Utilitarianism wins outright part 2
History favors utilitarianism
1
The inquisitor brought forth the utilitarian.
“You are charged with expressing hideous moral views,” he said in a low voice.
“Yes,” was the curt reply.
“Why shouldn’t we execute you?” demanded the inquisitor.
“Because I was right. Look a few centuries from now and you’ll see, everything I think is mainstream. Your morality is lost in the dark ages. I have a time machine. Let’s go forth 300 years and see if my views about racial egalitarianism are mainstream.”
The inquisitor nodded.
“Okay, but if you’re not then you will be executed. Understood?”
The utilitarian nodded.
“Wait, though before we do, would you be willing to place some bets on whether or not I’ll be right.”
The inquisitor looked baffled.
“Bet with a dead man,” he asked incredulously.
“I think you’re selling me a little short,” said the utilitarian. “If you’re probably right, you’ll get lots of money. I’ll bet you fifty bushels of grain.”
The inquisitor nodded and accepted the deal. The time machine whirred. They popped into the future.
“Excuse me,” said the inquisitor to a random street dweller. “Do you think black people matter just as much as white people.”
“Of course,” replied the man. “I’m not a bigot.”
The inquisitor handed over the 50 bushels of grain and returned to the past.
“There, I was right,” said the utilitarian. “Want to make the same bet about my views that women should be allowed to vote.”
“Sure,” said the inquisitor, but more sullenly this time.
They popped into the future, back to the past, and he handed in 50 more bushels of grain.
“How about for gay rights,” asked the utilitarian.
“Sure,” he replied. 50 more bushels of grain were given to the utilitarian after they entered and exited the time machine.
“How about the moral importance of animals,” he asked.
50 more bushels of grain went over to the utilitarian.
“Okay, how about for the repugnant conclusion,” asked the utilitarian.
The inquisitor wisely didn’t bet.
2
What do all of the examples of moral progress have in common?
Well for one, they’ve had to do with expanding the moral circle. The abolition of slavery involved expanding the circle of moral concern to include black people. Women’s suffrage involved expanding it to include women. The gay rights movement involved expanding it to include gay people.
When we see acts of gratuitous evil, like torturing other people for fun, they’re marked by excluding the victims from the perpetrators circle of moral concern. Bundy, Dahmer, and the Manson families actions showed no regard for the interests of their victims.
The Nazi’s actions were evil, because they totally ignored the interests of their victims. Likewise with the actions of Vlad the Impaler and all of history’s other despots. Utilitarianism has the theoretical framework to address all of these evils. If history’s greatest crimes have come from an overly narrow moral circle, then expanding the moral circle to include all sentient beings is plausibly required by morality. Numerous times throughout history people have thought that the particular group of sentient beings that they harmed were not worth including in their moral circle, while being horrified at previous atrocities which were caused by too narrow of a moral circle. The moral lesson of history seems to be that if you’re unsure whether or not to include a new being in your moral circle, you probably should. All the atrocities would have been solved by following utilitarianism, and expanding the moral circle to include all sentient beings. This trend gives us a very good reason to be a utilitarian.
The second thing that the atrocities have in common is that the utilitarians at the time were against them.
As (Utilitarianism.net ) writes, utilitarian philosophers were often on the right side of history. Bentham favored decriminalizing homosexuality, abolition of slavery, and protection for non human animals. Mill was the second member of parliament to advocate for women's suffrage and argued for gender equality. Sidgwick advocated for religious freedoms. In contrast, philosophers like Kant harbored far less progressive views. As Utilitarianism.net says “However, Kant also defended many ideas that would be unacceptable to express today:18 He called homosexuality an “unmentionable vice” so wrong that “there are no limitations or exceptions whatsoever that can save [it] from being repudiated completely”.19 He believed masturbation to be so wrong it “exceed[s] even murdering oneself”.20 He argued that organ donation is impermissible and that even “cutting one’s hair in order to sell it is not altogether free from blame.”21 Kant stated that women, servants and children “lack civil personality” and that they are “mere underlings” that “have to be under the direction and protection of other individuals”;22 thus he believed they should not be permitted to vote or take an active role in the affairs of state.23 Further, he wrote about the killing of bastards that “a child that comes into the world apart from marriage is born outside the law” and that society “can ignore its existence (...) and can therefore also ignore its annihilation”.24 Finally, Kant argued for the idea of racial superiority, claiming that “humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race”.25.”
Maybe you think this isn’t very good evidence because utilitarians were often on the wrong side of history, with Mill supporting colonialism. This is true, however, if we compare utilitarians to other philosophers, they seem empirically to have been far more progressive than other philosophers. The odds are extremely low that the wrong moral theory would conclude that homosexuality is permissible hundreds of years before it became acceptable to even suggest as much. Most people throughout history have harbored dreadful moral views that clash with our modern sensibilities. The fact that utilitarians were far less accepting of these barbaric practices counts strongly in favor of utilitarianism.
One misguided objection is that this does not count in favor of utilitarianism because it requires a meta morality, to decide which moral principles are true. Thus, we can’t say utilitarianism is best, for getting the correct answer to moral questions, without a mechanism for identifying the moral conclusion. If the mechanism for identifying the moral conclusion is utilitarianism, then the argument would be circular. It would merely suggest that utilitarianism identified the conclusions that utilitarianism suggests.
This, however, is false. We don’t need to decide upon a precise mechanism for identifying the moral conclusion in all cases to conclude that slavery is immoral, gay people shouldn’t be killed, and women should have the right to vote. For those who accept the immoralities of the aforementioned actions, this argument for utilitarianism should hold weight. If we can agree upon certain moral principles, then the moral theory to conclude them originally is more likely to be true.
3
The inquisitor brought forth the heretic.
“You claimed the universe is larger than 100 times the size of the earth.”
“Yes,” replied the heretic. “Your model of the size of the universe is waaaaaaaay too small. In terms of things that are possible in this world, your modal circle is way too small. I have a magic universe size measuring device—want to place bets on whether it will be more than 100 times the size of the earth.”
“Betting goes against my sacred values,” replied the inquisitor.
“Oh come on—surely you’ve read Robin Hanson,” the heretic replied. “Vote values, bet beliefs. You know it’s super accurate.”
The inquisitor hadn’t read Robin Hanson but thought that wasn’t worth pointing out in a public inquisition. He was supposed to be the one calling out the heretic’s ignorance.
“We can’t just bet on anything.”
“Look,” replied the heretic. “I know that being an inquisitor doesn’t pay super well. Remember that suggestion to fund investigative reporting through prediction markets. I think that’s how we should fun inquisitors. That would encourage killing real heretics with demonstrably false views. Surely you want good incentives for inquisitors—unless…you’re the one working for the devil.”
The Monty Python esque mob began muttering.
“Yeah—good incentives and prediction markets,” they shouted. They had all obviously read Robin Hanson.
The inquisitor caved. The button was pressed and it delivered the verdict that the world was larger than 100 earths. The inquisitor payed up.
“How do we know that this truth generator is really finding true things,” the
inquisitor asked suspiciously.
“Look,” replied the heretic. “It is possible necessary that it is finding true things—therefore, it is finding true things in the real world.”
The inquisitor caved.
“Want to bet that it’s more than 1000 times the size of the earth. And also 10000 times the size of the earth, and also 1 million times and also 1 billion times.”
The inquisitor took the bets and payed after the verdict was revealed. He wisely made no more bets.
4
You’re likely still not convinced of utilitarianism if you were not already convinced :(. However, the arguments we’ve already established provide a strong case—and we’re just getting started with the overwhelmingly lopsided case for utilitarianism. But just consider for now how unlikely it is that an incorrect theory would have the three following features.
A) Totally blowing other theories out of the water in terms of theoretical virtues.
B) Its proponents were consistently very far ahead of their time, discovering important moral truths hundreds of years before they were widely accepted.
C) The theory is the only one that broadly expands the process that’s common in all examples of moral progress.
Let’s say our prior in utilitarianism was 1/20—so 1 to 19 odds. The odds of A being the case if utilitarianism were false seems very low—maybe 5 to 1 on the truth of utilitarianism. So we update to 5 to 19. B seems similarly pretty unlikely—maybe 3 to 1 so we update to 15 to 19. C seems also pretty unlikely, maybe 4 to 1. So we update to 60 to 19. And we’re just scratching the surface of the terrifying case for utilitarianism, but we’re already in a territory pretty close to justified belief. Part three will take things up a notch though.