Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 37: Killing Those With Negative Utility

And why it might be less bad than you think -- assuming all else equal of course

Some like (Carson, 1983) have argued, utilitarianism has the unacceptable consequence that we should kill people who have a negative quality of life.  If their quality of life is negative, they overall detract from the hedonic sum, such that things would be better if they were killed.  However, this conclusion strikes many as counterintuitive.  

There are two crucial questions worth distinguishing.  The first is whether one should kill unhappy people and the second is whether the world is better when unhappy people die.  Utilitarianism would, in nearly all cases, answer no to the first.  One can never be particularly confident in their judgments about the hedonic value of another person and killing damages the soul and undermines desirable societal norms.  Thus, the cases in which utilitarianism prescribes that people who are unhappy should be killed are not cases which are likely to arise in the real world, which trigger our intuitions.  They are cases in which there are no spillover effects, no one would ever find out about the killing, the killing won’t undermine one’s character, and you can know with absolute certainty or near absolute certainty that the person has a bad life which will remain bad for the entirety of its existence.  

Thus the cases in which utilitarianism prescribes that sad people should be killed are ones in which the relevant question is far more like the second one posed above, namely, whether the world is better because of the deaths of some people, based purely on facts about the life of the person.  This caveat is to distinguish the case from one in which a person is killed to prevent other bad things from happening, such as would occur from killing Hitler.  If we imagine a scenario in which there are aliens who know with absolute certainty that a person will be miserable for the next year and then die, who can bring about their death in a way that will be believed to be an accident, producing zero negative effects on the aliens, and maximizing the sum total of well-being in the world, the utilitarian account begins to seem more intuitive.  

Thus, the question primarily boils down to the question of whether a person with more sadness than happiness is better off dead.  If people are better off dead, then killing them makes them better off.  The intuition against killing seems dependent on the notion that it makes the victim worse off. Common sense would seem to hold that people can be better off dead, at least in some cases.  If a person is about to undergo unfathomable torture, it seems plausible that they’d be better off dead.  So utilitarianism and common sense morality are in 100% agreement that some people are better off dead.  The disagreement is merely about whether this applies to all sad people.  

However, it seems all theories of well-being would have similar conclusions.  Objective list theory would hold that a person is better off dead if the badness of their life is greater than their pursuit of goods on the objective list.  Desire theory holds a person is better off dead if they have more things in their life that they don’t desire than things they do desire.  

Thus, the argument can be formulated as follows.  

Premise 1 If killing people makes them better off, then you should kill people, assuming that there will be no additional negative side effects.  This principle has independent plausibility; a morality that isn’t concerned with making victims better off seems to be in error.  Additionally, this premise follows from the intuitive Pareto principle, which states that something is worth causing if it’s better for some and worse for none.  

Premise 2 Killing people who have a negative quality of life makes them better off.  This seems almost true by definition and follows from all theories of well-being.  

Therefore, you should kill people who have a negative quality of life, assuming that there will be no additional side effects.  

Premise 3 If you should kill people who have a negative quality of life, assuming that there will be no additional side effects, then the hedonistic utilitarian judgments about killing people who have more sadness than happiness is plausible. 

The objective list theory and desire theories also hold you should kill people under similar circumstances, relating to desire and objective list fulfillment, therefore, this plagues all theories and is not a reason to reject hedonistic utilitarianism.  

Therefore, the hedonistic utilitarian judgments about killing people who have more sadness than happiness are plausible.  

One might object that a notion of rights would prevent this action.  I’ve already provided a litany of arguments against rights.  However, even if one believes in rights, it’s hard to make sense of a notion of rights that doesn’t apply in cases of making people better off.  For example, it is not a violation of rights to give unconscious people surgery to save their life, even if they haven’t consented, by virtue of their being unconscious.  Thus, a notion of rights is insufficient to salvage this objection.  A right that will never make anyone better off doesn’t seem to be very plausible. 

Here’s a very plausible side constraint on rights — rights must benefit someone. There couldn’t possibly be a reason to give someone a right that never makes them better off. But this is precisely what the person who disagrees with the utilitarian account of rights must deny.

Additionally, I’ve previously argued that there is no deep distinction between creating a new person with a good life and increasing the happiness of existing people.  If this is true and it’s bad to create miserable people, then it would seem to be permissible to kill miserable people, given the extended ceteris paribus clause that has been stipulated.  

Several more arguments can be provided for this conclusion.  Imagine that a person is going to have a bad dream.  It seems reasonable to make them not have that dream, if one had the ability to make their sleep dreamless, rather than containing a miserable dream.  Similarly, if a person would be miserable for a day, it seems reasonable to make them not experience that day, as long as that would produce no undesirable consequence.  However, there’s no reason this principle should only apply to limited time durations.  If it’s moral to cause a person not to experience a day because it would contain more misery than joy, then it would also seem reasonable to make them not experience their entire life.  

Additionally, it seems reasonable to kill people if they consent to being killed and live a terrible life.  However, if they don’t consent because of error on their part, then it would be reasonable to fix the error, much like it would be reasonable to force a deluded child to get vaccinated.  Killing them seems plausibly analogous in this case.  

Finally, there are many features of the scenario that undermine the reliability of our intuitions.  First, there’s status quo bias, given that one upsets the status quo by killing someone.  It seems much more intuitive that a person is better off dead if that occurs naturally than being killed by a particular person, which shows the influence of status quo bias.  Second, we rightly have a strong aversion to killing.  Third, it’s very easy to imagine acts becoming societal practices when evaluating their morality.  However, killing unhappy people would clearly be a bad societal practice.  Fourth, there’s an intuitive connection between killing innocent people and viciousness, showing that character judgments may be behind the intuition.  Fifth, the scenario is deeply unrealistic, involving total certainty about claims that we can’t really know in the real world, meaning our intuitions about the world are unlikely to be reliable.  It also requires stipulating that a person will never be able to be helped for their misery.  Sixth, this prescription is the type that has the potential to backfire, given that it would be bad if people acted on it in any realistic situation.  Seventh, this principle seems somewhat related to the ethics of suicide, which people naturally have a strong aversion to.