What’s wrong with the utilitarian philosophy?
As its name implies, utilitarianism aims to be a useful, a practical philosophy. But the German philosopher Gotthold Lessing (1729-1781), musing about utilitarianism, was on to something important when he asked, “What is the use of use?” That was not just word play. Lessing understood that the idea of usefulness ultimately makes sense only when it is underwritten by some definite idea of the good. X is useful for the project of doing Y. If it is Z you are after, X may be a complete wash-out.
When we set about the practical tasks of everyday life, this question generally does not have much urgency because we know pretty well what good we are aiming at. We want a cup of coffee and a roll and we set about doing the things to realize that aim. But when we step back to ponder larger moral issues, the question of the good for human life (as Aristotle might put it) suddenly snaps into the foreground.
Grammar may be of some help in clarifying what Lessing had in mind. There is much that we do in life that takes place under the aegis of “in order to.” We exercise in order to stay healthy, we go to the bank in order to withdraw money, we go to the airport in order to travel somewhere. But there is also much in life that we do not in order to achieve a specific end but for the sake of some good.
The distinction between the “in order to” and the “for the sake of” is a distinction between the calculation of means and the acknowledgment of an ideal. One important human ideal is freedom. A central reason that the utilitarian fantasy with which we began is morally repugnant is because it requires the violation of freedom.
It therefore builds a fatal weakness into its very foundation. The utilitarian promise works to the extent that we understand ourselves as creatures who behave in order to achieve certain ends. To the extent that we see our selves as moral creatures — creatures, that is to say, whose lives are bounded by an ideal of freedom — utilitarianism presents itself as a version of nihilism: a philosophy, a Nietzsche put it, for which the the question “Why?” has no answer. “What is the use of use?” That is one question the thoroughgoing utilitarian refuses to ask himself. Entertained in earnest, that question reveals the limits of utilitarianism. The limit is reached where morality begins, which is why a utilitarian faced with our thought experiment can only endorse what it proposes or wring his hands in mute uneasiness.
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When I asked them to provide an argument to persuade a burglar not to burglarize most students fell back on some version of the utilitarian argument that, if we all burglarized our neighbors, society would face collapse. This might be persuasive if only Joe Society was accessible by e-mail,post or fax, but any burglar anxious to pay his kids’ college tuition could only agree that he wouldn’t want everybody to burglarize either. It would imperil his store of loot.
Only a few students managed to devise an answer based on conviction.
The use of useful and the meaning of meaning. Subjects for deep meditation.
It all depends on what “is” is.
Yea dude philosophy is so stupid! Aristotle and Socrates? Don’t they know climate “scientists” and banal materialists are the real arbiters of meaning?!
If you look at the results of Utilitarianism in the late 18th through middle 19th centuries then in answering your question I would say yes. Many of the freedoms and reforms we take for granted in our world came about because of thinkers such as Bentham and Mill.
According to fundamentalist secular leftists who rewrite history. Non theists have been a part of the move forward but until about fifty years ago they were a very small component of the Christian civilization and its very non utilitarian morality code which built the civilization that provides you with all the things you care so much about.
Being snarky and pretending you’re smarter than all that because you know the name of some atheist philosophers no one cares about won’t change anything!
What did utilitarianism really bring the last few centuries, whatever its modest positive effects? Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. All people who believed that the millions of lives of the people who they murdered in cold blood were worth their utopian leftist fantasies.
If we have to take heat for pedophile priests then you must all explain the unhappy coincidence that history’s greatest mass murderers were all strict followers of your belief system!
Mass death in the 20th century was not the result of utilitarianism, or secular society. Each of the dictators was a collectivist, which is not the same as utilitarianism. But individuality has had its enemies in the social sciences, and one of them is David Riesman, whose views I contrasted to Hayek’s here: http://clarespark.com/2010/10/09/david-riesman-v-friedrich-hayek/. Authoritarianism can be found throughout the political spectrum, and should be better understood.
Or better still, see http://clarespark.com/2011/11/21/cormac-mccarthy-vs-herman-melville/. It is “secular winds” that blow the world into apocalyptic catastrophes. This is not my view, and mad scientists are figments of certain conservative imaginations.
I also think that the reluctance on the part of most people to provide a reason for their uneasiness is troubling. For one thing, it suggests that for many people, moral intuitions are unsupported by articulate moral principles. It also suggests that, acting more or less like utilitarians in our daily lives, we are poorly equipped to challenge utilitarian proposals when they go too far.
But why should moral intuitions of most people be supported by articulate principles? And why need we all be equipped to challenge a given principle? A world where all ordinary people are intellectuals who apply systematic thought on all moral matters would be horrible, and is thankfully not going to happen.
An easy consolation for the author of the article will be the concept of guilt.
Seems to me that this is the matter that trouble to all this moral-antiutiliarns.
If can assume the guilt of killing one man for the sake of the mankind you are done. If can assume the responsability of violation the freedom of one humen being for the sake of the freedom of all other ok. Besides, if you can not to tell the others the shame in what his happiness and fredom are based, better. Eyes not seen heart not feeling. The problem is that the moral courage of be an immortal annonymous little sinner is too much for the non utilitarinas. Weak minds can´t stand for the well of others. The moral ego of one have been the doom of the many.
Yet we execute murderers for deterrance. For every one we execute there are 8 fewer murder victims.
Bentham was correct to describe rights as nonsense on stilts.
Murderers are, by definition, not innocent. Rather they are someone who, generally with for-knowledge of the penalties that they would be subject too, killed someone without justification.
Executing someone who has committed murder is a far cry from picking random person off the street and throwing them into the “happiness” grinder.
That is wrong on at least three levels.
1. The social goal that most people actually seek to achieve via execution is justice, not deterrence.
2. If deterrence were truly the reason on which the decision to use execution hinged, we’d apply it liberally to serious felonies ranging from major white collar crimes, to rape, to armed robbery.
3. Execution has no empirically provable impact on the decision of most murderers to murder people.
I could also add a fourth, that is that if justice is merely a matter of expedience as utilitarians claim, it would be impossible to say that executing anyone for any offense whatsoever is ipso facto unjust. After all, rights are just nonsense on stilts. Therefore no concrete right is violated if the state decides to send roving death squads into Central Park to summarily execute the homeless sleeping there.
True. The ultimate utilitarian solution to crime (as practiced in, say, 18th century London) was simply to hang most criminals – everyone from murderers to pickpockets. A criminal is a parasite and a danger to society. Society is entitled to remove him permanently, just as a surgeon would excise a tumor from a patient. The part is sacrificed for the good of the whole. That works like a charm, but it’s not justice.
I don’t think utilitarianism can even provide justice as we understand it. Justice is what’s just – what’s fit, meet, appropriate, balanced, fair, right. It’s not an intellectual construct. It’s a priori. It comes from the gut. It’s based on human nature – our deepest instincts as social organisms. I think that all the massive, complex legal systems we’ve developed throughout history are just elaborations of things we can’t express because they just “are.” So I don’t think utilitarianism can tell us what punishment a criminal “deserves.” You can’t plug that concept into a cost-benefit calculation.
If somebody says he wants to construct a system of justice on a purely rational basis, run away fast. He ain’t human and he probably doesn’t think you are, either.
1. The social goal that most people actually seek to achieve via execution is justice, not deterrence.
I can’t see this as correct. In ancient (paleolithic) times execution removed offenders from the gene pool (the offender’s offspring would likely starve) and the resource pool. “Justice” is an abstract concept that requires enough resources to have a choice to apply, therefore this is a modern (not paleolithic) concept. Note that as late as the middle ages in Europe the usual consequence of execution was the same as in ancient times. Justice never had a chance to enter the picture.
It’ impossible to know why Paleolithic people executed each other, or even whether they performed what we would understand as executions. No written records of their beliefs regarding justice. Given that human nature doesn’t change, I’d say they probably had at least a basic notion of justice – the idea that doing harm to someone “deserves” some kind of punishment. Whether they believed it was society’s role to judge offenders and administer punishment is unknown. Justice back then may have been limited to personal revenge. Or not – we just don’t know. But I doubt they had any theories about “removing criminals from the gene pool.” Possibly just “removing criminals,” period.
I’m not an expert on medieval legal theory, but I know it was extremely complicated, infused with Christian morality, and definitely based on a recognizable concept of justice.
Either you have been inarticulate or you believe that you should have no rights. In many places in this world women would not dare to put forth their opinion, even remotely contrary to that of a man, or any opinion at all. Likewise, they have no right to their own body. You possess those rights. Is that nonsense on stilts?
The purpose of executing murderers, like the purpose of imprisonment for lesser crimes, is incapacitation, not deterrence.
As I learned in studying abnormal psychology, and later in actual practice in law enforcement, criminals are as rule immune to deterrence other than by immediate and physical means (i.e., the application of security measures up to and including physical force).
Simply put, most either do not have, or do not exercise, foresight to the degree of assessing the potential future consequences of their actions. The concept of “If I do this, they’ll put me in jail” rarely registers, except insofar as with the conditional “But only if they catch me” added. Most criminals are convinced that they are smarter than “straights” anyway (after all, they get money without working for it), so they have a finely-tuned contempt for the authorities, and their victims, to begin with.
Somebody with that sort of mindset is not going to be “deterred” by a threat of punishment. Only actual punishment works, and then only insofar as it disables their ability to prey on others.
Progressives often decry the fact that as “crime goes down, incarceration goes up”. As usual, they have reversed the cause and the effect. Crime rates go down because increased penalties put more criminals behind bars, where they can’t commit further crimes. (This is why the present fad for “mainstreaming” some criminals who are deemed “less dangerous” is a bad idea, and will lead to problems down the road.)
Seen in the correct light, capital punishment for murder makes perfect sense. Many murderers who have served “life” sentences have killed again, either in prison or after being released in the name of “humanitarianism”.
No murderer has ever killed anyone else after being executed. Unlike other methods of “rehabilitation”, in this respect, execution is 100% effective in preventing the criminal from re-offending.
clear ether
eon
Like I said above (but before I read your comment), it would seem that death is the perfect utilitarian solution to the problem of crime. A criminal causes harm to society. Remove the criminal, remove the harm. Does removing the criminal have any negative impact on society? For most criminals, it would be hard to answer “yes.” Viewed as members of the collective, very few of us are critical or irreplaceable.
I think the sense of justice is what prevents us from implementing the perfect utilitarian solution.
Agreed. Another way to put it is a “sense of proportion”. That being, jaywalking is dangerous to both the jaywalker and anyone who might be driving down the street at the time, but we don’t execute people for jaywalking.
When you get to the point where every offense is seen as a mortal threat to social order, no matter what it is, you have veered into either “Les Miserables” territory (think; Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert), or else into the range of your typical Third World dictatorship. Remember Haiti under “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his TonTon Macoute thugs; what was a capital crime on any given day might depend on exactly how deranged Papa Doc was at breakfast time.
If you go too far the other way, you arrive at the place where crime is seen as a protest against an “unjust society”. Therefore, any crime, no matter how heinous, becomes the fault of society as a whole, not the offender. And the victims (assuming they are still alive) get lectured on “well, this is what you deserve for being part of an unjust society”- while the criminal is essentially patted on the head and told “Don’t cry, we’ll make it all better for you”.
Yes, I have seen judges follow substantially this procedure in felony cases. They are uniformly shocked when the criminal shows up in their court again, accused of an even more heinous offense. About half the judges still don’t impose a serious penalty, even then; depending on how devoted to the “victim of society” dogma the judge is, even when it flies in the face of logic.
The answer is, of course, common sense. But as Gerrold’s Law states, “It’s too bad that common sense, isn’t”.
cheers
eon
Thou shall not murder.
Love thy neighbor as thyself.
It would not be “murder”. There are indications that such “sacrifices” occurred in the Andes about 1000 years ago. Some mummies of young children were discovered, and thought to have been killed after drugging them. They were young children and thus “innocent”. Archaeologists believe the killings were ritual sacrifices.
Being an engineer type myself, I would just laugh in the proposer’s face. There is NO way to leverage a worldwide effect out of one random sacrifice.
Worse, if it were implemented, it would not work. And the politicians would decide that maybe the Gods wanted MORE sacrifices.
You beat me to it. You cannot get wonderful results out of murdering innocents.
You can, however get wonderful results from killing off truly evil people. Killing off Hussein and his two loathsome whelps was a very good thing, since they were responsible for roughly 600,000 murders of their own people. Some people just need killing, so that others do not get murdered by them.
The important thing is to know the difference between killing and murder. The original text of the Bible does not say, “Thou shalt not kill.” It says, “Thou shalt not murder.” ‘Kill’ is a mistranslation by some idiot who did not know the damned difference.
Good point. If the world is to improve, it stands a better chance the more evil folks thrown in the lava then good ones.
Just say’in.
I agree that the proposition is self canceling because of the engineering. However, the proposition specifies that the engineering is possible. The nature of that engineering is the downfall. What must be re-engineered is not the world but, the people in it. To engineer the politicians out of humans, would we not remove organizers, and leaders. For every possible negative trait yhere is at least one positive application. In the end would we be but sheep, waiting to be sacraficed?
“I agree that the proposition is self canceling because of the engineering. However, the proposition specifies that the engineering is possible.”
I’d assume that somebody was lying. I’ve seen too many politicians insist ‘the engineering is possible’ or equivalent.
Utilitarianism also violates a fundamental principle of human life that Albert Einstein expressed thusly:
“Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves.” (From the Essay, Cosmic Religious Feeling)
Eastern thought put it even more simply: the goal of life is happiness, and happiness can be achieved only by expansion of awareness – by an increase of health, love, inner strength, wisdom, and communion with divine joy.
Contractive acts and attitudes, on the contrary, decrease happiness. And that’s why the good of the individual can never be sacrificed to produce some spurious “good” of the pack – because it is contractive. Read: selfish. The lessons for politics aren’t too hard to find.
“Eastern thought put it even more simply: the goal of life is happiness, and happiness can be achieved only by expansion of awareness – by an increase of health, love, inner strength, wisdom, and communion with divine joy.”
The danger in this, of course, is who decides what constitutes the above. In the Sixties and Seventies, everyone from the Beatles to Tim Leary believed that the best way to attain this state (defined as Nirvana in Hinduism) was by junking Western civilization in its entirety and consuming massive amounts of psychotropic chemicals. Today, Islamism believes the same state can be achieved if the true believers can just kill enough non-believers.
All such systems operate on the principle of a small group of “enlightened thought leaders” who make the decisions, and reap the rewards. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and the imams of Iran being cases in point.
The leadership in Eastern, “mystic” cultures (and I include Communism in this category) invariably do well, materially and otherwise. Everybody else in the society, not so much so.
Our present President and his minions have a romanticized view of Eastern mysticism which causes them to overlook the small flaws in its implementation in the real world. As do many of our Western academics, who really should know better. Unless, of course, they don’t believe that past history is a guide to what mistakes of the past to avoid repeating. (My guess is that most such either have never heard of Arnold Toynbee, or else just don’t like him much.)
IMHO, the “mystic East” is over-rated. Historically, its devotion to such things as meditation, caste systems, exclusionary religions, etc., as opposed to actual, concrete physical accomplishments (ranging from road building to flush toilets) has stunted the growth of its cultures and impoverished its people. On “utilitarian” grounds, it fails the “greatest good for the greatest number” test.
clear ether
eon
“I think that the uneasiness that most people feel about this utilitarian fantasy is a good thing. I also think that the reluctance on the part of most people to provide a reason for their uneasiness is troubling. For one thing, it suggests that for many people, moral intuitions are unsupported by articulate moral principles.”
Is it so troubling? Most people aren’t moral philosophers, and we should be grateful that the inclination of those people is to recoil from the idea of an annual sacrifice.
I am reminded of CS Lewis’ observation (in the Abolition of Man?) that he would rather play poker with someone who believed that “gentleman do not cheat at cards”, than with a moral philosopher who had exquisitely reasoned himself into the view that cheating was morally wrong.
Useful? Meaning? How about Moral? Or Ethical. Or Right and Wrong.
Or, (horrors!) Good and EVIL?
One of the major problems with “utilitarianism” is that it quickly leads from a personal philosophy of, “If it feels good, do it; if not, stop it” to an attitude that, “If I think this is a good idea it must be so and everyone must adopt it.” The last line is, of course, the platform of the current “progressive” movement in the U.S. Long term consequences be damned. If it hurts some minor group, too bad because I think it is good for the majority. So, we get to the idea of “let’s stop air pollution even if we cut electricity production and destroy the economy – I have enough and if you don’t, tough;” and, “we need to save a tiny fish so we must stop using water to grow food for both our nation and the world; let’s start a desert in central California.”
Well said! In addition; I live smack in the middle of the utilitarian desert (just up the road from Victor Davis Hansen) of which you speak and I haven’t eaten even one of those tiny little smelt! Once again it seems a self canceling, unproductive (read NOT GOOD!) mindset.
Utilitarianism is a horrible philosophy. It assumes that human beings exist for the good of the community. It should be the other way. Utilitarianism brought us corporatism, relativism, nihilism, the thoughtless acceptance of euthanasia & abortion by governments, Communist dictators, Obama, & Adolph Hitler. Everything wrong that occurred in the 20th century came from utilitarianism.
#8. Ellen — I agree, such a scheme would not work in the end, but that was not the point of the thought experiment; what if someone DID come up with such a scheme that seemed to be workable? What if Roger’s mad scientist persuaded us that it could be done? What would your objection then be? What rational basis would you have to reject any such scheme?
#10 lefroy — The above bit is why Roger is troubled by people’s inability to articulate why they think his hypothetical scheme is evil. If you can’t object to a course of action because of any point of principle or logic, all you have left is emotion, & this is easily manipulated over time. For instance, back around 1790, it took just a few years for France to go from expressing the universal brotherhood of man to an official policy of improving humanity’s lot by exterminating the unvirtuous.
This rapid degeneration of some apparently logical utopia into an abattoir seems to be quite common; Communism in Russia & China are somewhat more recent examples that come to mind. The next time someone comes along with such a scheme, he’ll very likely brush off historical precedents with a “This time it’s different”, & persuade a fair number of people of that. And since utilitarianism is frequently used to dismiss tradition & history (“We shouldn’t be held back by old customs if we want to make things better!”), I share Roger’s doubts that it’s a philosophy robust enough to resist our tendencies to genocidal happiness.
“What if someone DID come up with such a scheme that seemed plausibly workable?”
And you could teach a snake to tap-dance, if you could just get the shoes on his little feet.
This is why these philosophers are so dangerous. They veer off into la-la land, into an academic world insulated from all reality. They come up with cockamamie schemes devoid of reality and, most importantly, morality. They entertain the most fantastical notions, when a proper-thinking person rejects such nonsense instinctively as purely fabulous.
For example, communism, in theory, works… if people were not just so self-interested. If everyone would just work with all their hearts for the benefit of all. Shyahright! No one would prefer to loaf all day and let others do the work. No one would be criminal at all. And there would not be the power-junkies who would exercise their power, because that is how they get their jollies. Which alternate reality would that be, specifically? Anyone with a modicum of sense knows immediately that Communism is childish drivel.
While you are seeking Utopia, be sure to wish for a pony, as well.
“But, what if…?”
Drivel.
Mr. Malone, I take offense at your juvenile dismissal of my philosophy. I firmly believe that I am diagonally parked in a parallel universe and I’ll fight to the death to defend my well researched position (or until the government grant money runs out)! Heathen!
a. The death penalty is not a deterrant, but is sure a guarantee against a repeat performance.
b. We ask people to sacrifice themselves for the higher good constantly: consider the military, the police and firemen as obvious examples.
Otherwise Utilitarianism is, as is most of philosophy, the deep analysis of the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin. It is more important when analyzing the extent to which government can intrude on the freedom of the individual, in which case philosophy mostly comes down on the side of government and against the individual. Funny about that, isn’t it?
That analogy doesn’t hold. Military (recently anyway), firefighters, and law enforcement are not forced to do those jobs. They aren’t randomly selected off the streets (thank God).
If there were a scenario where those who might be sacrificed voluntarily subscribed to the risk. I would subscribe tomorrow, and so would many reading this. (“Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon”?)
In one sense, a soldier does the same thing, except taking a much greater risk for a much smaller social good.
It is a much toothier problem, however, if the victim were taken completely at random, not having consented to the risk.
That’s interested. I was wondering, if the sacrifice were strictly voluntary, how many people would actually sign up to be victims. I imagine that in any society you’d find quite a few takers – probably enough to keep the world cozy forever.
I am just the opposite of you: I would never sacrifice myself for Humanity because collectively the bastards don’t deserve it. By the same token, I don’t deserve to have anyone else sacrifice themselves for me. I cause most of my own suffering; it would be criminal to ask anyone other than me to pay for it. I know we’re getting into Jesus Christ territory here but I’m not bucking for sainthood so it doesn’t matter.
I would sacrifice myself for a loved one, a friend, soldier buddies, an innocent child, and maybe a few others I can’t think of right now. But humanity in general? Screw ‘em.
You are so right. That is exactly why a personal relationship with Jesus the Christ, Blessed Redeemer is appealing to so many. Faith in Jesus and the God of the bible is an upside down faith contrary to human nature or philosophy.
Utilitarianism is the most easily refuted of political premises. Nor does one need to recur to moral fundamentals to destroy it; it refutes itself with the contradictions between its core principles.
Our problem, as lovers of freedom, is to get others to understand it and love it as we do. Thomas Szasz once defined freedom as “That which you demand for yourself, but would deny to others.” Should we ever succeed in erasing the second clause of that definition, our battle would be won.
‘He who saves one life saves the world entire.’
One might try to distinguish between saving the world,
and saving oneself alone, but at bottom it is the same
Devil’s Bargain, and has the same hellish results.
Samuel Delany, in his SF novel ‘Empire Star’ proposes
the inverse bargain: One person willingly experiences
exponential Hell in order to purchase the services of
a slave race which can rebuild her war-torn civilization.
I believe John Stuart Mill was a utilitarian that used the rationale that women should be given equal rights so as to maximize the potential that a society might realize from their conributions. Madam Curie is a good example of the utilization of the best and the brightest. Nothing is perfect. Utilitarianism
appears to be very similar to the economic principle of the Law of Diminishing Returns. One should try to do that which maximizes the benefits of ones work, wealth, life, etc.
isn’t this thought experiment–an innocent sacrificed for the benefit of the clan–in fact the basis of the classic Shirley Jackson short-story “The Lottery”?
With regard to sacrifices, of humans or animals, as having direct consequential results – that’s been tried and found empirically empty. So, we have to consider the logic or illogic of utilitarianism.
But first, I’d like to consider the results: peace, prosperity and general happiness. Whew. These are general rather than particular terms; that is, they apply to the whole population. And that’s what bothers me. It sets up a no-change society that is closed to individual reason and freedom to question and analyze.
If we opt for ‘peace’, I assume that this means that no dissent, no different opinions, can emerge. In the boardrooms, in the science labs, in the govt halls. How functional is that? Have we really solved all questions, both the ones that exist now and the ones that will arise? Does consensus, which is peace, solve problems?
Prosperity? What does this mean? Is there are minimum standard for its definition? What if someone goes above it?
General happiness? How does one achieve this, when a great deal of happiness is internally subjective and not amenable to external control?
So, I question both the desirability of these results, which would, I suggest, bring innovation and adaptive capacities to a screeching halt but would in addition, entropically reduce a society to its LCD, lowest common denominator of living.
Now, for the theory of utilitarianism – to act on behalf of, not oneself, but for the greatest good. Good, remember, is defined as peace, prosperity and general happiness. What if, we the people, decide that these results are best guaranteed, not by the murder of only one person which lacks force but by the expulsion of all members of a certain religion. That’s been tried. Has it worked?
Or, by the forbidding of one gender from carrying out certain activities: such as voting, or driving, or going to school.
How about killing one person, claiming their insurance policy, and donating it all to build a school for poor children? Heck, that’s for ‘the greater good’, isn’t it?
That brings us to the relation between cause and effect. As I’ve said, I’m not sure that the effect of peace, prosperity and general happiness is that desirable. But I’m also not sure that there can be any causal link between a specific practical action (one murder, expulsion/murder of a mass of people) and an abstract result for a general community. Is there any connection between the particular and the abstract? Has there ever been? No.
Finally, is there such a thing is ‘jus naturale’ or natural law, as well as ‘just gentium’ (social laws)? Wouldn’t the former reject the hedonism of harming the few to benefit the collective?
Let’s change it up a bit. Suppose, instead of sacrificing one person per year, there was a one-time sacrifice of 1/4 of the world’s population. The principle is the same; the lesser is to be sacrificed for the greater good. However, this is much less likely to win approval. Why? Because now it is much more likely that we or someone we know will be chosen to die. Human beings largely define good by how it affects them.
This utilitarian view is also, as I noted in Roger’s previous article on Mill, a mechanical view of society; that is, society is a ‘sum of bits’.
So, society is a collection of ‘individual bits’ which are all to be kept more or less the same (as bits) and thus, the focus is on the means by which this mechanical whole, the society, is best organized by these bits. Darwin’s evolutionary theory is similar – it too considers the whole, the species, as a sum of bits, and random changes to one bit can harm the species. In society, this view means that one must control randomness by the philosophy of utilitarianism, or, the focus on maintaining a homogeneity within the collection-of-bits: the society.
In this view, society or the species of man, has no integral nature, that moral law that governs the whole. It is just a collection of individuals and the best society is one where individualism or randomness is, morally, repressed.
Would it be moral to allow billions to suffer, and many to die, for the sake of 1 person’s life? What if that person was you?
I think you’ve found the weak spot in this thought experiment. It doesn’t specify whether the victim is willing or unwilling. In my opinion, that factor alone is what makes the scheme moral or immoral. “Engineering” issues aside, assuming the arrangement really works and is not just superstition (sacrificing to the Volcano God or whatever), then there’s nothing immoral about a willing (and sane) victim submitting to death in order to benefit the rest of humanity. And even if the arrangement works, it’s completely immoral to sacrifice an unwilling victim – that would be murder.
If you want to get into a gray and dangerous area, though, imagine the victims are all convicted murderers and rapists. We have a vast supply of them and more are being born ever minute. There would be enough to keep the world safe and happy forever. Just to keep things legal, we could select them only from states and countries that have the death penalty. They would already be scheduled for execution; this way, their deaths would be of positive benefit to humanity. Sounds like a perfect solution. But it makes me wonder how many non-death-penalty states and countries would reinstate capital punishment. Also whether the rates of conviction for capital crimes would go up. And if there would arise a new species of whack-o that commits murder specifically in order to be sacrificed and thereby become a hero. “Saviour by cop” – what a weird idea.
Your friends thought experiment was made into a short story by Ursula LeGuin some years back, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”
It was inspired by a quote from William James:
“Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”
Is that the one where the whole kingdom is happy and prosperous because they keep an innocent child locked up and starving in a dungeon?
Bentham left his estate to the founding of a non sectarian college which is now University College, London University.
A condition of his will was that he preside at meetings of its governing body. So he was stuffed and mounted, seated in his favorite chair with his dog in a case which is on display in the lobby and is wheeled into some meetings.
Here he is:
http://www.texaswillsandtrustslaw.com/2011/04/06/wacky-wednesday-wills-that-make-you-go-hmmm-jeremy-bentha/
As a child I was often taken to see him by my father, a Ph. D. University College. My education in utilitarianism was salutary.
I recall reading Bentham during my college days in the early 70′s. My concerns with Utilitarianism haven’t changed since. That is; who decides the “utility” of things. Roger is exactly correct. You must give away freedom to the philosopher king (state) for the “utility” to be correctly decided.
That’s where we find ourselves today.
Reminds me of the “Lifeboat” scenario which a Progressive teacher posed to my class in 7th grade: Ten people in a lifeboat, each with different characteristics, with supplies for only eight. How do you decide who stays, and who will have to be sacrificed for the good of the others?
I was pretty much alone in insisting that NOBODY should be sacrificed, although I couldn’t articulate it any better than to say that it would be wrong.
Forty years on, I can say with certainty that it would create a dynamic on board the boat which would militate against ANYBODY surviving: Once you accept the premise that sacrificing two people would improve survival chances for the remainder, logic tells you that sacrificing FOUR would make survival chances even better for the remaining six.
Instead of a group working together for common survival, the passengers would quickly devolve into conniving cliques and individuals working to eliminate competitors.
The Big Question is: Who gets to define utility?
Often the needs of the few or the one outweigh the needs of the many.
Would need to know if the person sacrificed at random had previously agreed to the risk. If membership in this society is voluntary, works as advertised and general happiness insured individual happiness (this is simple musings after all) then for an individual it can be seen as an acceptable risk/reward choice. It is a much more difficult question without these constraints.
I would never take such a devil’s bargain; the only way such a scheme would work would be magic–sacrifice to Molech so that everyone else has prosperity etc. You’d have to have a magic spell to force all the people to be peaceful and prosperous, otherwise no dice. And anyone who offered such a devil’s bargain is evil already, so no way their nifty magic solution could work. Germany went through a kind of similar idea a while back. They got up out of the depression before anyone else, became prosperous etc, at the low low price of a few Jews being sent off to ‘work’ camps. Turned out great for them, didn’t it?
I’d rather choose my own hell than be forced into any heaven. The only way to create a perfectly named utopia is to destroy free will. Since it can’t be done in our world by any means known, all the failed attempts do is chalk up an ever-greater tally of murders. What’s the simplest definition of evil? ANYTHING that detracts, denies, pretends to destroy, or attempts to limit free will in any way shape or form is evil. The greater the degree of slavery proposed, the more evil the proposer. Promising what seems a small price (1 life vs billions) in exchange for your free will but continual ‘happiness’ isn’t exactly a bargain. Happiness can’t be given, can’t be guaranteed, it is a simple fact of the universe, and that is the central fallacy of all the romantic philosophies and political movements from Jacobins to Nazis to ‘progressives.’ Nothing can force me to be happy, and nothing can force me to be unhappy. I can pursue happiness while being tortured in prison, and I can pursue misery even when I’m Divine Emperor of the world. Utilitarianism suffers from the same problem as all the other romantic belief systems: nothing negates human nature.
The utilitarian question is generally acceptable in the abstract. Where it falls down is when you start thinking about the nitty-gritty. It’s all well and good to imagine some poor innocent being sacrificed, but there’s a reasonable probability that it will be you or some member of your family that is chosen. In addition, humans being humans, there is really no possibility that the choice will really be random: the rich and politically powerful will, like Andromeda’s mother, attempt to keep themselves and their children from the pool, some will attempt to increase the chances of the politically undesirable, some will attempt to alter the odds for their friends or enemies.
Utilitarianism fails because, ultimately, it allows men to pretend that they are gods. We cannot see very far into the future, and what we do see we often see imperfectly. Utilitarianism does not see that there are some things which simply should not be done – not because they will not help people, even a majority, now, but because the long-term cost will be too high. Principles exist, like religious commandments, because long-term experience (or Divine Providence) has shown certain actions or situations to simply have too high a cost no matter how high the short term gain.
Maybe we’re better off with a small dose of utilitarianism where appropriate. Any “one size fits all” political philosophy is bound to crash into random circumstances and human nature at some point. There are areas where utilitarian thought can be useful, other areas where it’s irrelevant, and still others where its downright inhuman.
That’s usually why systems like Marxism fail. They can’t deal with chaos – the fact that Reality throws stuff at us that we can’t predict and that doesn’t correspond with our neat little theories about it. Marx was literally a madman. He suffered from the delusion that his theory could predict the future and control history. Ultimate 19th century industrial-age hubris.
It strikes me as pretty obvious we should accept the deal, so I don’t think we should credit peoples revulsion as hugely morally salient.
If we take the deal, then one innocent person is killed at random. This is very bad.
But if we don’t take the deal, *many* innocent people will be killed, in a similarly random way: it will be a lottery of birth, rather than a lottery of our own devising. So you aren’t even trading off some higher principle for greater happiness and less suffering; it seems simply a case of preferring less suffering and death over more suffering and death, because we are already in a situation when many people are allocated to death via effectively random means – no one chose or deserved to be born in the affluent west instead of in the midst of famine and poverty. It is the 1 versus 5 trolley problem (or rather one versus untold millions), and most people when presented with *that* experiment say it is fine to switch.
And I think distance from reflective equilibrium better explains the dislike for the utilitarian answer here, and not some greater malaise in utilitarianism itself – frame the same trade in a trolley problem way, and you’d get people thinking it is obviously preferable. Moral intuitions are unreliable guides, and so we need to interrogate them carefully.