“I'll do what I can to promote the greater good. If you can harm one person to save 1,000, I'm gonna do it every f**king time.”
— Sean Patrick Flanery
Sadly, not everyone is a utilitarian. Those non utilitarians are often extremely adamant about the horror of utilitarianism. Anscombe famously said that “if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind.” She also called Sidgwick vulgar and Mill brash. Williams famously predicted the end of utilitarianism was not too far off. It was even suggested that utilitarians should be sacrificed first.
Probably the most common non rights based objection to utilitarianism is that it is too demanding. Utilitarianism says that we should do whatever is best, whatever personal sacrifices are involved. However, many people argue that we can’t be obligated to endure sacrifices that are too terrible. This objection has always struck me as terrible.
First, utilitarianism is intended as a theory of right action not as a theory of moral character. Virtually no humans always do the utility maximizing thing--it would require too great of a psychological cost to do so. Thus, it makes sense to have the standard for being a good person be well short of perfection. However, it is far less counterintuitive to suppose that it would be good to sacrifice oneself to save two others than it is to suppose that one is a bad person unless they sacrifice themselves to save two others. In fact, it seems that any plausible moral principle would say that it would be praiseworthy to sacrifice oneself to save two others. If a person sacrificed their lives to protect the leg of another person, that act would be bad, even if noble, because they sacrificed a greater good for a lesser good. However, it’s intuitive that the act of sacrificing oneself to save two others is a good act.
The most effective charities can save a life for only a few thousand dollars. If we find it noble to sacrifice one's life to save two others, we should surely find it noble to sacrifice a few thousand dollars to save another. The fact that there are many others who can be saved, and that utilitarianism prescribes that it’s good to donate most of one’s money doesn’t count against the basic calculus that the life of a person is worth more than a few thousand dollars.
Second, we have no a priori reason to expect ethics not to be demanding. The demandingness intuition seems to diffuse when we realize our tremendous opportunity to do good. The demandingness of ethics should scale relative to our ability to improve the world. Ethics should demand a lot from superman, for example, because he has a tremendous ability to do good.
Third, Singer’s drowning child analogy can be employed against the demandingness objection. If we came across a drowning child with a two thousand dollar suit, it wouldn’t be too demanding to suggest we ruin our suit to save the child. Singer argues that this is analogous to failing to donate to prevent a child from dying.
One could object that the child being far away matters. However, distance is not morally relevant. If one could either save five people 100 miles away, or ten 100,000 miles away, they should surely save the ten. When a child is abducted and taken away, the moral badness of the situation doesn’t scale with how far away they get.
A variety of other objections can be raised to the drowning child analogy, many of which were addressed by Singer.
Fourth, while it may seem counterintuitive that one should donate most of their money to help others, this revulsion goes away when we consider it from the perspective of the victims. From the perspective of a person who is dying of malaria, it would seem absurd that a well off westerner shouldn’t give up a few thousand dollars to prevent their literal death. It is only because we don’t see the beneficiaries that it seems too demanding. It seems incredibly demanding to have a child die of malaria to prevent another from having to donate.
For those who find utilitarianism too demanding, I’d encourage you to read eulogies for young children who have died. Every single one of them is so horrifically tragic. When they’re no longer hypothetical people, but instead people with loving families and names like Jacob, Alexander, Max, Emma, or Charlotte, who died the day before their fifth birthday, who brought joy to all those around them, who had laughter that helped everyone else get through hard times, and was just a bundle of joy, it becomes harder to value their lives at less than 10% the price of a car.
To paraphrase Owen
“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene with malaria, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent children’s tongues,-
My friend, you would be so persuaded
By the argument allegedly damning
This so called objection which claims
Utilitarianism is too demanding”
—A heavily edited Wilfred Owen poem inspired by this article