Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 28: Responding To Objections

None of them succeed

Much to my surprise, shock, and horror, not everyone is a utilitarian.  I’ve previously argues that the intuitions employed against utilitarianism backfire—see earlier posts in this series. However, people sometimes have other objections that are worth responding to.

One common 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 is a bad objection, amounting to little more than a complaint that it’s psychologically difficult to be perfectly moral.

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, 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.  

If a privileged wealthy aristocracy objected to a moral theory on the grounds that it requested they donate a small share of their luxury to prevent many children from dying, we wouldn’t take that to be a very good objection to that moral theory.  Yet the objection to utilitarianism is almost exactly the same—minus the wealthy aristocracy part.  Why in the world would we expect the correct moral theory to demand we give up so little, when giving up a vacation could prevent a child from dying.  Perhaps if we consulted those whose deaths were averted as a result of the foregone vacation or nicer car, utilitarianism would no longer seem so demanding.  

Third, 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.  

Fourth, the drowning child analogy from (Singer, 1972) 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.  

Another objection provided to utilitarianism is that it fails to respect the separateness of persons.  This objection seems to be fundamentally confused.  Utilitarianism obviously realizes the persons are separate.  The question is merely whether that provides for moral significance.  Two things being different doesn't mean that we can’t make comparisons between them.  It is rational to endure five minutes of pain now to prevent thirty minutes of pain later.  This does not fail to respect the “separateness of moments.”   

We can make tradeoffs regarding separate things.  My happiness is separate from the happiness of others, but we can obviously make tradeoffs.  It would be wrong to save my life instead of the lives of hundreds, despite our separateness.  If we take the view that interpersonal tradeoffs in happiness are prima facie wrong that runs afoul of pareto optimality.  Suppose we can take an action that gives person A five units of happiness and costs person B 2 units of happiness.  If we take seriously the “separateness of persons,” we would perhaps not take that action.  However, suppose additionally that we can give person B 5 units of happiness and cost person A 2 units of happiness.  This act would similarly be wrong.  This would make an act that makes everyone better off morally wrong.  

The believer in the separateness of persons has to provide a reason to assign normative significance to the separateness of persons in a way that undermines utilitarianism.  Impartiality demands that we regard everyone as equal.  This does not require that we lose sight of the fact that people are, in fact, different.  

(McCloskey, 1973) presents two more objections to utilitarianism.  The first is that utilitarianism denies the notion that ought implies can.  McCloskey objects to the notion that if one takes an action like bringing orphans to the beach that was benevolent, but that had bad consequences, then they ought not to have done it, despite it being impossible to predict that their action would produce an action.  

This is confused.  On utilitarianism, what matters fundamentally is not whether or not people take moral actions.  Rather the entire aim of morality, conceived of broadly as the entire set of actions one will take, will be to produce the best outcomes.  Sometimes it may be right for example, to put oneself in a situation in which they will take some wrong actions.  It might be right to follow a promise, even if following that promise ends up having bad consequences.  

Generally the term ought is used to denote blameworthiness.  In this sense, ought clearly implies can.  One isn’t blameworthy for failing to do things they couldn’t do.  Similarly, the person who takes orphans to the beach isn’t blameworthy.  

Utilitarianism says nothing about how we can use particular words.  There is a strong consequentialist case for using the word ought to describe actions which are praiseworthy.  Thus, semantically it makes little sense to say one ought to have done things that they couldn’t do or know about.  

However, utilitarianism is concerned more fundamentally with what is important and worth aiming for.  Thus, purely semantically, a better way of describing the case of the person who drives orphans to the beach would be along the lines of “it would be better if they hadn’t driven those orphans to the beach.”  This is an utterly uncontroversial claim.  When a utilitarian makes a claim that the person shouldn’t have driven the orphans to the beach, that is the sentiment they are expressing.  This is only an apparent problem because of semantic ambiguity.  

McCloskey’s second objection is that utilitarianism values the happiness and suffering of animals, such that it would say that if you could either save some large number of horses from burning to death or one human from burning to death, you ought to save the large number of horses.  

As was shown in part two of chapter two, in the comparison of torture and dust-specks, any plausible moral theory will hold that some large number of dust specks will be worse than one torture.  If that is true, then unless one thinks that one dust speck is worse than a horse burning to death, or that no number of people undergoing brutal lethal torture can ever be as bad as one person burning to death, then they’d have to accept that saving some number of horses from burning to death would be more important than saving some larger number of humans.  

When McCloskey says (p.63)

“As Kant long ago pointed out, it is not morally reasonable to weigh the pleasure of animals (value) against the worth of a person as a person,”

it is his view that is morally unreasonable.  If one thought that the pleasure of a human was categorically more important than anything that could happen to animals, then they should be willing to horrifically torture infinite animals to prevent one human death.  This is absurd! 

Several other problems arise for a view like McCloskey’s.  First, it’s not at all clear what about humans makes them unfathomably more morally important than animals.  It can’t be intelligence for there are some severely mentally disabled humans who are less intelligent than some animals.  As many such as Singer in Animal Liberation, have argued, no such distinction can establish a morally relevant difference between humans and animals of sufficient magnitude to justify not caring about animals.  

Second, there are clear biases when it comes to our judgment of the moral status of animals.  It is no surprise that human judgments will conclude that humans matter vastly more than animals.  There are clear evolutionary reasons for such a prejudice.  But unless that prejudice can withstand philosophical scrutiny, it should be discarded.  

Third, consider a series of entities going back through evolutionary history, as humans slowly evolved from non-human animals.  If at each stage, the sentient creatures growing gradually more humanoid are not infinitely more important than the previous generation, then by transitivity humans would be logically barred from being infinitely more important than non-human animals.  

Fourth, one clearly doesn’t gain moral value merely by virtue of being biologically human.  If a person took a DNA test and was confirmed to be technically non-human, though still appeared human and was sentient, this would not rob them of their moral worth.  Given that there are some humans who are mentally similar to non-human animals, unless merely being biologically human makes one morally relevant, non-human animals would have to have similar moral worth (intrinsically) to those mentally disabled humans.  

A reasonable way to test if a particular entity has moral value is to imagine oneself being that entity and seeing if they would care about what would happen to that entity.  This is the principle of empathy.  If I slowly turned into a pig (assuming that transformation was able to preserve personal identity), I would care a great deal about what happened to me after I became the pig.  I would undergo large sacrifices to avoid being burned alive while being a pig.  If, however, I was turned into a non-sentient plant, I would not care what would happen to me after I became a plant.  If we would care about a being were we in its shoes, but don’t care about the being currently, that is just bare prejudice, and is not justifiable philosophically.