Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 27
A Few More Cases That Other Theories Struggle To Account For
Introduction
Utilitarianism, unlike other theories, gives relatively clear verdicts about a variety of cases. This makes it easily criticizeable—one can very easily find seemingly unintuitive things it says. Other theories, however, are far vaguer, making it harder to figure out exactly what they say.
There are lots of situations that utilitarianism adequately accounts for that other theories can’t account for. I’ve already documented several of them. I shall document more of them here.
1 Children
Consequentialism provides the only adequate account of how we should treat children. Several actions being done to children are widely regarded as justifiable, yet are not for adults.
Compelling them to do minimal forced labor (chores).
Compelling them to spend hours a day at school, even if they vehemently dissent and would like to not be at school.
Forcing them to learn things like multiplication, even if they don’t want to.
Forcing them to go to bed when their parents think will make things go best, rather than when they want to.
Not allowing them to leave your house, however much they protest.
Disciplining them in ways that cause them to cry, for example putting them on time-out.
Controlling the food they eat, who they spend time with, what they do, and where they are at all times.
However, lots of other actions are justifiable to do with adults, yet not with children.
Having sex with them if they verbally consent.
Not feeding them (i.e. one shouldn’t be arrested if they don’t feed a homeless person nearby. They should, however, if they don’t feed their children. Not feeding ones children is morally worse than beating their children, while the same is not true of unrelated adults.)
Employing them in damaging manual labor.
Consequentialism provides the best account of these obligations. Each of these obligations makes things go best, which is why they apply. Non consequentialist accounts have trouble with these cases.
One might object that children can’t consent to many of these things, which makes up the difference. However, consent fails to provide an explanation. It would be strange to say, for example, that the reason you can prohibit someone from leaving your house is because they don’t consent to leaving your house. Children are frequently forced to do things without consent, like learn multiplication, go to school, and even not put their fingers in electrical sockets. Thus, any satisfactory account has to explain why their inability to consent only bars them from consenting to some of those things.
2 War
Consequentialism also provides the best account of when war is justified. Usually, it’s immoral to kill innocent people. However, in war there is an exception.
(Lazar 2016) provides an account based in just war theory of when war is justified. However, Lazar’s criteria are bizarre, ad hoc, and clearly derivative of more basic principles. Utilitarianism provides a much better account of just war.
On utilitarianism, war is justified if it maximizes desirability of mental states of sentient beings. If it makes sentient beings' lives better overall, then war is justified.
Lazar lays out several necessary criteria of just war.
“1. Just Cause: the war is an attempt to avert the right kind of injury.”
This diverges slightly from utilitarianism in two ways, which make the utilitarian account clearly better. First, the utilitarian account does not take into account intentions. If an actor achieves a desirable end, even if their aim was ignoble, the war would be good overall. For example, if the U.S. decision to intervene in world war two was driven by bad motivations, that would not mean that U.S. intervention decreasing the length of the holocaust and war wouldn’t make the war good overall.
Second, the utilitarian account is proportional. Rather than saying that wars can only be justified to avert the right kind of injury, it would say that wars can only be justified if the benefits of the war outweigh the costs. Thus, even if the injury were very great, if the costs of the war were greater, war would not be justified. This is rather intuitive, if combatting a genocide going on in China would result in nuclear anhiliation of the world, it would not be desirable. Similarly, it says that the bar for justifying a more modest intervention is much lower. This is also intuitive, if the cost to prevent several hundred thousand deaths would be a drone strike that would cost a few hundred lives, intervening would be good. Rather than drawing arbitrary lines for how great the atrocity has to be to justify an intervention, utilitarianism rightly holds that analysis should compare the benefits and costs of expected intervention.
When justifying this principle, Lazar appeals to the immense harms of war. However, analyzing the harms of war to justify treading lightly when it comes to war appeals to consequentialism, because it uses the negative consequences as a justification for being hesitant about going to war.
Next, Lazar says “Legitimate Authority: the war is fought by an entity that has the authority to fight such wars.”
The utilitarian account is once again better here. First, as I argued in part 1 of the chapter, utilitarianism provides the only adequate account of political authority. Second, it seems clear that the authority of the entity going to war is not relevant for evaluating the desirability of a war. If an illegitimate criminal enterprise went to war against the Nazi’s, thereby quickly ending the holocaust, even though the illegitimate criminal enterprise wouldn’t be legitimate, the war would still be desirable. Third, this standard is clearly ad hoc. Utilitarianism provides the best grounding of the arbitrary list of requirements for war to be justified.
Lazar next says “Right Intention: that entity intends to achieve the just cause, rather than using it as an excuse to achieve some wrongful end.”
Intention is irrelevant, as I argued above. It’s also unclear how we ascribe intentions to a government. Different people in the government no doubt have different intentions relating to war. There is no single intention behind the decision to intervene.
Lazar’s fourth criterion is “Reasonable Prospects of Success: the war is sufficiently likely to achieve its aims.”
Once again, consequentialism provides a better account. First, even if a war isn’t likely to achieve its aims, if it ends up producing good outcomes, consequentialism explains why it’s justified. If the decision to intervene intends to bring democracy to a region, fails to do so, but ends up saving the world, that intervention would be good overall. Second, even if a war is unlikely to achieve its aims, if its aims are sufficiently important, the war can still be justified. If a war has a 3% chance of saving the world, it would be justified, despite being unlikely to succeed. Third, a war only gains justification from being likely to achieve its aims if those aims are desirable. Fourth, consequentialism provides an adequate account of why likelihood of success matters. Better consequences are brought about by wars that are likely to produce good outcomes.
Fifth, Lazar says “Proportionality: the morally weighted goods achieved by the war outweigh the morally weighted bads that it will cause.”
This is true, yet perfectly in accordance with the consequentialist account. This criterion is essentially that war is justified only if the expected benefits outweigh the costs, which is identical to the utilitarian account of when war is justified.
Sixth, Lazar says “Last Resort (Necessity): there is no other less harmful way to achieve the just cause.”
This criteria is ambiguous. If the claims is merely that war should only be done if it’s the best option, and if other options are better they should be done instead, that’s clearly true, and it’s accounted for by utilitarianism. However, the mere existence of less harmful ways of achieving the aim of war wouldn’t affect the morality of the war. If intervening would be desirable, but sanctions would be even more desirable, that’s a reason to choose sanctions if one has the option of selecting either sanctions or war. However, if one does not have the option of imposing sanctions, the existence of potentially desirable sanctions wouldn’t affect the desirability of going to war.
Lazar goes on to provide necessary criteria for the conduct practiced in war to be justified, even if the war itself is justified.
“Discrimination: belligerents must always distinguish between military objectives and civilians, and intentionally attack only military objectives.”
This is a good heuristic, but the utilitarian account is better. If intentionally targeting one enemy civilian would end a war and save millions of lives, doing so would be justified.
Additionally, this criteria seems to draw a line between intentionally targeting civilians and targeting them as collateral. Utilitarianism adequately explains why that distinction is morally irrelevant. If given the choice between killing 100 enemy civilians as collateral damage or 10 intentionally, utilitarianism explains why killing the 10 would be preferable.
Second, Lazar says “Proportionality: foreseen but unintended harms must be proportionate to the military advantage achieved.”
Utilitarianism explains why this is false. First, it explains why there’s no morally relevant difference between a foreseen but unintended harm and an intended harm. It would be better to kill 10 people intentionally than 15 people in a way that’s foreseen yet not intended. Second, it explains why harm to civilians that doesn’t achieve a military advantage can still be desirable. If, for example, bombing of 15 civilians prevented 500 extra civilian deaths, even if no military advantage was achieved, the bombing would still be justified. Third, utilitarianism provides an account of why the harms and benefits should be proportional in war.
Third, Lazar says “Necessity: the least harmful means feasible must be used.”
Utilitarianism can account for why the least harm should be caused. However, it also accounts for why it can be good for an action to happen even if it’s not the least harmful. Even if there’s a better option than bombing people, if bombing people makes the world better, utilitarianism explains why it’s still justified.
3 Pollution
Some types of pollution should clearly be prohibited. (Slaper et al, 2013) argues that the Montreal Protocol, for example, prevented millions of cases of skin cancer per year. It did this at a relatively low cost. Most would agree that if a policy produced minimal economic harm and prevented millions of cases of cancer every year, it would be good overall.
However, some types of pollution clearly shouldn’t be polluted. When a person lights a candle, the ash goes into the air, affecting people for miles around. When people exhale they release a bit of CO2, without the consent of anyone else. Consequentialism provides the best account of when pollution is justified.
Any time someone pollutes, they affect people who do not consent. Pollutants are breathed in by those who do not consent. However, it only makes sense to ban pollutants that are actually harmful. Consequentialism best accounts for this fact.
It seems clear that a pollutant should be banned only if it’s harmful. (Lewis, 2015) argues that PFAS pollutants are quite common, affecting vast numbers of people. Whether or not it makes sense to ban or regulate PFAS seems to hinge on whether or not they are harmful. If it turned out that PFAS was not harmful, there would be no rationale for banning it. Other theories have difficulty accounting for why pollutants being harmful are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a pollutant being ban-worthy. Indeed, the importance of banning a pollutant scales proportionally to how much harm the pollutant does.
4 Political Authority
(Huemer, 2013) has argued persuasively that government action looks suspiciously like theft. After all, governments take our money without consent. That tends to be how most people define theft. However, despite this, the notion that taxation is good if it produces greater overall benefits is quite intuitive. Thus, utilitarianism gives the best account of why political authority is not necessarily objectionable. If the government takes money to spend it to save the life of someone else, that is overall good.
Huemer considers a case wherein a person often kidnaps people and puts them in their basement whenever they commit a crime, while demanding payments from people. This would clearly be unjust. However, a government is structurally similar, demanding payment without consent and imprisoning people. What would be the morally relevant difference between those two cases? The utilitarian can supply an adequate account: bands of roving vigilantes does not bring about good outcomes, while a state (plausibly) does. Theft causes harm in a way that taxation does not.
One might object that the legitimacy of political authority comes from implicit consent. However, Huemer explains why this does not work. For consent to be valid, people have to be able to opt out reasonably, explicit dissent has to trump implicit consent, consent has to be voluntary, and obligations have to be both mutual and conditional. Political authority lacks any of these features. One cannot easily opt out of government. Huemer quotes Hume, who said “We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.”
This is unhinged Mr. Bulldog. You're just repaating the simplicity rule over and over again here in a bunch of random contexts. Yes, we get it, you have one extremely dumb and completely applicable rule, that doesn't mean that it's any better...
And besides, there isn't really any explanation here. You just say "it's ok to make kids do things when it increases utility". No fucking shit that's how it works under utilitarianism, but we both know that there are other ethical theories that can account for that, such as by simply stating that children lack the mental capacity to manage themselves, which means that they are absolutely prohibied from doing some things that adults can do.
The "War" is even dumber. You say that utilitarianism is good because it says war is justified when it increases utility. No fucking shit sherlock. This isn't "explanation", it's just repeating your rule again and again. All your other answers are just repeating utilitarianism - I.E. you say that intention doesn't matter because utilitarianism is true. Ok, but if the purpose of the post is to PROVE UTILITARIANISM you cannot be circular.
You also critizise "intention as being impossible to measure" - please tell me how to measure utility Mr. Bulldog.
Pollution - no idea why only utilitarianism proves an adeqquete account for this.
Political Authority - again, you just repeat that political authority is good when it increases utility. The specific "taxation is theft!!11!!" requires only ~7 braincells to defeat, not utilitarianism.