Utilitarianism wins outright part 11
Anti utilitarians say the darnedest things
0
Don’t be mislead, dear reader, from the detour from going through thought experiments used against utilitarianism and blowing them to smithereens. The series of posts arguing against that will continue soon. However, for this post, like the last few, I have a different aim. Here, I’ll see what objections people give to utilitarianism in popular articles and argue against them1.
1
Psychology today has produced an argument against utilitarianism. They think it’s unjust because it would advocate framing an innocent person to save lots of lives. I’ve already responded to this argument here . Saying that utilitarianism ignores justice begs the question against a utilitarian account of justice, for which I’ve extensively argued. I’ve also argued against rights as a whole here.
2
The Markkula Center for Applied ethics has an article arguing against utilitarianism, demonstrating the poor quality of their applied ethics. Based on the quality of the objections, I wouldn’t trust them to apply my ethics.
Their first objection is that it’s hard to calculate utility, to weigh a human life against art. That’s true but tradeoffs are inevitable and we can make best guesses. Probably all the art in the world is collectively more valuable than a human life, but one human life has more value than the average piece of art. The fact that a moral theory is sometimes difficult to apply doesn’t count against it. Ethics is often difficult, we don’t know the utility of everything. It’s no different from epistemic rationality. No one objects to rationality based on it being hard. Also, absent having precise expected value, one leaves themself open to dutch book arguments.
The next objection is the classic inane, tired objection that utilitarianism holds that if bad things were conducive to utility then they’d be good. BUT THOSE THINGS ARE BAD!!! The example given is apartheid. The author says that people said apartheid was good for overall quality of life and that if this is true then utilitarianism would justify it. Fair enough. Apartheid is bad because it makes people’s lives worse. Opposition to apartheid shouldn’t be caused by a strange aversion to sullying oneself—if it really made people’s lives better, then it would be good. The people who think apartheid had good outcomes are wrong. This is no more objection to utilitarianism than it would be to rationality to object that it would justify believing the earth was flat if the evidence pointed to it being wrong.
3
This blog presents 13 considerations favoring and disfavoring utilitarianism. All of the considerations, including the pro utilitarianism ones are wrong—an impressive achievement. They start out by defining utilitarianism as supporting the greatest happiness for the greatest number—which is a bogus definition. Utilitarianism tries to maximize overall happiness (or technically happiness minus suffering). If something produces slight benefit for two people but major losses for one, utilitarianism wouldn’t justify it.
The first argument for utilitarianism is “1. We get to focus on happiness as a society.” This is just what utilitarianism is, it’s not much of an advantage to the theory unless you already accept utilitarianism.
They say “2. It teaches us that harming other people is wrong.”
Other theories tend to agree.
“3. Utilitarianism is an easy theory to implement.”
This is irrelevant to its correctness and is also false—utilitarianism is sometimes pretty difficult to apply.
“4. It is a secular system that focuses on humanity.”
Lots of other have the same focus. Utilitarianism focuses on all sentient beings, not just humans.
“5. Utilitarianism seeks to create the highest good.”
I agree here—it’s intuitive that one should do what is the most good.
“6. It focuses on the democratic process for forward movement.”
Lots of other systems do too—utilitarianism also does but only if democracy is optimific.
“7. We get to focus on an objective, universal solution.”
Other theories also have this, also utilitarians don’t have to believe in objective morality.
Now they get to the cons of it. I’d urge you all to make sure to be far away from tables right now, lest you bash your head on a table in irritation at the incredibly low quality of these arguments.
“1. We do not consider any other element besides happiness.”
This is true, but it’s not a downside unless you think other things matter. The closest they come to arguing that other things do matter is the following.
“Love is something which offers tremendous value, but it also can cause extraordinary heartbreak. We eat foods like kale because we know that it is a healthier choice then eating Twinkies every day even if we preferred to do the latter because it makes us feel better.”
Well, love generally increases long term happiness as does kale. Twinkies probably don’t. If people are in love but aren’t happy, most would agree that it’s a bad relationship.
“2. It creates an unrealistic perspective for society.
Imagine the scenario: there are eight people right now who would benefit from having your organs. When looking at the principles of utilitarianism, the balance of happiness over harm supports the idea of putting you to death to improve the satisfaction of everyone else. Why?
Because you are not in that majority.
If there are eight other people and you to make nine, the chances are that everyone else will vote to save themselves as a group at the expense of your life. That is why the ends can never justify the means. It makes it too easy for the majority of people in a society to create harm using the balancing principle. The happiness of the minority must also come into consideration.”
I’ve previously argued that you should kill one to save 8, and similarly sacrifice one person to save 8. Anything else privileges those who happen to benefit from the status quo. I think most people agree that it would be moral to sacrifice yourself to save 8. The happiness of the minority does come into consideration by utilitarianism—it weights everyone equally. Surely people shouldn’t get extra consideration merely because they’re in the minority. It would be right to save 5 people rather than just 1.
“3. Utilitarianism can be unpredictable.”
So can rationality. Life is unpredictable sometimes.
“4. It also relies on people making consistent decisions.
If there is one thing that humans are good at doing, it is changing their mind. You cannot trust anyone to ask for the greater good if the majority decides to get rid of all of the other structures which support societal health and wellness. The average person will act selfishly whenever they are faced with a difficult decision, no matter what their upbringing or spirituality happens to be.
Why do people follow religions in the first place? The goal of “being saved” isn’t to initially help anyone else find some level of eternal salvation. It is to create a life insurance policy for an unpredictable future because that is what offers comfort to the soul. This process would happen immediately if society shifted to utilitarianism.”
What? What process? This is just incoherent. Utilitarianism says people should be consistent not that they will be. It doesn’t deny the obvious fact of selfishness.
“5. Utilitarianism relies on multiple definitions of happiness.
Every person has a different definition of happiness. Although we can find common ground on specific things, it is virtually impossible to see two people with cloned perspectives about the world today. Humans are complex beings. What makes one person happy can make another individual feel bored or out of touch with their life. That means we are faced with two choices: we could either find common ground within our experiences to compromise on a definition of happiness or only allow the description of the majority to exist.”
Utilitarianism says we should maximize good experience (At least hedonic utilitarianism does, which is what I defend and what the utilitarian’s that he criticizes do). There’s on definition that’s instantiated in different ways in different people. Some people get happiness from certain foods. Others don’t. This isn’t different definitions.
The last part is particularly baffling. Oh no, utilitarianism allows the description of the majority to exist? Utilitarianism says we should maximize overall happiness, not just maximize the things that make the majority happy.
“6. It creates the potential for the majority to rule through tyranny.
People who self-identify as being an evangelical in the United States do not support the idea of same-gender marriage at a level of 67%. Although younger evangelicals support the idea as a majority at 53%, the significant population of older adults skews the overall percentages. Now imagine that laws were being created based on the concept of utilitarianism in this population group. If you identified as an LGBTQIA+ individual in this society, you would be unable to get married. There would be nothing you could do about it either until enough people were swayed to come over to your position.
Just because the majority of a population believes something is right does not make it the ethical choice. That thought process kept women from voting for centuries, permitted slavery to exist, allows for child trafficking and exploitation still today, and many more activities that harm others in some way. That is why happiness cannot be permitted to be the foundation of societal pursuits. Sometimes the correct choice is not the popular choice.”
Tyranny of the majority doesn’t maximize overall happiness. Minorities are harmed more by oppression than majorities benefit by it. This is where the confusion at the beginning of the article sends the author astray. Utilitarianism doesn’t just benefit the majority—it maximize overall benefit. Torturing one person to make two people slightly happy wouldn’t be justified because it wouldn’t increase the overall balance of experience.
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Not be be surpassed in foolishness by the green garage blog, Gaynor writes an article talking about why utilitarianism is “an awful ethical system, with almost no merit.” The objections given, however, are awful ethical objections, with almost no merit.
Gaynor says “The first problem with utilitarianism is that it is conditional. Utilitarianism is a teleological system that says, “seek to maximize utility”, different thinkers have put for different answers to what that that utility is. This makes utilitarianism a conditional system, it only applies so long as the actor agrees with the identified activity, or property that provides utility. If one seeks to maximize pleasure, as Bentham suggests, that’s fine, except if I don’t want to maximize pleasure the entire system is useless to me. This is a major problem, as an ethical system shouldn’t be entirely contingent on an assumption, that happiness is the correct thing to attempt to maximize. David Hume calls this the is ought-problem.”
Ah yes, the notorious is-ought problem. The author seems unaware that the is ought problem avails all ethical theories—it’s a problem of logical deduction, of getting a normative conclusion from purely descriptive premises. This isn’t an objection to utilitarianism any more than it is to literally any other ethical theory ever.
The author objects that utilitarianism only applies if the actor agrees with it. This is either false or trivial. If the claim is that utilitarianism makes no demands on non utilitarians—that would be false. It’s a theory of what things are good and what things are bad. It applies to non utilitarians just as much as others.
However, if the objection is that utilitarian arguments won’t motivate non utilitarians, that’s obvious but true of all ethical theories. Deontology won’t motivate non deontologists. Furthermore, I argue that rationality requires people to be utilitarians, so it’s binding as much as rational belief is. Sure, people with irrational beliefs won’t care about standards for rational beliefs. However, if they don’t care about them they’re being foolish.
Quick note on the is ought problem, it’s not a very good objection. It does show that we can’t prove objective morality deductively. However, we also can’t deductively prove induction—you can’t straightforwardly derive a will be from an is any more than an ought from an is. Despite that, we still make predictions about things…
Moral non naturalists would agree that you can’t cross the is ought gap but just say that there are non natural moral properties that make things matter. These are not trivial tautologies, rather they’re controversial substantive claims. The is ought gap just rules out trivial tautologous moralities.
Moral naturalists would think that morality IS a natural property of some sort, so you can derive an ought from an is. Either way, Hume’s guillotine is not compelling, except against confused libertarians trying to derive all of ethics from definitions and first principles with logically necessary and uncontroversial premises.
Gaynor continues, saying, “The second, arguably larger issue, is that it’s impossible to apply for two reasons. Because utilitarianism attempts to maximize something we must have a way to quantify it, or at least compare two different items to see which is greater. Except how does one quantify pleasure or pain? Bentham proposes a “pleasure calculus” based on 7 attributes of pleasures or pains, but this is really just moving the goal post, how do you compare the intensity of pleasure, of the fecundity of pain? These are impossible, John Stuart Mill suggests there are two types of pleasures, higher and lower, but this is just a further attempt to both ignore the impossibility of comparing pleasures and pains as well create artificial distinctions, grounded not in reason, but in individual intuition. If we can’t tell which actions are better, we can’t actually make any decisions from our ethical system.
The other issue in the application of utilitarianism is that, even if we could compare pleasures and pains, they’re often impossible to predict in advance, or even years later. For example, was the accident at Three Mile Island good or bad? It obviously had devastating effects, but it also was a catalyst for changing nuclear power policy in the US, and even now, 30 years later, we probably can’t say whether the benefits in safety policy outweigh the obvious costs.
Because utilitarianism is both logically unsound (it relies on an unproven assumption) and impossibly to realistically implement it is a bad ethical system. I have no understanding of how people try to follow a utilitarian ideology in light of these indisputable flaws. In a future post I’ll cover my issues with some deontological ethical systems.”
The fact that we can’t quantify things precisely doesn’t mean that we’re totally in the dark about how to maximize them. Despite my inability to quantify happiness I’m pretty sure that if I banged my head against a table with great force it wouldn’t be conducive to happiness. Similarly, saving a life would be conducive to happiness. In chess, it’s impossible to precisely calculate exactly how the game will play out if you take a particular move, but it’s still possible to make good moves that you’re reasonably certain will turn out well.
We can’t predict things with perfect accuracy years in advance, but we can be reasonably confident. Three mile island was probably bad because it caused lots of damage and also resulted in bad nuclear policy. Saving lives is probably good, even if we’re slightly uncertain. One calculates pleasure and pain impersonally the same way they do in their own life. They consider what each of the mental states is like, and see which of them would be preferred. Eating ice-cream causes pleasure, but it would be outweighed by brutal torture. We can make similar judgements when deciding what things will be optimific.
They finally say that utilitarianism is logically unsound, so it’s false, having an unproven premise. Well, as per Münchhausen trilemma, any chain of justification has to bottom out at some point. We have to rely on some axioms to form beliefs. Utilitarianism’s judgements are no different from literally all other domains in this respect. Mathematics itself relies on axioms. The fact that pain is bad is about as plausible as mathematical axioms.
The rest of this blog looks pretty interesting, but this article is just awful and misses the point on everything.
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This well named blog has some objections which are fine—better than some of the other ones we’ve seen so far.
“(1) Perhaps pleasure is not the ultimate good: perhaps there are other goods, such as beauty, justice, truth, loyalty, duty, and so on, that can trump pleasure in some cases.”
All of those things are generally conducive to utility. Things that would otherwise seem just aren’t just if they don’t make lives better. It would be senseless to punish people if it didn’t produce benefits, given the arguments against retributivism. Beauty is only good if it’s appreciated, we wouldn’t care about a random beautiful unobserved galaxy.
Maybe you disagree? Well, if a beautiful unobserved galaxy is good, then enough beautiful unobserved galaxies would be good enough to outweigh any bad things. If this were the case, the destruction of googol unobserved galaxies that were beautiful would be worse than the holocaust. Also, beauty is not discovered but invented. The reason we find humans beautiful but blobfish ugly is because we evolved to feel that way. Blobfish find each other very beautiful.
Truth, loyalty, and duty are also only good if they’re conducive to utility. If one was loyal to their friend and helped them cover up a murder, that would be bad. We value the truth about the optimal cure for malaria to a great disease. We don’t, however, value a cure for a fictional disease. This is because truths are only good if they’re generally conducive to utility.
The truth of the number of stars in the universe isn’t valuable. However, if knowing the number of stars in the universe allowed us to save the world, it would be. The value of truth is entirely contingent on the well-being it brings. This is the only way to explain why the aforementioned virtues wouldn’t matter if there were no sentient beings.
Duty is also only valuable if it’s optimific. The nazi excuse that they were just following orders holds no weight, because their alleged duty was evil.
“(2) It does indeed seem wise to calculate consequences to some degree to discern if an action is right or wrong. But are we really prepared to accept that motives and acts have no moral value in themselves until we look at the consequences? Isn’t the act of rape intrinsically wrong…indeed instrincially evil?”
Yes, rape is not conducive to utility. Acts and motives do have moral value because they’re the only way to infer things about what people will do in the future. Hitler’s grandmother was not blameworthy and shouldn’t be punished, because there was no way to predict her actions would turn out bad. It’s impossible to deter actions with unpredictable consequences. Bergman explains this principle super well.
“(3) Moreover, can we really calculate consequences to a sufficient degree of accuracy, especially in situations like war where there are an astonishing number of variables to take into consideration as we do the pleasure calculus?”
I already replied to this objection—no need to rehash it.
“(4) It appears that some harms are not evil. We can think of endless examples of how people harm each other in everyday life – certain inappropriate comments, lies, breakups, and so on – in ways that are bad not evil. Thus the utilitarian view that all harm is evil seems too inclusive.”
Utilitarianism wouldn’t lab all bad things evil. Evil generally refers semantically to things done by conscious agents that are very bad. Things that are a little bit bad are bad but not evil.
“(5) Moreover, utilitarianism, in focusing only on consequences as far as moral analysis goes, fails to place any value on those doing evil. All harm is evil regardless of its source. But this seems wrong: we often judge one form of harm as worse than another not simply because of the harm it causes in others but because it was voluntarily willed by a culpable agent with certain sadistic, malicious, or defiant motives. So by adding certain motives and culpable agency to extreme forms of harm we can successfully distinguish evil actions, motives, and agents from those that are just bad.”
These considerations affect how acts should be treated for reasons I explained when responding to the third argument. However, the harms are not made worse by being caused by malice—malice just affects how we should treat it. If covid were made by a psychopath in a lab, that wouldn’t make it any worse. I’d rather take a 49% chance of death from being shot by a murderer than a 50% of dying by being shot by accident.
“(6) A utilitarian must be prepared to accept some evil as a means to satisfying the GHP. This would allow evil to be used instrumentally, that is, to be used knowing that it is evil but allowing it to occur as a means to a greater good being established. This of course means that, paradoxically, it can be right to do evil.”
Utilitarianism holds that things that would be prima facie bad are sometimes justified. In general it would be evil to kill one person. However, you should kill one person to save the world. Utilitarianism just disagrees about the conditions for being evil. For an act to be evil, it has to have bad consequences, so killings to save the world wouldn’t suffice.
6
The Free Radical thinks that utilitarianism is stupid for very bad reasons. The main objection seems to be that utilitarianism sometimes justifies taxing people to benefit others and paternalism. They write
“Even though this definition of utility as a measure of happiness/fulfillment/satisfaction etc. is not useful scientifically, it is appealing because it seems like it reflects reality. I’m not saying it doesn’t. I agree that, in a very loose, non-scientific sense, the happiness I would gain from having an additional loaf of bread would be much less than that of a starving man who received the same loaf. And what’s more, I act like a utilitarian to some degree in my personal life. Every time someone donates food to the hungry or gives the foul ball they caught at a baseball game to the kid in the seat next to him, they are acting out of some form of this sentiment.
However, in those cases, they are still acting in accordance with their own personal preferences, it is just that those preferences have what might be called a utilitarian dimension to them. They get more happiness out of giving the bread to the hungry than out of eating it or out of seeing a child smile and imagining him lying in bed clutching the foul ball and dreaming about being a major league ball-player than they would from throwing it in their closet and probably forgetting about it.
The problem with utilitarianism is when you try to apply it by force via the government. The government I think Sumner would prefer is one which leaves people alone to make decisions about how to live their lives in most cases but just does a few things to spread the wealth around to increase total utility. And I think Sumner’s ideal world would be a lot better than what we’ve got now. But the problem is that that is not a suitable moral/philosophical foundation for such a system because this notion of utility is entirely imaginary which means it is entirely subjective which means that it can be used to justify any breach of individual property rights.”
The fact that utilitarianism disagrees with their preferred policy seems like a better argument against their policies than against utilitarianism. Both egalitarians and libertarians agree that the state should enforce a just distribution of property. Libertarians would support the state using force to make me give my TV back to a person who took it. Thus, the relevant question is not whether force should be used to justly distribute goods, but what the just distribution of good is. It’s not more an objection to utilitarianism that it sometimes endorses taxes than it is an objection to libertarianism that it sometimes endorses taking people’s stuff, when they’ve stolen from other people.
There are further problems though. Lots of things that we do all the time infringe on others without their consent. Lighting a candle produces smoke which goes into others lungs without consent. Playing music shoots soundwaves all around which hit the eardrums of people without consent. Even talking to people shoots soundwaves at people without consent. Only utilitarianism can make sense of the things that are thought to be rights.
The objection that generosity involves people acting in accordance with their preferences, while state theft doesn’t, only matters if you think one should never violate consent. There are obviously cases where it makes sense to violate consent. If a person is knocked unconscious, you should rush them to the hospital even though they didn’t consent in advance. Additionally, we’re able to do things all the time without people’s consent. Looking at someone’s house doesn’t violate rights, even if people don’t consent to it. Entering people’s houses without consent, however, does. Why? Well, one rights is optimific, the other one isn’t.
Our friend the Free Radical continues, writing
“This way of thinking suggests that someone has a moral right to the possessions of others by virtue of being poorer than they are. So while it is functionally possible that we could have a specific “progressive” tax system along with an entirely libertarian everything else and that would work pretty well if we had it, it would never lead to that. The same notion of forced utility maximization across individuals, once accepted, would be (and for that matter is) used to justify all manner of other government interferences in the lives of individuals.
The land your house sits on might generate more “utility” with a highway there, or for that matter a shopping mall. You will have higher utility if you save more money for retirement but you are too stupid to realize it so the government will just take some out of your paycheck and use it to pay you back later if you survive long enough (and to pay other older people in the interim). Sure, maybe you could live another year or two if you got the million-dollar treatment for your cancer but would the utility you derived from that extra year really be more than that derived by all the poor children we could feed with that (“your”) money? Yes, we’re sending you, against your will, to fight and probably die in a foreign country but your sacrifice can’t be compared to the extra utility that will be secured for future generations. It’s not that we want to tell you what to put in your body, it’s just that when (certain) drugs are legal, crime increases and you can’t possible argue that the added utility you get from smoking dope outweighs the indirect harm that legalizing it does to your neighbors. Plus we know that drugs are actually hurting you anyway, you are just, again, too stupid or weak to realize it, so we’re actually increasing your utility by taking them away too. It’s win-win! I could go on but hopefully you get the picture.
Utilitarianism, at its core, is just a made-up method of collective reasoning. This type of collective reasoning is at the heart of every usurpation of individual liberty. It is the foundation of every form of socialism, communism, fascism, etc. The only alternative to collectivism is to elevate the rights of the individual above all such notions. This means we have to be willing to look at a rich guy and a poor guy and think that it would be better if the rich guy cut back on his yachts to buy a house for the poor guy without also thinking that we aught to force him to do it. Once you start down that path, forever will it dominate your destiny.”
This person correctly identifies that utilitarianism would support non libertarian things if they had good consequences. However, there are obviously cases where it’s okay to violate rights. One should steal a penny from Jeff Bezos to prevent infinite child rape. If a person falls out of an airplane and is hanging on the end of the building, they wouldn’t be obligated to fall to their death if the building owner announces that they don’t consent to the use of their building.
All of the bad things like communism and fascism had bad outcomes. I’m not sure what it means for utilitarianism to be a “made up,” method of collective reasoning. It’s certainly a method. I don’t know how it being made up is an objection, or even what it means for it to be made up. Any society will need to make decisions. Utilitarianism, like libertarianism, just has specific judgements about what those decisions should be.
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The new criterion thinks that there’s something wrong with utilitarianism, and believes that if utilitarianism were are old ethical criterion, we need a new one :) . The first objection is that utilitarianism would prescribe that it would be good to bring about utopia if it required the brutal torture of one child. This is true, but doesn’t count against utilitarianism. Previous articles have argued against the idea of inalienable rights. Additionally, most people would agree that you should kill one person to save the world. If this is true, then you should probably also torture a child to save the world. Bringing about literal utopia has as much value as saving the world, so it should be similarly justified.
Hearing about the child can induce scope neglect—causing us to ignore all the goodness of the society broadly. Nearly everyone is well off in that society.
If you think that a society where one person is brutally tortured but everyone else is well off is a bad society then you should be against our current society, for more than one person is currently being tortured. The only difference is that in the hypothetical society there’s only one person being tortured (which is a good thing, better than lots of people being tortured) and that it’s more systematized. That, however, shouldn’t be morally relevant.
Lots of small good things can add up to produce enough goodness to outweigh one very good thing. On a regular basis we risk being tortured when we go out to do anything fun. We’d be less likely to be brutally tortured if we never went out. This, however, would be ill advised.
Every time a person has a child they’re risking their child being brutally tortured for their child probably having a good life. It’s only moralistic bs and systematic lack of empathy for the millions of utopia dwellers that causes most people to oppose the utopia.
The author next argues that utilitarianism disregards liberty, which I’ve already responded to several times. Finally they say “To the extent that we see our selves as moral creatures-- creatures, that is to say, whose lives are bounded by an ideal of freedom--utilitarianism presents itself as a version of nihilism. “What is the use of use?” That is one question the thoroughgoing utilitarian refuses to ask himself. Entertained in earnest, that question reveals the limits of utilitarianism. The limit is reached where morality begins, which is why a utilitarian faced with our thought experiment can only endorse what it proposes or wring his hands in mute uneasiness.”
Utilitarianism isn’t nihilism… not sure why the heck Kimball thinks this. It holds that there are good things, namely, utility. Utilitarianism doesn’t say anything about the use of use—it just says happiness is good so there should be more of it. Reason allows us to figure out the solutions to ethical questions—much the same way other theories think it does.
Why is it that when the subject of utilitarianism comes up otherwise intelligent people begin babbling incoherently and producing awful objections?
8
Content warning very very very low hanging fruit
“No, I'm not going to pull a B. Williams and say it "harms your integrity" or some other stupid shit right before I shut off my ears and go running off like bezoomny.
Utilitarianism is bullshit because there's nothing is an end in itself. You can't say "making humans happy is important because it makes humans happy". Why then, can't we give any real horrorshow drugs to people and expect them to experience the highest level of happiness? The utilitarian answer would be "because it would lead to suffering later on and will kill them so it wouldn't last long". This is bullshit. Remember, happiness is just a release of endorphins in your brain, it's a meaningless evolutionary mechanism. Why then, shouldn't all humanity stop whatever the hell it's doing and focus on altering our genes so that we would experience a healthy release of endorphins at all times? It would last forever. And then utilitarians will finally see how little difference does happiness make.”
Well, utilitarianism says making people happy is good. Much like there’s no deeper reason why 1+1 equals 2 there doesn’t have to be a deeper reason why happiness is good. It just is.
Drugging people without consent doesn’t increase net happiness. It shortens their lives. Altering our genes to make us happy is, in fact, good. Happiness is produced by endorphins in the brain, but happiness is a good mental state. It would be good even if it weren’t produced by endorphins. The state of being in love is produced by chemical states but it’s still good. Saying that because it’s produced of things that are not by themselves valuable it can’t be valuable itself is the composition fallacy. If all of humanity stopped their activities and did cocaine that would not bring about more overall happiness.
9
Well, Christians think about ethics sometimes and when they do they often say nonsense. This article argues that utilitarianism is grossly and grotesquely immoral. It disagrees with the allegedly very moral bible, which says the following.
Leviticus 21:9 “And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.”
Leviticus 24:16 New International Version (NIV) 16 anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord is to be put to death. The entire assembly must stone them.
Second Kings 2:23-25 NIV Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. "Get out of here, baldy!" they said. "Get out of here, baldy!" He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.
Numbers 31:17-18 Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves.
Nonetheless, people who think that the bible and was a pretty good book and are big fans of Jesus are calling out utilitarians based on the alleged immorality of their ethical doctrine. The objection relates to the numerical proficiency of utilitarians. This Christian says “The heuristic “do what creates the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people” encourages treating people as nonhuman numbers only. Utilitarianism involves taking a calculating attitude where human beings are just pawns in the calculations. As such, utilitarianism has a corrupting effect; encouraging us to be immoral, not moral. It is a rejection of justice, and fairness, in favor of what is temporarily useful to the many.”
I have no idea why a morality that ignores calculating would be preferrable to anyone who was able to do addition. Surely if we had the option of either saving 1 person or five people, we should save the 5 people. Utilitarianism doesn’t reduce people to mere numbers—it uses number to represent people’s interests for purposes of calculating. This is reasonable—giving people presents is nice but saving lives is better. If you could only do one of them you should save lives. Numbers are just used to represent the moral importance of it. The alleged immoral, depraved, corruption of utilitarianism is obviously question begging—it won’t be convincing unless you’re already convinced of the immorality of calculating in ethics. Then they give the reductio of framing an innocent person, which I’ve already defended here. They then say that utilitarianism justifies society killing people if hostages demand it as a requirement for releasing 5 people. This is obviously false—it would encourage more hostage taking and not be optimific.
The author continues “This indicates that human reason when decoupled from (moral) intuition is an unreliable and even demonic guide.”
Also, worth pointing out that utilitarianism doesn’t reject moral intuitions.
Next they argue that utilitarianism justifies pushing a person off a bridge to save five people. The arguments for doctors killing people and harvesting their organs also apply here—but there are more reasons to push people off bridges.
1 Imagine a modification to the scenario in which all of the people on the bridge and on the tracks are on suitcases, so that no one knows if they’re on the tracks or on the bridge. In this case every single person wants you to push the person off the bridge because there’s a 5/6 chance it will save their life and only a 1/6 chance it will end it. In that case, it seems obvious that you should push the person off the bridge. Making people impartial shouldn’t make this action worse—so these cases seem morally parallel.
2 Consider another modification of the situation in which there are 5 people on the tracks. The train will kill all of them unless you push one of them forward, in which case only that person will die. In this case, it seems obvious you should push them forward—they’ll die either way, it will just save people’s lives. However, pushing someone off a bridge is no worse than pushing them forward, and the person atop the bridge has no extra moral worth than the person being pushed forward, so the cases seem parallel once again.
3 It seems obvious that the world would be better if the person fell off the bridge. No one would die rather than five people. Thus, deontological theories have to hold that giving a perfectly moral person control over a moral situation makes the situation worse. A third party should hope for the best state of the world, so a benevolent third party should hope that you act wrongly.
4 As Greene argues the key factor that determines whether or not people find it intuitively acceptable to cause on to die rather than five relates to whether the force was exerted with their muscles. That’s why we find it intuitive to flip the trolley but unintuitive to push the person in bridge—one is done with our muscles, the other one is not. This shows that the intuitions don’t capture a morally relevant feature.
5 Suppose that the footbridge case is duplicated with one utilitarian and one deontologist—the deontologist doesn’t push the person, the utilitarian does. A moral third party can choose to stop one of the trains. It seems obvious that they should prevent the train from killing the five, which means that it’s much more important to negate to effects of the deontologists action than it is to negate the effects of the utilitarians action.
6 People are much more utilitarian if speaking a foreign language—which also reduces their emotional reaction to the situation.
7 Imagine that you would be in the situation, where you would be either on the footbridge or on the tracks. It seems obvious in that case that you’d rather they push the person—it’s only when we consider it from the point of view of a detached third party observer that this verdict changes.
8 Imagine you’re swinging on a rope such that if you do nothing you’ll push the person off and save the five people. In order to avoid pushing the person off the tracks you’d have to move your legs up. In this case inaction will result in 4 fewer people dying—but it doesn’t seem intuitively like the morality of pushing the person changes if you’re swinging on a vine. Thus, the killing versus letting die distinction doesn’t work.
9 Suppose you push the person off the track and then can lift them up, causing the five people to die. In this case it seems like you shouldn’t bring them back up—undoing your actions. Yet bad actions should surely be undone, meaning that this action isn’t bad.
10 Imagine a situation in which you push someone off the bridge thinking that it will stop the train. However, you find out that it won’t stop the train, and the train will now kill all six people. You have a bit of time during which you can either save the one person or the five people. In this case, if you save the one person, no one will have been killed by your actions, while if you save the five you’ll have killed one and saved five. Yet it still seems obvious that you should save the five.
11 We also know that asking people to be impartial makes them more utilitarian. Impartiality is good, right?
Hic est ubi articulus concludit
Well friends, we’ve waded through the river of nonsense surrounding utilitarianism. All the arguments seemed to boil down to one of the following.
1 Utilitarianism has us calculate but that’s hard sometimes and also bad because… humans aren’t numbers. Also, like Hitler calculated sometimes so it must be bad.
2 Utilitarianism justifies x thing that sounds unintuitive until you reflect for like five minutes.
3 I know utilitarianism says x thing is bad but like in a counterfactual scenario where it had good consequences utilitarianism would endorse it.
Why did I make this post? Well, wading through serious phil papers gets tedious sometimes and it’s fun to blow off verbal steam by bashing terrible arguments. It was also a fun experience. Also these articles had lots of readers so lots of people find them persuasive apparently… a fact which seems like at least as good an argument against democracy as a five minute conservation with the average voter.
Creationists will often say very stupid things about evolution, like that it believes apes2 randomly give birth to humans sometimes. Evolutionists do not in fact believe this. There are some (slightly) sophisticated creationists who make arguments against evolution that are way better than these crappy misconceptions. However, it’s still worthwhile for popular science advocates to argue against this low hanging fruit, for it’s shockingly prevalent among creationists. I think a lot of people disagree with utilitarianism for similar terrible reasons. So it’s similarly worth correcting idiotic misconceptions. It’s also fun for the whole family.
The rationale was also similar to Alexander’s rationale here. If utilitarianism is dismissed with only a few sentences of analysis constantly, it builds up negative affect. It becomes seen as trivially false, the type of thing not worth engaging with. If when people think of utilitarianism the first thing they think of is that it’s that pro framing innocent people philosophy which can’t be applied in the real world and requirea literal omniscience on the part of its practitioners, that it’s the type of thing that can be dismissed in a few sentences by reasonable people, that would be bad for utilitarianism broadly.
Promoting good values is very important . Utilitarianism is the root of all of those good values that are worth promoting. So it would be great if there were more utilitarians. Hopefully this blog furthers that goal. Let human reason, which rejects some intuitions as an unreliable and even is even a demonic guide, spread to the ends of the earth.
Some are really funny so I’ll mock them mercilessly
Yes, I know humans are technically apes…I’m referring to the type of apes that people generally think about when people talk about apes. Stop being a smartass.