One argument against utilitarianism is that no one actually follows it. I call this the Argument from Hypocrisy. A better objection, though, is that even highly scrupulous utilitarians don’t comply with their stated principles; I call this the Argument from Conscience. In Governing Least, Moller powerfully develops a parallel objection: While utilitarians often urge self-sacrifice, they rarely preach other-sacrifice. But given their principles, they totally should! Moller’s explanation is so well-phrased that I decided to reproduce a complete section.
Challenges to living with utilitarianism tend to focus on what I called options— the option we think we normally have to flout the overall good when we rather sleep in, or buy a subwoofer instead of donating to charity. But what really cuts ice are constraints on our actions. Singer and others emphasize that they can accept that they do not, as utilitarians, have the option to loaf about when they could help others, however much they fall short. But what is really hard about living with utilitarianism isn’t self-sacrifice but other-sacrifice, paradoxically enough. This wouldn’t be so if we were purely self- interested, but we aren’t, and the prospect of exploiting others for the greater good thus terrifies us. Of course, it’s rare that harming innocents will produce much good, but it’s easy enough to come up with cases:
Grandma: Grandma is a kindly soul who has saved up tens of thousands of dollars in cash over the years. One fine day you see her stashing it away under her mattress, and come to think that with just a little nudge you could cause her to fall and most probably die. You could then take her money, which others don’t know about, and redistribute it to those more worthy, saving many lives in the process. No one will ever know. Left to her own devices, Grandma would probably live a few more years, and her money would be discovered by her unworthy heirs who would blow it on fancy cars and vacations. Liberated from primitive deontic impulses by a recent college philosophy course, you silently say your goodbyes and prepare to send Grandma into the beyond.If this seems too outré to take seriously, we can try this instead:
Child: Your son earns a good living as a doctor but is careless with some of his finances. You sometimes help him out by organizing his receipts and invoices. One day you have the opportunity to divert $1,000 from his funds to a charity where the money will do more good; neither he nor anyone else will ever notice the difference, besides the beneficiaries. You decide to steal your child’s money and promote the overall good.Recall that we’ve already set aside ecumenical views that side with deontic morality in practice. So it’s no use to protest that the true utilitarian theory has some esoteric feature that lets us ignore the case, say because we should only follow rules with good consequences, and killing those around us to reduce hunger would have terrible consequences overall. The only views left on the table at this point are precisely those that are willing to contemplate that, at least in some circumstances, rubbing out Grandma and stealing from our children is the right thing to do. The problem, then, is that most people don’t seem able to accept even that they ought to aspire to such behavior, let alone engage in it. Exploiting those we love isn’t an ideal we fail to attain, it’s the very antipode of the ideals themselves. Just consider contexts in which we are specifically seeking to articulate them, as when we instruct our children. Do revisionist utilitarians sit down their sons and daughters and implore them to steal from their friends when it is possible to do so undetected and to divert the money to famine relief? There are many books by revisionist utilitarians telling us that we ought to do more to live up to the demands of morality through self- sacrifice; the fact that there are so few urging us to engage in more other-sacrifice would be surprising if revisionists really could take their philosophy seriously in practice.
Notice, again, that Moller is not invoking the Argument from Hypocrisy. “The problem, then, is that most people don’t seem able to accept even that they ought to aspire to such behavior, let alone engage in it. ” In other words, utilitarians don’t preach other-sacrifice, but fail to practice what they preach. They barely even preach it! Suspicious, to say the least.
READER COMMENTS
Steve Fritzinger
Apr 17 2019 at 10:36am
By bizarre coincidence, this SMBC comic was the very next article in my blog feed. Are you and Weinersmith in the same book club?
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/coffee-2
renato
Apr 17 2019 at 11:18am
They are not in the same book club, but in the same book.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/open-borders
Matthias Görgens
Apr 18 2019 at 6:20am
Well, they made a book together.
Thomas Redding
Apr 17 2019 at 11:42am
It actually makes perfect utilitarian sense to not make a big deal deal about this or discuss it publicly: it would make fewer people utilitarian causing people to die re effective altruism.
John J Donnelly
Apr 17 2019 at 11:54am
Utilitarianism assumes knowledge not in evidence. Who’s to judge that “saving many lives in the process” or “diverting funds to a charity” is what is called for in the instant I decide I can make the world better off?
Interlopers with less than perfect information (well intentioned or not) are a hazard.
Scott Sumner
Apr 17 2019 at 12:22pm
Utilitarians praise “other-sacrifice”, which is far more effective than preaching other-sacrifice. I need to do a post on this.
BC
Apr 18 2019 at 2:42am
Do utilitarians really praise other-sacrifice or just others’ self-sacrifice? Praising someone for charitable giving would be praising someone else’s self-sacrifice. Praising other-sacrifice would be praising someone for killing his grandma or stealing from his children.
John Halstead
Apr 17 2019 at 1:14pm
This is not a good argument against utilitarianism. Utilitarians do preach other sacrifice; everyone does. Almost no-one thinks that no costs can ever be imposed on innocents for the sake of the greater good. In spite of the absolutist rhetoric of libertarians and other absolutist nonconsequentialists, you clearly do accept that the innocent may sometimes be harmed for the sake of the wider social good.
For example, the UK criminal justice system is not 100% accurate, so it knowably and foreseeably punishes lots of innocent people every year. We accept this cost for the sake of the wider benefits of the criminal justice system. Even statist libertarians accept this. Even most anarchists presumably think a private agency is permitted to punish people, but they don’t think 100% certainty must be achieved with every decision – otherwise they would never punish anyone. Therefore, utiltiarians, along with Bryan Caplan and other libertarians, preach other-sacrifice. The criticism seems rather the type of other-sacrifice you accept, which is an entirely different debate.
The examples suggest that the problem is with other sacrifice of one’s nearest and dearest. But is a complete prohibition on this plausible? What if you had to imprison your child for two minutes in order to stop millions being killed by an terrorist? (Make it two seconds, whatever you need to get the right answer.) At the limit, no-one believes the nonconsequentialist rhetoric around sacrifice and the ‘separateness of persons’.
Thomas Leske
Apr 17 2019 at 2:57pm
The threats of bad men seam to be another argument against utilitarism. Phillipa Foot discussed them in “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect”: “A further argument suggests that if the doctrine of the double effect is rejected this has the consequences of putting us hopelessly in the power of bad men …”
She rejects the doctrine of the double effect and embraces a rights-based approach:
“[E]ven if we reject the doctrine of the double effect we are not forced to the conclusion that the size of the evil must always be our guide. […] We may therefore refuse to be forced into acting by the threats of bad men. To refrain from inflicting injury ourselves is a stricter duty than to prevent other people from in inflicting injury, which is not to say that the other is not a very strict duty indeed”
See my blog (in German) for a discussion of this problem in the context of the European discussion on gun control: I argue that terrorism as an utilitarian argument for gun control cannot work, because this would make pro-gun terrorism a promising strategy.
P.S.: I did the German translation of Michael Huemer’s rights-based approach on gun control “Is there a Right to Own a Gun?” („Gibt es ein Recht, Schusswaffen zu besitzen?“)
Thaomas
Apr 20 2019 at 8:48am
Terrorism in any case is not a unique argument for certain kids of regulation of certain kinds of transactions involving certain kinds of firearms.
Thomas Leske
Apr 24 2019 at 2:57pm
Terrorism is the declared argument for even stricter gun control in the EU. The EU regulation mainly adds some red tape without real benefits for security (e.g. restricting the capacity of unlicenced magazines). However the Greens in Germany effectively want to prohibit certain sports and lifestyles.
The number of victims of legally owned guns in Germany is already so low, that a lone-wolf terrorist could easily top the body-count. I argue that the Green’s argument is utilitarian, so that they would probably cave in to pro-gun terrorism.
James
Apr 17 2019 at 3:04pm
Scott wrote: “Utilitarians praise ‘other-sacrifice’, which is far more effective than preaching other-sacrifice.”
You should take your point its logical conclusion: Utilitarians should in most cases not preach utilitarianism because there are more effective things to preach.
Since the effect of preaching depends on both whether the audience buys in and also what the audience will do if they buy in, utilitarians should consider both variables and choose what ethics to preach based on the probability of buy in multiplied by the benefit of buy in. Since most people are far less likely to buy into utilitarianism than they are to buy into things like scripture, tradition, and rights based philosophies, utilitarians should only preach utilitarianism when acting on utilitarianism would lead to results overwhelmingly better than the results of acting on non-utilitarian forms of ethics.
Thaomas
Apr 20 2019 at 8:52am
I agree in principle, but I think for small changes, the conclusion goes the other way. Scripture and rights give little guidance on the optimal tax rate on consumption or the optimal carbon tax.
Friendly Utilitarian
Apr 26 2019 at 3:15am
You are quite correct. As the most rigorous of the three great 19th Century classical utilitarians, Henry Sidgwick, wrote:
“on Utilitarian principles, it may be right to do and privately recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be right to advocate openly; it may be right to teach openly to one set of persons what it would be wrong to teach to others; it may be conceivably right to do, if it can be done with comparative secrecy, what it would be wrong to do in the face of the world; and even, if perfect secrecy can be reasonably expected, what it would be wrong to recommend by private advice or example.”
Bryan and other anti-utilitarians here may infer from this what my response would be to the Grandma and Child scenarios. Given that Peter Singer and other utilitarians I know in real life have said that they would push the Fat Man in the trolley problem, this should not come as much of a surprise, however.
Sidgwick also partly anticipated what you say about utilitarianism not always being the best system to promote:
“a Utilitarian may reasonably desire, on Utilitarian principles, that some of his conclusions should be rejected by mankind generally; or even that the vulgar should keep aloof from his system as a whole, in so far as the inevitable indefiniteness and complexity of its calculations render it likely to lead to bad results in their hands.”
Ghatanathoah
Apr 17 2019 at 6:17pm
There’s a pretty simple rejoinder to this: Utilitarians have noticed that societies that practice lots of self-sacrifice and others-sacrifice have worse utilitarian outcomes than societies that don’t. I think utilitarians of all sorts agree that the USA is a better place by their standards than North Korea, even though the later encourages all sorts of sacrifice.
From a utilitarian perspective, self-and-others-sacrifice is something that seems like it would intuitively make the world a better place, but doesn’t ever seem to when people actually try it. It’s like socialism, protectionism, and anti-usury laws, something that seems like a good thing to a lot of people, but turn out to be bad if you think about them for a bit.
Mark
Apr 18 2019 at 12:43am
This argument is only an argument against simple utilitarianism, not rule utilitarianism which is a more common form of utilitarianism (I think the author acknowledges this as “ecumenical views that side with deontic morality in practice”).
A strong rule against other-sacrifice is good because most people can’t help but weight the utility of themselves and those closer to themselves more heavily, so in real world situations they cannot be trusted to objectively calculate whether an other-sacrifice would really support the greater good. Also in the real world, people in the positions to decide whether to sacrifice others will almost always be the more powerful party, which means that their calculation as to what is the greater good will also favor more powerful groups. Real world trolley problems are usually not do you kill one person to save five identical people so much as do you bomb five defenseless civilians to save one of your country’s soldiers. Sure, one can imagine extreme scenarios where other-sacrifice clearly enhances overall utility, but don’t-sacrifice-others is a better rule for most of us who are aware of our own biases to follow.
Bedarz Iliachi
Apr 18 2019 at 1:16am
John Halstead,
Does the UK justice system deliberately punish innocents for greater social good?
You say it does so it” knowably and foreseeably” but the moral action is supposed to be something that is done deliberately, not merely foreseeably. (Here is the double-effect).
John Halstead
Apr 18 2019 at 4:23pm
In the words of Alastair Norcross, the doctrine of double effect is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
I don’t know why one case counts as deliberate and the other does not. In the grandma case, the utilitarian would still prefer not to have to take from his child if doing so did not produce a wider benefit. In both cases, costs are imposed on the innocent for the sake of the greater good. The doctrine of double effect has no independent plausibility and is just used ad hoc to save nonconsequentialism.
Phil H
Apr 18 2019 at 2:42am
There are a couple of things to say here:
(1) “So it’s no use to protest that the true utilitarian theory has some esoteric feature that lets us ignore the case, say because we should only follow rules with good consequences”
Rule utilitarianism totally is a thing. Google says so. But let’s assume that in the context of the book, Moller can legitimately discount it…
(2) “…implore them to steal from their friends when it is possible to do so undetected and to divert the money to famine relief…”
The most underexplored feature of utilitarianism is the difficulty of prediction, and how that intersects with action. This guy thinks “it’s easy enough to come up with cases,” but do his “comings up with” bear any relation to reality?
The thing about working on your own actions is that the consequences are much more predictable and much, much more controllable than what happens when you try to do things to other people. If you want an example of what happens when you do something to someone else for the greater good and the consequences spin out of control, you could consider…
Terrorism
All palace coups
The fate of the family that sheltered the Franks
Most Hollywood movies
I don’t think the casual theorising of people who say “No one will ever know” should trouble real-world utilitarians too much. Not that there are many of those!
James
Apr 19 2019 at 3:01pm
Rule utilitarianism degenerates into regular utilitarianism.
Rule utilitarianism doesn’t just say to follow rules with good consequences. It requires that when considering two or more rules, we must choose the one with the very best consequences.
Given the choice between “Act a rule utilitarian always even if being a regular utilitarian would lead to a better result,” or “In all situations, act as either a regular utilitarian or as a rule utilitarian depending on which has better consequences,” the rule utilitarian must accept the second rule.
BC
Apr 18 2019 at 3:12am
To be fair, perhaps the problem with the grandma-killing and Robin Hooding examples is not utilitarianism per se but the impossibility of centralized utility maximization. We don’t really know how much grandma values her life relative to how much others value their own lives. For example, if we knew *for certain* that grandma would have voluntarily sacrificed her own life to help others if only she and the others could have overcome transaction costs to reach some Coasean bargain, then perhaps effectuating the same outcome that grandma would have chosen for herself had she been given the chance would not be so morally objectionable. Alas, even if grandchildren think they know their grandma’s utility preferences well, they certainly don’t know the utility preferences of the many perfect strangers that might be helped by grandma’s death.
Both utilitarians and anti-utilitarians seem to insufficiently appreciate that utility maximization requires aggregating broadly distributed information.
Philo
Apr 18 2019 at 10:36am
Note the extremely casual judgments that drive these cases: you can “redistribute it [Grandma’s money] to those more worthy, saving many lives in the process”; you can “divert $1,000 from his [your son’s] funds to a charity where the money will do more good.” Do I really know that the people to whom I would give Grandma’s money are more worthy, or that a bit of money will save their lives, or that kindly old Grandma isn’t planning some even better distribution of the funds? Do I know that the $1,000 will do more good in the hands of the charity than in the hands of my son? (He is a rather wealthy person, who will probably save and invest most of it; and how much do I really know about the operations of this charity?) And what if my nudge causes Grandma not to die but merely to be severely injured? What if my son discovers my theft of his $1,000? When we take into account the real-world complexity of these cases, looking beyond the philosopher’s gross oversimplifications, they seem far from compelling as objections to utilitarianism. Is this the best that critics can come up with?
As a philosopher I am happy to “contemplate” such cases, but for practical purposes it would be a waste of my limited mental resources to give them even a passing thought.
Lance Bush
Apr 20 2019 at 10:50am
Many of the charges routinely leveled against utilitarianism strike me as double standards inconsistently applied to utilitarianism but not other normative theories.
Does anyone follow any well-specified normative theory with high standards that isn’t utilitairan? I doubt it. Humans are imperfect. This isn’t a problem with our normative theories, it’s a problem with humans.
Human choice is limited to those options psychologically accessible given our limitations – including selfishness, partiality, and our other defects. A successful utilitarian is simply someone who strives to compensate for these shortcomings.
In addition, the objection that utilitarians often urge self-sacrifice, but rarely advocate for other-sacrifice, is not an objection to utilitarianism. It’s an objection to (some) utilitarians. Theories aren’t wrong or bad because their advocates are hypocrites, if the hypocrisy is incidental to and doesn’t undermine the theory itself. Even so, I am sympathetic to the arguments laid out here, if construed as an objection to some utilitarians. I suspect most “utilitarians” are unwilling to accept the implications of utilitarianism and attempt to rationalize their stance on specific issues in order to fall more in line with conventional moral standards. In that sense, their stance on specific issues is inconsistent with what they would be committed to if they were honest utilitarians.
Even so, I’m a utilitarian, and I can state categorically that I urge other-sacrifice. I think people should push the man off the bridge in the footbridge case, and I think you’re an evil monster if you wouldn’t do it.
But look at how people would feel about me, as a person, for advocating this. Utilitarians who make a public show of encouraging other-sacrifice, even if we are privately committed to it, risk suffering significant reputational costs. We risk being perceived as cold, Machiavellian, and psychopathic. Work by Kahane and others shows that those who do exhibit a willingness to push in the footbridge case are typically not utilitarians, but people lower in empathy and higher in their inclinations towards psychopathy. Given this, why would a utilitarian go out of their way to encourage other-sacrifice when this risks serious negative consequences, including
(a) Significant reputational costs to the utilitarian and to utilitarianism itself
(b) You may encourage people to rationalize unethical courses of action that harm others by equipping that person with a tool for justifying their behavior, despite it not maximizing utility. I do not trust politicians and policymakers to “sacrifice others” in a way that actually maximizes utility.
The simple answer is they wouldn’t. In fact, it may even make sense not to be public about being a utilitarian.
I am also suspicious of the hypotheticals used here – they seem engineered to play on common human intuitions that the person making these other-sacrificing decisions is a malicious and horrible person. We could come up with another scenario:
War: You are a general in charge of a vast army. You are fighting against an enemy nation that is committed to an ideology hellbent on global domination, with the goal of enslaving and killing anyone who isn’t the same ethnicity as them. One day, you must consider a troop deployment. You know that if you send a few hundred troop into a location, you will save thousands of civilians and increase your chance of winning the war, but that it is a suicide mission: all of the troops will die. Should you do it?
The utilitarian answer is obviously yes. It also seems like the “intuitive” moral decision. Other-sacrifice can be framed positively or negatively. I have no problem publicly accepting a willingness to sacrifice others if it would make me seem noble and willing to make tough calls. I have far more of a problem with admitting, publicly, that I would advocate murdering or scamming friends and family. This isn’t because I think these actions are unethical under the properly-specified circumstances, but because publicly admitting that I endorse them doesn’t seem to serve my utilitarian goals.
After all, why stop with killing grandma? You could ask utilitarians if they’d advocate torture, rape, and genocide, if it would maximize utility. They are committed to saying “yes.” But a sensible utilitarian probably isn’t going to say they’d advocate for any of these things “if they would maximize utility.” The signaling costs to doing so seem to outweigh the benefits of being perceived as logically consistent.
My point here is simply that some utilitarians may appear hypocritical or inconsistent because they recognize the alternative is worse. One could imagine similar questions leveled at deontologists: would you advocate genocide and torture if you had a moral duty to perform these acts? If we determined that husbands had a right to mercilessly beat their wives, would you respect this rule and not advocate for prevention of domestic violence? I suspect most would say no to both, in which case, deontologists would be just as hypocritical as utilitarians. The only difference is that nobody seems to bother to level analogous objections against deontologists.
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