Rule utilitarianism isn't arbitrary (neither are the 10 commandments, for that matter; they have other issues).
What rule utilitarianism allows is heuristics/norms in the face of uncertainty/odd cases, and a bit of simplicity in the face of complexity.
It's almost cheating because it takes the useful bits of deontology (but, ideally, with better informed priors and a focus on consequences/empiricism) and combines it with the best bits of pure utilitarianism.
Care to read the first few chapters of Singer's Practical Ethics? You left out the word "preference" in "preference utilitarianism" (as opposed to "hedonic utilitarianism" which seems to be your straw man).
An unconscious person still has (or rather had) "preferences" in the same way a dead person did. You care about what happens in the world after you die.
Also I don't know which utilitarians you've talked to, but the ones I know _love_ Trolley problems. They just can't get enough of them. Being allergic to thought experiments is a criticism I'd lay at the feet of just about _any_ other group before utilitarians
It bothers me that utilitarianism is often taken for granted in EA, policy circles, economics etc. when it's hardly the consensus position in normative ethics. The last PhilPapers survey on the views of academic philosophers showed that utilitarianism was the 3rd most popular view, slightly behind virtue ethics and deontological views (https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all). When you restrict it to philosophers who specialise in normative ethics the gap widens in favour of deontology and against utilitarianism. I get the appeal – it's a wonkish anti-common sense view that tells you to break out your calculator and make the harsh tradeoffs that other people are too squeamish to make – but it shouldn't be uncontested gospel just because it excites nerds.
The last objection is particularly annoying since utlilitarians are fond of pointing out that adherents of other moral systems get the answer to trolley problems "wrong."
The main critique here falls flat to me, simply because you're allowed to fold into your definition of utility ideas like "people are better off in a society where we don't rape unconscious people or allow anyone to starve" and I think you'd be right to do so. Placing a large utility premium on these things lets us resolve all your counterexamples without much trouble, but importantly I *do* think there is some amount of human happiness we should trade one person starving for. Living in a world bound by physical reality requires making decisions with tradeoffs; you don't get to only win.
To me utilitarianism is the insistence that you consider the consequences of your actions when you're taking them, not just how they feel ex-ante. If your project is to alleviate climate change, then deontologically maybe recycling and spending tens of minutes thinking about how to reuse tote bags is the appropriate action, but a utilitarian will demand you acknowledge that these things are worse use of your resources and less effective at helping climate change than doing things like buying carbon credits, donating to climate lobbying groups, lobbying for nuclear power, etc.
A lot of EA's project is to get people to apply a minimally utilitarian lens to situations that aren't so thorny, and I think they are a very strong driving force in holding charity and philanthropy accountable for their actions and not just their words. I am extremely sympathetic to many of your criticisms of EA as a philosophical school, but I think I would much prefer to live in this world than a world where EA ideas are subscribed to by nobody. Any person living in abject poverty would prefer to gain basic resources and healthcare in exchange for adding to the world some billionaires and over-eager college students that the American philosopher class dislikes, and we, including you, have a duty to take that seriously
"There are of course many other examples where utilitarian logic violates our basic moral instincts."
Ah yes, the basic moral instinct argument. Does it really exist?
If your dog gets out and ends up in the neighbor's yard that are recently immigrated Hmong... and they kill and eat your dog, what is the moral argument?
On some primitive tribal islands if you accidentally shipwreck there, the natives will kill you and eat you. They might rape you first. What is that moral argument?
American liberals have "progressed" to a belief that more victims of crime are an acceptable consequence for reducing the number of incarcerated, and that young children who question their gender identity should be actively encouraged to physically alter their gender. How do you square these position in terms of natural morality?
C.S. Lewis argued in his letters to the British people despondent over yet another world war that God is natural present in the natural human reaction to cruelty, unfairness and harm done to others. However, those that are the most cruel, unfair and harmful often claim to be virtuous and moral in their actions.
I am not convinced that there is natural morality. Morality seems to be more a social and cultural construct, and hence it is malleable and corruptible. This distinction is important as the secular left "progresses" without a committed religious grounding of base morality.
I feel that in a utilitarian system, there would be no vegetative patients to be raped. Think of all the resources that go into maintaining those patients. Wouldn't that money be better spent stocking food-banks? Wouldn't the trained staff be better deployed treating people who have urgent needs? Personally I would triage those who are actively suffering over the comatose. Ideally, we could care for both, but realistically there are people who are actively suffering who are currently going untreated.
I think you are mistaken that utilitarians would support the raping of comatose people because in a non-utopian utilitarian society those patients simply would not exist.
My guess (and it’s a guess informed only by anecdotal evidence, if it’s informed at all)—
is that this situation is similar to the one with libertarians, where they argue that whatever bad outcomes are generated by their philosophy will self-correct, or can be easily corrected with almost no muss and fuss. A few caveats, a few tweaks, and we’re done. But in real life, where people don’t bother to take the tweaks and caveats seriously, bad outcomes happen and the philosophers are long gone when the suffering of others takes place.
Sadly the world requires infinite decisions be made, yet provides a dearth of good choices. How is one to navigate in these circumstances? That is my quandary.
I would not call myself a strict utilitarian, so I feel no need to defend the position, but this feels a bit too much like a straw man to be really useful.
There are short term utility and long term utility, and the two often collide. If I'm having surgery, it might be creating more utility for society in general if the doctor took all my usable organs and saved many lives, instead of doing the operation I was expecting to have. But the long term negative effect of this, fear of getting medical treatment lest one is turned into an unwilling organ donor, far outweighs the positive short term utility. I think it's rather easy to find similar counterarguments to the examples you're using.
"Utilitarianism places no value on duty to personal responsibilities." I think that's wrong, and I could see a utilitarian argument for such values similar to the one above: Showing personal responsibility and acting on duty can have positive consequences, social utility, thus can be defended on within a utilitarian philosophy.
In the end, I don't think all moral and practical questions can be solved on one universal principle, so I don't feel the need to defend utilitarian thinking at any cost. It's more, as you say, a good school of thought for shaking up one's own moral intuitions, for rethinking some of our mainstream approaches to problems.
I think this particular critique relies on the scenarios having very limited time horizons & pools of people whose happiness is being considered.
1) A society in which people are not allowed to rape women in vegetative states will produce greater happiness for a greater number in the long run.
2) Fighting the set of norms that makes it possible to quell civil unrest by framing an innocent black man for rape, instead of upholding those norms for short-term gain, will, if you and your allies are successful, produce greater happiness for a greater number in the long run.
3) Give your loaf of bread to the homeless woman and her kids, then go back to the store and buy another loaf for your own kids. If you can't afford another loaf, you're in the same situation as the people asking for your help, and it's a coin toss whether you keep the bread or donate it.
4) "[I]f everyone followed such a project, the credit system would collapse"—yes, which is why it's good for you personally to uphold the credit system, since the stability of the system produces greater happiness for a greater number in the long run.
I'm not a utilitarian, but I think there's a steel man here you haven't yet taken on.
[My in-defense-of-utilitarianism argument for 2) doesn't fully satisfy me—a society doesn't have to base its scapegoating system on racial prejudice, but every society has a scapegoating system, and scapegoating is probably, cf. Girard, necessary to keep human societies stable. Utilitarianism does provide a defense of scapegoating in general, as long as you can't find a better system, and as long as you keep the number of scapegoats as low as possible. However, I'm not sure it follows from this that utilitarianism is bad, because I'm not sure it's possible to eliminate scapegoating from human societies.]
Rule utilitarianism isn't arbitrary (neither are the 10 commandments, for that matter; they have other issues).
What rule utilitarianism allows is heuristics/norms in the face of uncertainty/odd cases, and a bit of simplicity in the face of complexity.
It's almost cheating because it takes the useful bits of deontology (but, ideally, with better informed priors and a focus on consequences/empiricism) and combines it with the best bits of pure utilitarianism.
Rule Utilitarianism Isn’t So Crazy
https://fakenous.net/?p=2789
Care to read the first few chapters of Singer's Practical Ethics? You left out the word "preference" in "preference utilitarianism" (as opposed to "hedonic utilitarianism" which seems to be your straw man).
An unconscious person still has (or rather had) "preferences" in the same way a dead person did. You care about what happens in the world after you die.
Also I don't know which utilitarians you've talked to, but the ones I know _love_ Trolley problems. They just can't get enough of them. Being allergic to thought experiments is a criticism I'd lay at the feet of just about _any_ other group before utilitarians
It bothers me that utilitarianism is often taken for granted in EA, policy circles, economics etc. when it's hardly the consensus position in normative ethics. The last PhilPapers survey on the views of academic philosophers showed that utilitarianism was the 3rd most popular view, slightly behind virtue ethics and deontological views (https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all). When you restrict it to philosophers who specialise in normative ethics the gap widens in favour of deontology and against utilitarianism. I get the appeal – it's a wonkish anti-common sense view that tells you to break out your calculator and make the harsh tradeoffs that other people are too squeamish to make – but it shouldn't be uncontested gospel just because it excites nerds.
The last objection is particularly annoying since utlilitarians are fond of pointing out that adherents of other moral systems get the answer to trolley problems "wrong."
Ursula K. LeGuin's classic treatment is "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas".
Yah, there’s no God so don’t have a moral philosophy, I just vibe man lol
The main critique here falls flat to me, simply because you're allowed to fold into your definition of utility ideas like "people are better off in a society where we don't rape unconscious people or allow anyone to starve" and I think you'd be right to do so. Placing a large utility premium on these things lets us resolve all your counterexamples without much trouble, but importantly I *do* think there is some amount of human happiness we should trade one person starving for. Living in a world bound by physical reality requires making decisions with tradeoffs; you don't get to only win.
To me utilitarianism is the insistence that you consider the consequences of your actions when you're taking them, not just how they feel ex-ante. If your project is to alleviate climate change, then deontologically maybe recycling and spending tens of minutes thinking about how to reuse tote bags is the appropriate action, but a utilitarian will demand you acknowledge that these things are worse use of your resources and less effective at helping climate change than doing things like buying carbon credits, donating to climate lobbying groups, lobbying for nuclear power, etc.
A lot of EA's project is to get people to apply a minimally utilitarian lens to situations that aren't so thorny, and I think they are a very strong driving force in holding charity and philanthropy accountable for their actions and not just their words. I am extremely sympathetic to many of your criticisms of EA as a philosophical school, but I think I would much prefer to live in this world than a world where EA ideas are subscribed to by nobody. Any person living in abject poverty would prefer to gain basic resources and healthcare in exchange for adding to the world some billionaires and over-eager college students that the American philosopher class dislikes, and we, including you, have a duty to take that seriously
"There are of course many other examples where utilitarian logic violates our basic moral instincts."
Ah yes, the basic moral instinct argument. Does it really exist?
If your dog gets out and ends up in the neighbor's yard that are recently immigrated Hmong... and they kill and eat your dog, what is the moral argument?
On some primitive tribal islands if you accidentally shipwreck there, the natives will kill you and eat you. They might rape you first. What is that moral argument?
American liberals have "progressed" to a belief that more victims of crime are an acceptable consequence for reducing the number of incarcerated, and that young children who question their gender identity should be actively encouraged to physically alter their gender. How do you square these position in terms of natural morality?
C.S. Lewis argued in his letters to the British people despondent over yet another world war that God is natural present in the natural human reaction to cruelty, unfairness and harm done to others. However, those that are the most cruel, unfair and harmful often claim to be virtuous and moral in their actions.
I am not convinced that there is natural morality. Morality seems to be more a social and cultural construct, and hence it is malleable and corruptible. This distinction is important as the secular left "progresses" without a committed religious grounding of base morality.
There really isn't any perfect moral philosophy. It'd be nice if there was. With Deontology you just run into all of the opposite problems
Many a great Star Trek episode used to be written from this premise
I feel that in a utilitarian system, there would be no vegetative patients to be raped. Think of all the resources that go into maintaining those patients. Wouldn't that money be better spent stocking food-banks? Wouldn't the trained staff be better deployed treating people who have urgent needs? Personally I would triage those who are actively suffering over the comatose. Ideally, we could care for both, but realistically there are people who are actively suffering who are currently going untreated.
I think you are mistaken that utilitarians would support the raping of comatose people because in a non-utopian utilitarian society those patients simply would not exist.
My guess (and it’s a guess informed only by anecdotal evidence, if it’s informed at all)—
is that this situation is similar to the one with libertarians, where they argue that whatever bad outcomes are generated by their philosophy will self-correct, or can be easily corrected with almost no muss and fuss. A few caveats, a few tweaks, and we’re done. But in real life, where people don’t bother to take the tweaks and caveats seriously, bad outcomes happen and the philosophers are long gone when the suffering of others takes place.
Sadly the world requires infinite decisions be made, yet provides a dearth of good choices. How is one to navigate in these circumstances? That is my quandary.
I would not call myself a strict utilitarian, so I feel no need to defend the position, but this feels a bit too much like a straw man to be really useful.
There are short term utility and long term utility, and the two often collide. If I'm having surgery, it might be creating more utility for society in general if the doctor took all my usable organs and saved many lives, instead of doing the operation I was expecting to have. But the long term negative effect of this, fear of getting medical treatment lest one is turned into an unwilling organ donor, far outweighs the positive short term utility. I think it's rather easy to find similar counterarguments to the examples you're using.
"Utilitarianism places no value on duty to personal responsibilities." I think that's wrong, and I could see a utilitarian argument for such values similar to the one above: Showing personal responsibility and acting on duty can have positive consequences, social utility, thus can be defended on within a utilitarian philosophy.
In the end, I don't think all moral and practical questions can be solved on one universal principle, so I don't feel the need to defend utilitarian thinking at any cost. It's more, as you say, a good school of thought for shaking up one's own moral intuitions, for rethinking some of our mainstream approaches to problems.
I think this particular critique relies on the scenarios having very limited time horizons & pools of people whose happiness is being considered.
1) A society in which people are not allowed to rape women in vegetative states will produce greater happiness for a greater number in the long run.
2) Fighting the set of norms that makes it possible to quell civil unrest by framing an innocent black man for rape, instead of upholding those norms for short-term gain, will, if you and your allies are successful, produce greater happiness for a greater number in the long run.
3) Give your loaf of bread to the homeless woman and her kids, then go back to the store and buy another loaf for your own kids. If you can't afford another loaf, you're in the same situation as the people asking for your help, and it's a coin toss whether you keep the bread or donate it.
4) "[I]f everyone followed such a project, the credit system would collapse"—yes, which is why it's good for you personally to uphold the credit system, since the stability of the system produces greater happiness for a greater number in the long run.
I'm not a utilitarian, but I think there's a steel man here you haven't yet taken on.
[My in-defense-of-utilitarianism argument for 2) doesn't fully satisfy me—a society doesn't have to base its scapegoating system on racial prejudice, but every society has a scapegoating system, and scapegoating is probably, cf. Girard, necessary to keep human societies stable. Utilitarianism does provide a defense of scapegoating in general, as long as you can't find a better system, and as long as you keep the number of scapegoats as low as possible. However, I'm not sure it follows from this that utilitarianism is bad, because I'm not sure it's possible to eliminate scapegoating from human societies.]