I usually understand at least part of the rationale behind the objections to utilitarianism. I don’t think there are rights in any robust sense or that demandingness is a problem, but I can at least see how one could have the intuitions, and I do have them in a sort of superficial way. But what the heck is going on with the separateness of persons objection? I do not get it, and every time anyone tries to explain it, it just seems obviously idiotic, so much so that I feel I’m either an idiot or an alien, born without the mysterious intuition that the fact that people are different from each other means that utilitarianism is false.
The separateness of persons people like to say that utilitarianism denies the separateness of persons. Then they sit back knowingly, sipping a glass of wine, as if brazenly asserting that utilitarians are committed to implausible metaphysical views with no additional argument is some kind of incisive refutation. Perhaps utilitarians should adopt this strategy, and bizarrely assert that deontologists are committed to various false metaphysical claims such as that one can have a part that is not part of anything. That would have as much force as the separateness of persons objection.
Why do utilitarians have to deny the separateness of persons? The non-utilitarians tell us: because they say that we can make trade-offs across lives. If you think that you can trade things off against each other, then apparently you deny their separateness.
But that’s obviously false. I accept the separateness of moments. I think that moments are different from each other, but we can make tradeoffs across moments, I’d endure suffering now to avoid future suffering, not because I deny the separateness of moments, but because I think that good things can be compared to each other, even when they’re different from each other. And it seems all views that are remotely plausible have to deny the separateness of persons in this sense—if you think that comparisons across people require denying their separateness, then accepting that people are separate requires thinking that you shouldn’t inflict mild suffering on one to prevent infinite suffering experienced by another. But that’s obviously crazy.
I was reading Anarchy, State, and Utopia earlier today. Nozick gave the separateness of persons objection as a reason why we can’t make comparisons across people. He pointed out that there is no one superperson who experiences all the moments, so we can’t harm one to benefit another, though we can harm one to benefit their later self. But…what? There is also no supermoment that contains both moments, but nonetheless we can make tradeoffs across moments. Why in the world are persons the relevant units of measurement here? We can trade off good things against other good things because they’re both good, and any plausible view will say that good things are worth pursuing.
Now, I think that there are various arguments from the nonreality of persons to utilitarianism. If we accept Parfit’s personal identity reductionism, for example, then various doctrines like rights and desert end up being harder to defend. But this does not mean that one has to deny the separateness of persons to be a utilitarian or that the separateness of persons is an objection to utilitarianism, just that it’s an objection to some objections to utilitarianism.
Richard has two pieces of writing addressing the objection. I agree that the ways he develops the objection, it has a bit of force, though is unconvincing for the reasons he describes. But this just seems not to be what people actually are talking about when they develop the objection. Every single time, people just seem to state sagely that utilitarianism fails to respect the separateness of persons, and then act as if this is a devastating takedown—rather than raise the deeper concerns about fungibility and such. Here’s Rawls’ statement of the supposed problem:
[Utilitarianism] is the consequence of extending to society the principle of choice for one man, and then, to make this extension work, conflating all persons into one… Utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons.
This seems to be how it’s always advanced. People point out that utilitarianism accepts that people’s interests are comparable, and then they just bizarrely assert that this denies that people are separate. I remember hearing that Parfit would, when asked a stupid question, steelman the question such that it seemed like it was raising a serious objection and then address that, rather than actually answer the original question, so as to avoid making the asker feel bad. I sort of feel this way about the separateness of persons objection and Richard’s response—there are lots of ways you can take the basic objection in interesting directions, but the basic intuition just seems bizarre and obviously wrong and I don’t have it at all.
So, am I missing something. Or is the objection just crazy?
I agree that it is unclear what people mean when they complain that utilitarianism fails to consider the separateness of persons. I thought I agreed with the objection myself until I realized that I couldn't find the objection clearly explained in a sensible way that wasn't just equivalent to other common objections.
Anyway, when I reflect on what I think I had in mind with this objection, it seems that we have a moral intuition that persons themselves have a special kind of value, a value that cannot be merely reduced to the value of their welfare. The idea is that utilitarianism fails to appreciate this special value because it gives prescriptions in a way that would make sense only if this special value didn't exist. For example, if it turned out that there are no persons (or if we were actually just parts of one person), then utilitarian prescriptions seem like they would make perfect sense. If that were the case, then it makes perfect sense to maximize aggregative well-being. But given that there *really are* persons with special intrinsic value, that should make some difference to the prescriptions of the correct moral theory, hence the prescription of the correct moral theory can't just be maximize aggregative well-being. Utilitarianism doesn't make this difference, so it fails to respect the separateness of persons. Or at least I think that was the reasoning that I would have said when I thought I agreed with this objection.
I guess there are different ways to explain what is required to respect the special intrinsic value of persons. Maybe persons require their autonomy to be respected (independently of concerns with well-being), or that trade-offs made across persons have a higher standard to justify than trade-offs made within a person's life, or that persons have various rights that must be respected, etc. In fact, it seems like many of the common objections to utilitarianism (e.g., rights, desert, responsibility, equality, promise-keeping, etc.) appeal to an intuition about the way persons should be valued. For example, I don't think people value equality because of something impersonally valuable about flat distributions of utility; rather, the idea is that persons have a special claim to be treated as equals or something like that. So, really, it seems like the "separateness of persons" objection functions as just a generic placeholder for any objection to utilitarianism. So I don't find it to be an independently interesting objection, at least from what I've read so far.
Egoism does not take seriously the distinction between moments!