“Act so as to maximize the total quality of life of all organisms over all time.”
Maybe you believe that morality is relative, maybe not. One way or another, how can you possibly argue against Utilitarianism as the best moral system?
There are some arguments against Utilitarianism, but most of them are terrible. Anyone have any well-formulated objections?
I mean, for one, let’s say there was a system that competed with Utilitarianism. Since it’s a different system from Utilitarianism, that necessarily means that, in some cases, it advocates an action that results in something less than the maximum total quality of life. How could this inferior action ever be the right one?
Well, one of the main problems with utilitarism, as I see it, is that it is extremely hard to foresee the consequences of a given action on a larger scale, and it is further impossible to make an adequate definiton of happiness which is measurable. Therefore, it is very hard to use in practice.
If you want to justify certain wrongdoings against few individuals for “the good of the whole” you’d have to be completely sure that it would actually amount to “the good of the whole”, and it is very hard to be certain of that.
There are also certain other problems with utilitarism. Suppose it was discovered that the vast majority of human lives was, when all experiences and emotions was added up, basically slightly miserable, a little below the emotional “neutral”. If one applied utilitarian doctrine, this would mean that we should all commit collective suicide. I don’t think people would be willing to accept such a consequence, and it might even be argued by some that even misery in life is better than the oblivion of death.(I do not claim that, however)
Or suppose that there existed a psychopatic murderer, who would like nothing more than to destroy all of humanity, barring himself. Due to his sick mind, doing this would put him in an extreme state of ecstacy, far surpassing any joyful emotions normal people can feel. The utilitarian consequence would be that we should put all nuclear weapons of the world under his command.
I completely agree. That is to say, I agree it’s nearly impossible to calculate which action will result in the maximum quality of life. But there are many examples of areas in which the exact calculation is nigh-impossible, but it still serves quite well to use approximations. Physics, for one - and even in standard morality, we try to consider others, but we don’t go overboard. When helping the old lady across the street, we don’t consider the possibility that she’s going to buy food for her criminal son hiding in her house, and that the only way to stop him would be to interrogate her. Possible, but improbable, so we approximate, and practically we ignore the possibility.
So I think it’s true that utilitarianism in full is very complex, but this isn’t a reason not to use utilitarianism. I mean, without thinking too hard about it, we can see that the maximum quality of life will probably be higher if we act using approximations, then if we spend years calculating whether or not we should tie our shoelaces.
I disagree with this. In the immediate, sure, we should let him kill all of us, because his happiness would be that extreme. But it’s not just about immediate happiness. In the long term, letting him kill us would prevent the existence of all the future generations and all their happinesses. If you then say, “ok, but he’d get SO much pleasure from killing us that it would still be worth it,” it’s true that utilitarianism would say “yes, let him kill us”. But that’s also a totally impossible scenario. We have no reason to believe that anything like that is remotely possible, where 1 person’s immediate happiness can outweigh even a single entire lifetime.
Essentially, in that example, we have the intution that “letting him kill us is always wrong no matter what”, which stems from the fact that his happiness would never outweigh ours. But then you make the hypothetical scenario where it WOULD outweigh ours. It’s really our intuition that is at fault here - in that (impossible and very extreme) example, letting him kill us WOULD be right - it’s just very hard to intuitively accept that. Just as it’s very hard to intuitively accept that an electron can be in two positions at once.
I also started to consider the prospect of future generations, also in connection with my first imagined example. Again, it is extremely hard to predict, but it is true that if one adopted the optimistic view, happiness of future generations should be considered to outweigh the immediate happiness of the psychopath.
I agree that most of the people who seek to apply utilitarism use approximations, and that some of them prove quite effective. But still, there is a chance of error, much like in a weather forecast. Of course, it is fairly hard to provide any well-founded alternatives to the utilitarian doctrine if one is a moral relativist, so perhaps these approximations are the best we have.
Another problem with utilitarism could be that it sort of disregards the idea of an individual, as everything is viewed on the collective basis of humanity in its entirety(or in its more extreme forms, as all Life in its entirety). So that great atrocities, torture, death, etc… could be inflicted upon individuals in the name of universal good. My intuition clearly says that this is wrong, but utilitarism says that it’s in order as long as it’s outweighed by other people’s happiness. If one asked the individual in question, he’d most certainly curse the utilitarian doctrine - but would that just be selfish of him?
I think that in some ways Utilitarianism is very powerful. After all, who doesn’t want to work for everyone’s betterment.
That said, I have two main intuitive objections to Utilitarianism:
It passes things as morally right which I have grave reservations about calling morally right. Torture and killing are the two most obvious, lying is another that pops to mind. I cannot see how these things can be considered in a meaningful way to be morally right. I can cleary see how Utilitarianism justifies them, but I still hesitate to want to call them right.
I think that Utilitarianism makes a fundamental error about the nature of our lives. As you said Twiffy, the goal is to “act to maximise the total quality of life of all organisms over all time” But, I think that Utilitarianism misses important aspects of our moral and spiritual life.
Quality of life is a tremendously imprecise term, and I think that as a society, certain acts, just by their very occurence diminish our quality of life. Torture, again is an example. Even if I benefit from the outcome of the torture, my quality of life is still diminished in a meaningful way because I was complicit, if only in my silence.
I suspect that this may grate against your logical positivism and for that I do apologise, but I don’t know if we can measure these sort of things.
A third and very minor objection that I thought of, is the inclusion of all organisms in your definition - isn’t killing animals and plants for our benefit then wrong because they vastly outnumber us?
Under utilitarianism, slavery is prefectly fine as long as the maximum good gets increased. By some fancy creative logic, one could argue that “civilized people” experience more happiness than “uncivilized people”, and so maximizing the “civilized ones” pleasure increases the total good for everyone. Under utilitarianism this could arguably fly. On the surface it always seems like a good theory, but it actually has some monstrous consequences. The way you formulated it “for all beings” isn’t a variant I’ve often seen. Usually it gets put as “the most people possible” because you can never please everyone.
The question to ask when discussing utilitarianism is: whose pleasure or good, and at what cost?
This sounds like variant on the Ontological argument… interesting… just replace “the supreme being” with Utilitarianism . Hm.
I’m not sure about your definition of utilitarianism’s validity. I thought it was commonly believed as
“a moral system which promotes the right thing to do, as being the one that gives the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people”
that being said, I believe that utilitarianism sometimes falls under the fallacy of “appeal to popularity”, just because everyone says it’s good, doesn’t make it so.
There are many things that make most people happy, that we know is wrong. ie junk food and the growing obesity problem.
Most people like to eat junk food, but that doesn’t make it good for you.
Whoops, just realized that I never responded to this.
Corlindale,
It’s true that when you use Utilitarianism, you have to make approximations - but this is true with just about all moral systems. And it’s true you could always be wrong, or neglect to take an important factor into account - but this isn’t a problem with Utilitarianism, it’s a necessary difficulty with being human. Physics is similar - because we’re not smart enough to solve some of those equations exactly, we have to approximate. This isn’t a problem with the physics, it’s just a limitation of humans.
Well, you have to ask yourself, in what kind of situation, realistically, would it ever be Utilitarian to torture someone? There was an example previously involving a terrorist who knows the location of a nuclear weapon that is about to go off. It would be Utilitarian to torture him, if that’s what was necessary to find the location of the nuke to save millions of people. And is it moral? Of course. That individual would curse his torturers, and yes, it would be out of pure selfishness, or at least motivated by a different moral system.
However, almost always, Utilitarianism condemns torture, because not only is torture rarely beneficial to anyone, but no one lives easily in a society where they could be tortured because of something that they might have had no control over.
Gemty,
As I think you and I have discussed before, Utilitarianism only condones torture and killing and lying in cases where it has the best results. What would some of those examples be? Torturing pot-smokers, and jay-walkers? Hardly - more like, generally torturing no one, but being willing to torture the nuclear-bomb terrorist. Lying to the Gestappo and saying that there are no Jews hiding in your basement. Killing someone in self-defense. All examples of generally bad actions, but in circumstances that makes them not only acceptable, but actually good.
I disagree that Utilitarianism misses aspects of our moral and spiritual life. Utilitarianism doesn’t directly care about spirituality, of course, but it DOES care about anything that increases our quality of life. If spirituality is important to you, Utilitarianism recognizes and respects that happiness. If video games are important to me, Utilitarianism cares about that, too. It’s really the all-loving philosophy that Christians want to ascribe to God, but usually can’t quite pull off. But it’s also “tough-love” - it wants what maximizes the good, even though that can almost never happen in a way that makes everyone happy.
I definitely do include all organisms in my application of Utilitarianism - but this only has a few interesting consequences. First, I’m peska-vegetarian, exclusively because of these beliefs. (I didn’t use to be in high school, when my morality was mostly “selfishness”.) Plants I have no hesitation about eating, because although they have responses to damage (something which computers and water molecules also have), there is no reason to believe that plants have any kind of consciousness, or discernable “quality of life”. Similiarly, I am willing to eat fish and seafood because I think that the quality of life that a fish or a clam can experience is so minimal that the enjoyment I get from eating them literally outweighs the negative consequences of their deaths.
It’s because of this analysis that I have no problem with killing large quantities of bacteria, or swatting a fly that annoys me (although I do prefer to put spiders outside instead of killing them).
combat stuborness with equal and opposite stuborness,… leaving intellect as the only way out.
Lieing only promotes lieing as a way to avoid. Confrontation allows you to dive head deep into the problem.
…
method of application. If you don’t understand it, then you should leave it be. For messing with it would ensure a 90% mess up rate.
the number of elements in play limit your ability to fathom the chances. Completely ignore certain elements and lose site of the whole. You’d perpetuate half truth’s untill they become true.
I was thinking more about Ut. as i was walking to work and I think it’s a pretty good normative system. After all, it is probably pretty good to do things that maximise, yadda yadda yadda.
But, I still don’t find it a very good practical system. I find it difficult to use it to help me make day to day decisions. I know it works for some people but that is just not the way my mind works.
On a slightly related note, I was remembering that game scruples where you had to say what you would do in tough situations and then people could vote if you would actually do it or not.
My top 3 list of people to play the game Scruples with:
A Logical Positivist (he wouldn’t last long - “this game is nonsense!”)
I think Utilitarianism is absolutely bloody awful. Why do we want to maximise the happiness of the majority? People are fundamentally stupid. The happiness they strive for is irrational and motivated by personal gain. It is impossible to apply this system within a system of government.
We must be looking towards what is better for society as a whole; happiness should never come in to it. Smoking is an example. I think people should be forced to quit smoking, by the goverment, because it is an absolutely ridiculous vice and is completely pernicious to society. It takes people from the workforce and costs millions to the health service each year. It makes people happy, so a utilitarian would say, hell, keep it, right? Wrong.
cries at the realisation that he’s become a radical conservative
AngryElvis must be fundamentally stupid?!? Can this be the conclusion he wants us to draw?
Surely not. For someone who attacked all the metaphysical crap out there you sure did produce a lousy claim here.
If its your contention that most people are stupid please define stupidity, and then empirically or logically verify that the proportion of people you claim are stupid, actually meet those criteria.
If we allow the claim “most people are stupid” then I reckon you have about three billion people out there to go and test.
I will admit that it was a rather hyperbolic statement to make BUT living in Britain, a number of indicators of the basic stupidity of the average person come to mind.
The contempt of academia - more and more people are becoming contemptuous of any kind of academic work. The average primary school is turning out kids completely against any kind of study or self-improvement.
People don’t seem to be able to think, they seem to lack the self-reflective capacity that distinguishes us from animals. They don’t seem to be able to think about their actions, about WHY they do certain things. People continue to smoke, not think about what they eat, not consider what they emit in the form of domestic waste, carbon dioxide, etc and completely refuse to any exercise. A complete lack of care for the environment or the self exists in our culture today.
The majority of British teenagers spend their friday and saturday nights either a) beating people up, b) getting vomitously drunk or c) combining the two.
Our culture is such that it worships the individual, exceptional success of the few who, say, can kick a football about or warble for a few minutes to repetitive, badly constructed music. Virtues such as working hard, working in relatively mundane but fulfilling jobs and self-control are scorned.
The average level of literacy and linguistic competance is decreasing. I’m attributing this to “dumbing down” through television, tabloid newspapers, overly relaxed school curriculums and a general lack of willingness to learn ANYTHING. The average person’s vocabularly is becoming smaller and smaller, most people lack the ability to reason coherantly or read anything containing multi-syllabic words.
So when I said “people are fundamentally stupid” I was not judging people on the basis of their IQ, I was judging people on the basis of their tendancy towards self-destruction. Our generation will be the first to have a life-expectancy lower than the previous one. Obesity is a massive problem, as is heart-disease, cancer and a number of other self-inflicted diseases. I mean self-inflicted in the sense of not looking after oneself to the extent that one contracts these diseases. Cancer has been linked to things as basic as not eating fruit and vegetables, which no one seems to do anymore. NOTE: Obviously the causes of these are more complex than “not eating certain things” and I admit that we do not know enough about them to categorically say that they are self-inflicted. The evidence presented to me in the form of medical and psychological studies seems reasonable enough, however, to induce one to think this.
I’ve just come out of a grammar school, a British school where you have to take an ability-based test for entry, and apparently those at grammar schools count as the highest 10% of students in the country, by intelligence. And by the above criteria, we are still pretty fucking stupid. This makes me pretty depressed.
This is why I don’t think Utilitarianism works. A complete ban on smoking would be better for society, as would be a complete ban on fast-food, but this would not make the overwhelming majority very happy at all. It’s still better for society in the long-term. Introducing more draconian policies for punishment and study in school would be better for society, in the long term, but if introduced, there would be uproar amongst students and parents.
Happiness has an origin. Happiness is the feeling we associate with stuff that helps us survive. Physical pleasure is associated with stuff that helps us survive our own lifespan, moral pleasure or happiness or wellbeing is associated with stuff that help our line survive. Thus, utilitarianism should be evolutionary. Utilitarianism shoiuld not be the pursuit of happiness but the pursuit of survival. When you interpret it as this, it stops being shortsighted hedonism that cannot account for such simple questions as slavery. Slavery may be good for an individual, but the reason we don’t use slaves is only partly because of consideration for others. One when you have a slave, you increase the chance of one of your offspring down the road becoming a slave. Two, slaves create a enemy force behind your lines during a war. Three, slaves revolt.
The solution to most peoples problems with utilitarianism is a shortsighted interpretation of utilitarianism that is the same as hedonism. If you look far enough in the future, all moral dillemas are easy to solve.
The problem with most utilitarianists is that they see utilitarianism as an ethic that needs to be enforced. It isn’t, everybody is already utilitarianist.
I’m tired, and my brother wan’ts to go swimming. More later.
Acknowledged. Though as you say, more and more, we have not yet reached “most” yet, and these are not adults you speak of but children. When you study children and modern music in comparison to adults and older music, keep in mind whether or not what you see is filtered. The old music we listen to is not just old music but the best of old music, because the bad music didn’t survive, and the adults we compare our children to are not all the people born at a certain time but the ones that survived, the best ones. In comparison, the children are completely and entirely unfiltered, as is the modern music.
Do you agree, TheAngryElvis?
There are some people who do think. They survive. The others don’t do either. Once again, are these adults you speak of, or children? And beware, humanity is misrepresented on T.V., as you yourself have expressed, so don’t ground your opinion of “the condition of humankind” on the of stuff you see on T.V.
Teenagers, man. You cannot compare the teenagers of today to the adults of today. One is filtered and one is not!
By the media! If you interview individual people, not in a group setting, the results are different than what you collect from what is shown on T.V.
Oh and also, all actions should be to the benefit of the dooer and the other people. Oh, and also, there is no way to not be a utilitarian. Haha! So there, AngryElvis, you already are one! Haha! :D/ Wow, I’m pretty much talking to myself, aren’t I…
and for that I do apologise, but I don’t know if we can measure these sort of things.