrong because the standard for making a moral action cannot be tied to an impossible "perfect rationality", you can say that an act is the most moral act of a person if its what they were able to come to with the limited rationality they actually have.
Your justification for Premise 2 is both wrong and partially circular. Even ignoring the fact that the predicate to the "if" statement seems metaphysically impossible, experiencing everyone's life would have no reason to be impartial. I experience every moment of my own life, but I doubt that I'm "impartial" to every part of my life. You give no explanation for why this is the case.
Next you make a highly interesting statement: "if we were fully rational, we’d be fully rational."
This is 100% correct, and also 100% tautology, there is no evidence or logic behind the assertion that experiencing everything would somehow cause perfect rationality.
If you're going to claim that "maximizing the value of life" is "perfectly rational", not only do you have to prove that hedonism is true, you also have to prove that hedonism is exclusively true.
Premise Three is just the definition of utilitarianism Mr. Bulldog..........!
Last thing:
"We could just stipulate a gradual morally neutral process of continuity as you slowly morph into each person and then experience their life."
Then presumably there would be some extra time where you are "morphing" between lives, which does not actually exist in the real world. It also seems highly dubious that merely continuing continuity of consciousness is sufficient to render this "morally neutral".