WTF Is Up With The Separateness of Persons Objection?

Are moral philosophers dropping acid?

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?