It’s amazing how contrived and detached from reality the counterexamples for utilitarianism have to be able to attack even the most basic forms of it. It really makes you think that utilitarianism is a solid principle.
But aren’t the counterexamples largely detached from reality because in reality people adopt other ethical systems/principles to avoid extreme outcomes?
I’m by no means opposing a general morality of optimising for the greater good, and I think on the whole utilitarianism, like other ideological/ethical systems, gets critiqued in comparison to an impossible standard of perfection. My sense is there are some more basic principles that underpin the success and pragmatism of any ethical/ideological system, and that these principles, to your implied point I think, would safeguard utilitarianism as well as other systems.
I think this is implied in the critique some have against utilitarianism, namely that it needs to introduce weighting in order to adjust the morality towards palatable/sensible means and outcomes. But I don’t think any system could avoid those same coping mechanisms.
People do adopt other systems, feel that utilitarianism must be “wrong” for whatever reason, get research grants from people who agree, and produce incredibly unimpressive work.
What basic principles are you thinking of? Even more basic than hedonism, consequentialism, etc.?
Weighing is just one of critiques against utilitarianism, and it’s a valid one. Maybe the extreme happiness of one person isn’t worth mild suffering of 5 people. But pretending that this upends the entirety of this moral framework, and not one of its building blocks (basically the aggregation function) is kinda silly.
Yeah I think we agree that utilitarianism is held to an unreasonable standard. I think contributing to that is some advocates suggesting it’s a solid utopian model to guide all decisions without further refinement and nuance (and I don’t think this is what you’re arguing).
And because it hasn’t been in practice widely adopted in history (unlike e.g. liberalism or Catholicism) the rubber hasn’t hit the road to allow us to understand how it would work practically. I think some other good ideas suffer the same problem/preemptive attack. Indeed any social progress seems to be attacked by a sort of whataboutism or false slippery slope attack.
To your question on basic principles, I think they’re caught in exercises like the trolley problem or the psychological experiments of the 60s: people on the whole don’t want to be responsible for causing harm, they don’t want to see people in their influence of control harmed, they don’t want to feel bad about themselves, they don’t want to be judged/punished by others - even if convinced it’s for the greater good. I’m not saying some people won’t take a fiercely rational or ideological lens, but on the whole people are influenced by some common psychology. And I think actually this is probably good: as much as it hinders “utopian” ideas being realised I think it ensures humanity moderates ideology.
I think without this a strict utilitarianism, eg a robotic approach, would lead to kinds of harm that I wouldn’t support, even if justified to some sort of ends that itself is subjective. But I think with it, an elevation of the greater good would probably be better than many approaches today. For a practical example I think we should permit more people to consensually enrol in promising but risky cancer research and treatments.
To reiterate that same point I think that in practice those factors would probably allow most systems to be successful, and some/many might be better than what we have now.
This is mostly an amusing logic puzzle of the sort Lewis Carroll liked to write, but there is an unstated moral here: utilitarianism requires a metric of utility, and it can be gamed by people who are merely paying lip service (at best) to utilitarianism, opening the door, in the worst cases, to Mill's tyranny of the majority. The global news, on any given day, contains several such cases.
This is known as a "reductio ad absurdum" argument, and isn't contrived at all. It's easy to make a general rule that applies in the majority of cases. To test whether a general rule has flaws, and to improve upon a general rule, it must be tested by applying it to edge cases. The same way that you test a datetime library by picking potential edge cases (e.g. Leap Day, dates before 1970, dates between Feb. 1-13 in 1918 in Russia, etc), you test a philosophical theory by seeing what it predicts in potential edge cases.
This also deliberately avoids introducing irrelevant arguments. By framing it as a mugger who wants to gain money for purely selfish reasons, we deliberately exclude complicating factors from the statement.
* The argument could be framed around donating to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, rather than a mugger. With the controversies it has had [0], it could be argued that these donations may or may not increase total utility, but donations to charities are part of the best possible path. However, using the Susan G. Komen Foundation as an example relies on accepting a premise that it isn't using donations appropriately, and makes the argument dependent on whether that is or isn't the case.
* The argument could be framed around allowing tax exemptions for all self-described charitable foundations, with Stichting INGKA Foundation [1], part of the corporate structure that owns IKEA, playing the narrative role of the mugger. The argument would be that the tax exemptions provided to charitable foundations are necessary for bringing about the best outcomes, but that they can be taken advantage of. Here, the argument would depend on whether you view the corporate structure of INGKA as a legitimate charity.
* Even staying with purely hypothetical answers, we could ask if the mugger going to starve should be mugging be unsuccessful. These could veer into questions of the local economy, food production, and so on, none of which help to test the validity of utilitarianism.
I've heard this described as crafting the least convenient world. That is, whenever there's a question about the hypothetical scenario that would let you avoid an edge case in a theory, update the hypothetical scenario to be the least convenient option. What if the mugger just needs a hug? Nope, too convenient. What if the mugger isn't going to go through with the finger-chopping? Nope, too convenient.
The problem here is that the counterargument is contrived to the point where it is stupid. This article isn't identifying a problem in theory or practice.
In theory a utilitarian is likely comfortable with the in-principle idea that they might need to sacrifice themselves for a greater good. Pointing that out isn't a counterargument against utilitarianism. In practice, no utilitarian would fall for something this dumb. They'd just keep the money and assume (correctly in my view) they missed something in the argument that invalidates the mugger's position. Or, likely, assume the mugger is lying about being an insane deontologist.
> In practice, no utilitarian would fall for something this dumb.
This is the penultimate conclusion of the dialogue as well, that even Bentham would need to admit so many post-hoc deviations from the general rules of Utilitarianism that it ends up being a form of deontology instead. The primary takeaway is then that Utilitarianism works as a rule-of-thumb, but not as an underlying fundamental truth.
No it isn't, the dialog is strawmaning and claims that Bentham would have to abandon utilitarianism.
I'm claiming that the initial scenario where Bentham caves is reasonable, but in practice will never occur. A utilitarian could reasonably believe Bentham's response was correct (I mean, seriously, would you look at someone and refuse to spend $10 to save their finger? You'd be a monster. As the article points out, we're talking literally 1 person). There is no theoretical problem in that scenario. Bentham has maximised utility based on the scenario presented. It was a scenario designed where the clear-cut utility maximisation choice was to sacrifice $10.
The issue is this scenario is an insane hypothetical that cannot occur in practice. There are no deontologists that strict and there are no choices that binary. So we can conclude in alternate universes that we do not inhabit utilitarianism would not work because these muggers would end up with all the money. Alright. Case closed. Not a practical problem. The first act plays out then the article should end with the conclusion concludes "if that could happen then utilitarianism would have a problem. But it can't so oh well. Turns out utilitarianism is a philosophy that works out really equitably in this universe!"
> In practice, no utilitarian would fall for something this dumb.
What you are saying is exactly what the article says, and you are conceding the article's point, which is that nobody actually practices pure utilitarianism.
Do we want to talk about a hypothetical world where deontology was the underlying moral principle? Where, for example, a large agency in charge of approving vaccines decided to delay approval of a life saving because, even though they received the information on November 20th, they scheduled the meeting for December 10-12th dammit, and that's when it'll be done? By potentially delaying several months because, instead of using challenge trials to directly assess the safety of a vaccine by exposing willing volunteers to both the supposed cure and disease, instead gave the cure to a couple of tens of thousands of people, and just waited until enough of them got sick and died to a disease "that would have got them anyway" to gather enough statistics for safety? Which is definitely good, you see, because no one got directly harmed by said agency, even if many more people in the country were dying of this theoretical disease. [0]
Or, even better, what if distribution of this life saving cure was done based on the deontological concept of fairness? Surely, this wouldn't result in limited and highly demanded vaccines being literally thrown away[1] in the name of equity and where vaccination companies wouldn't need to seek approval for something as simple as increasing doses of vaccines in vials. [2]
You know, just all theoretically, since it would be a terrible shame if any of these things happened in the real world, since this is just one specific scenario and I'm sure I can make up various [3] other [4] ways [5] in which not carefully evaluating the consequences of moral actions would turn out poorly, but hey!
I'm sure glad that utilitarianism isn't being entertained more on the margin, since we already live in the best of all possible moral universes.
(Footnote, I'm not going to justify these citations within this post, because it's pithier this way. I recognize this is not being fully honest and transparent, but I'd be happy to fully defend the inclusion of any these, if necessary)
It's not at all detached. People are manipulative all the time, including using themselves to reduce overall utility. Emotional blackmail is a name given to one variety of this.
It's not really a reflection on utilitarianism. That's just philosophical ethics, at least in the form that predominates in Anglo-American philosophy departments.
The game of coming up with "counterexamples" to moral theories is fun, but basically stupid. By definition it involves "contriving" cases, however realistic really, which can make whatever preposterous "stipulations" they please. The underlying assumption is that moral theories are somehow like scientific theories in that they are validated by "predicting" the available observational "data", i.e. our moral intuitions, i.e. the social values of the cultural/economic groups we're a part of. Mysteriously, christian conservative scolds engage with philosophy and end up developing something a lot like christian social conservatism, and cosmopolitan liberal scolds come up with something a lot like cosmopolitan social liberalism, despite the fact that both are engaged in this highly scientific form of inquiry. Very odd.
The whole game is also probably largely irrelevant to the kind of stuff Bentham actually cared about, since he mainly wanted to use utilitarianism to guide state policy, and (famously) hard cases make bad law.
I’m by no means opposing a general morality of optimising for the greater good, and I think on the whole utilitarianism, like other ideological/ethical systems, gets critiqued in comparison to an impossible standard of perfection. My sense is there are some more basic principles that underpin the success and pragmatism of any ethical/ideological system, and that these principles, to your implied point I think, would safeguard utilitarianism as well as other systems.
I think this is implied in the critique some have against utilitarianism, namely that it needs to introduce weighting in order to adjust the morality towards palatable/sensible means and outcomes. But I don’t think any system could avoid those same coping mechanisms.