Utilitarianism

To clarify something in my mind, do you propose this system as a version of utilitarianism, or because you hold that the system has utility (for the pain/pleasure utilitarian system)?

0 Replies

I am trying to describe how utilitarianism works, using a philosophically simple variant of it to avoid unnecessary confusion. As it happens, I also find this system useful in that it helps me think consistently about problems of ethics, justice, and politics. But my main intention was to describe how it works, and how it reaches its conclusions. My impression from reading the first five pages of this thread was that these workings were not clear to all participants.

0 Replies

Fair enough. To aid me in understanding your thoughts on how utilitarianism works, perhaps we could look at how some ethical dilemmas could be addressed.

I'll start with fairly crude, obvious ones, please feel free to suggest others, or flesh out these. How would you apply utilitarianism to:
(a) Use of torture?
(b) Treatment of animals in factory farms?
(c) An interventionist foreign policy?

0 Replies

djbt

Quote:

I do not think utilitarianism does say this. It says that if slavery prevents you from starving, it is less morally bad.

But why? Utilitarianism cannot consider slavery good or bad in itself. Only according to the results of an act of slavery (within the principle of "satisfaction to the great number").
If, by enslaving 10% of the population you give satisfaction to the other 90%, then, according to utilitarianism, slavery - in this particular case - is good.
Utilirianism has no criteria that allows to say: it is bad to enslave people. Or, it is bad to rape children.
No, first you must wait that the act of slavery or the rape takes place. Then you examine the results according to satisfaction or beneficts to most of people and then you decide if it was morally good or bad. You have no other criteria.

Quote:

I'm not sure what do you mean by 'freedom'. Could you give me an example of someone making a decision in freedom?

Yes, I can. Example: your decision of posting this question instead of not doing it.

0 Replies

Thomas

Quote:

Why is slavery morally unacceptable for you? Since you reject utilitarianism, it can't be because of all the pain and suffering that it causes.

First, being an utilitarianist you cannot reject slavery because of the pain and suffering. Why would pain and suffering be bad to you? If that pain and suffering of a few, have the result of giving satisfaction to the "great part" of population, they would be morally good.

Second, you are asking what my moral philosophy is.
Well, since I reject God or any metaphysical principle in my way of viewing the world, I cannot have an absolute moral, I mean, a moral appliable to all conditions of time and space.
As I said before, I can only speak for my ideas here and now, and not judging the past.
I believe that an human being has the right to life, the right to be free, the right to dignity, the right to develop his own personality, the right to live in peace, and so on.
Why do I believe that?
Since I cannot base my position in God's will, or any metaphysical source, my answer is this: because I want to live, and live free and with dignity. Because I don't want to be a slave. Because I don't want be killed. Because, if I had children, I would not want them to be raped.
Since I am an human being like the others, I believe that those essential things I want, or do not want, apply to most of mankind.

So I can say: slavery is always wrong, rape is always wrong ...
You cannot say this. If you have a little daughter and she was raped, your reasoning would be: let us wait to see if this rape brings happiness or satisfaction to most of the people. If, by any peculiar reason, this was the case, you would say to your daughter: it was moraly good that you were raped.

I know you would, in reality, never do that (because I believe you are not a monster). Indeed, when we start with the example of slavery, you didn't choose the great examples of slavery, and the most obvious, like the slavery of africans in US (or in Bresil, Africa or India, by us, portuguese: I know the crimes my country did). You went to choose examples of slavery I would qualify as "softcore slavery". Because, I believe that you, Thomas, think that slavery is an abomination, no matter how utilitarian you claim to be.

0 Replies

djbt wrote:

How would you apply utilitarianism to:
(a) Use of torture?

Pass a law that has the consequence of prohibiting torture as long as the expected pain caused to the tortured outweighs the expected pain to everybody else prevented by the torture. Given people's propensity to torture even when it's illegal, I expect that the legal rule that will make this happen is to outlaw torture, and impose a prison sentence of several years on it.

djbt wrote:

(b) Treatment of animals in factory farms?

This is a question on which different denominations of utilitarians give different answers, because you have to decide whose utility it is that legal rules are supposed to maximize. Historically, most utilitarians have assumed that only the pleasure of humans counts, and the pleasure of animals doesn't. Under this assumption the ehtical rule has to optimize the tradeoff between the pain of animal friends feeling pity for the factory hens, and the pleasure of egg consumers from cheap eggs. Lately, another school of utilitarians has arisen (not sure if they call themselves by that name) whose most outspoken representative is Peter Singer, with some support from zoologists like Richard Dawkins. These people suggest that the maximand for legal rules ought also include the utility to animals, to the extent they feel pleasure and pain. As one would expect, this latter school of utilitarians would take a much harder line on animal rights than the traditional school, but wouldn't bee as absolutist about it as some of the more extremist animal rights advocates. You may be interested in this correspondence between Peter Singer and Richard Posner, a utilitarian who doesn't believe the utility to animals should count.

djbt wrote:

(c) An interventionist foreign policy?

The rule is: pick the policy that makes as many people in the world as possible, as happy as possible. The problem is to predict what the outcome of any proposed policy is likely to be. Sometimes this prediction is easy, as in the choice between protectionism and free trade. As a consequence, almost all utilitarians are rabid supporters of free trade. At other times, the problem involves a large deal of strategic difficulties, as in arms races, the decision to invade countries who may or may not have weapons of mass destruction, and the like. Utilitarianism is pretty useless here, as is any other system of moral philosophy, because the core of the problem is about fact finding, not ethics. In general though, utilitarians tend to prefer non-interventionist foreign policy, on the grounds that governments are likely to screw up the intervention. Other things equal, the government of America is less competent at making people in Tunesia happy than the government of Tunesia is, so the utility maximizing general guideline is to let every government take care of its own people.

0 Replies

val wrote:

So I can say: slavery is always wrong, rape is always wrong ...
You cannot say this. If you have a little daughter and she was raped, your reasoning would be: let us wait to see if this rape brings happiness or satisfaction to most of the people. If, by any peculiar reason, this was the case, you would say to your daughter: it was moraly good that you were raped.

But I can say, rape is always wrong. In fact, I can even do better than that and say why it is wrong: The experiment you sketch out has been made millions of times, and the pain to the rapee has always been greater than the pleasure to the rapist. Certainly this has been true often enough to claim assert that a legal rule permitting rape would be a net creator of pain. I can give the same reasoning for all forms of slavery except for a few odd borderline cases such as voluntary indentured servitude.

val wrote:

You went to choose examples of slavery I would qualify as "softcore slavery". Because, I believe that you, Thomas, think that slavery is an abomination, no matter how utilitarian you claim to be.

Val -- do you think it says anything about utilitarians that they have historically been among the most ardent opponents of slavery? Sometime in the 19th century, Thomas Carlyle (whom G.W. Bush's circle of business friends is named after) coined the phrase that economics is "the dismal science". The thing he found so "dismal" about economists (who were overwhelmingly utilitarians at the time) was exactly their opposition to slavery.

0 Replies

Thomas

Quote:

But I can say, rape is always wrong. In fact, I can even do better than that and say why it is wrong: The experiment you sketch out has been made millions of times, and the pain to the rapee has always been greater than the pleasure to the rapist.

I was not thinking about the relation victim/rapist.
All I want you to consider is a society where most of people takes pleasure or satisfaction from the rape of a child (as a ritual, for example). Or a society where most of it's members take benefits, advantages and pleasure from slavery.
How can you say slavery of 10% of people is bad, if 90% become happy with it? Or to say the rape of a child is bad when 90% of the community liked it ant took pleasure from it?

And another question: if the satisfaction of the rapist was greater than the pain of the victim, then rape was good? Do you really mean that?

I don't care what individual actions utilitarians assumed. That is not the question. The question is utilitarianism. Spengler was against nazism, but his book "Der Untergang des Abendlandes" antecipates most of nazi's theories.

0 Replies

Thomas,

Thank-you for your examples. It seems that our slightly different takes on utilitarianism lead us to the same kind of moral reasoning, your conclusions are very similar to my own (except, perhaps, on the free trade issue, but I suspect this may be more to do with my ignorance on the topic, rather than a difference in reasoning.

Thanks also for the link the the Singer/Posner discussion. You say Posner is a utilitarian, but he does not sound very much like one to me. I find Singer's arguments persuasive, but perhaps that is because I tend to agree with Singer's reasoning anyway, and so by now have a 'tenacious moral instinct' to agree with him!

Val,

Earlier in this thread (bottom of page 2) I suggested your arguments against utilitarianism were based on your interpretation (I would say misinterpretation) of 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number', and in general a confusion between consequentialism and 'the ends justifies the means'.

You haven't yet replied to my comments, if you feel I am in error, could you point out to my why you think this.

val wrote:

All I want you to consider is a society where most of people takes pleasure or satisfaction from the rape of a child (as a ritual, for example). Or a society where most of it's members take benefits, advantages and pleasure from slavery.
How can you say slavery of 10% of people is bad, if 90% become happy with it? Or to say the rape of a child is bad when 90% of the community liked it ant took pleasure from it?

As it seems to me, utilitarianism is founded on three basic premises:
(1) Pain (unhappiness/suffering) is bad.
(2) Pleasure (happiness/satisfaction) is good
(3) All interests should be considered equally.

Now, in order for ethical decisions to be made, we need to take a positions derived from these premises. Examples might be:
(I) Pain is worse than pleasure is good, so all our efforts should be spent minimising pain, maximising pleasure is only important where it has no effect on the amount of pain.

The trouble with this position is that it seems to lead to the conclusion that mass suicide is the best way to go, since this would remove all pain! But all of us are prepared to accept some amount of pain in exchange for pleasure, we do it all the time. So, we could try;
(II) Some amount of pain is acceptable in exchange for pleasure, but only an amount we would all be willing to experience in return for the pleasure.

Either position would conclude that ritual rape is wrong, as is slavery. Of course, this argument will led towards hypotheticals where the pleasure gets greater, and the pain get worse, to try to find the place where greater pleasure for many will outweigh the pain of one. I refer to this as the balancing act of utilitarianism.

Perhaps I could throw in then another possible position:
(III) When making utilitarian calculations, our focus should start on the party most effected by the act. Considering their interests equal to all others, we start by asking: if I were this person, would I consider my pain to be outweighed by the pleasure that will also result? If no, then is seems the balance weighes towards the bad.

0 Replies

val wrote:

How can you say slavery of 10% of people is bad, if 90% become happy with it? Or to say the rape of a child is bad when 90% of the community liked it ant took pleasure from it?

Because I assume -- I think correctly -- that the pain to the slaves and the rape victims is sufficiently greater than the pleasure to the slave holders and rapists to make up for the 9:1 relation in numbers. In fact, I think it preposterous to assume otherwise. Your hypothetical does not describe the psychology in any human society that I know of. If there was such a society, perhaps I wouldn't consider rape unjust -- or, more probably, I wouldn't use utilitarian arguments to attack the practice. The point is, I don't have to answer this question, because there is no way to ask it in the real world. After all, the purpose of morality is to make a difference in the real world, not to make points of abstract reasoning.

val wrote:

I don't care what individual actions utilitarians assumed. That is not the question.

That is correct. The reason I brought this up is because in the beginning of this thread, you made some confident predictions about what utilitarian principles would prescribe in given real world situations. From these predictions, my impression was that you hadn't investigated the implications of utilitarianism much yet. So I thought you would find it interesting to compare your assumptions about utilitarianism against the positions actual utilitarians have actually argued.

0 Replies

djbt

In some point of this discussion I have centered my comments in the positions assumed by Thomas. I think that it is natural in a discussion like this one, that we move from the initial and global question to more particular situations, as a result of the discussion itself.

Quote:

As it seems to me, utilitarianism is founded on three basic premises:
(1) Pain (unhappiness/suffering) is bad.
(2) Pleasure (happiness/satisfaction) is good
(3) All interests should be considered equally.

I agree with the two initial premises. But in his critique to "natural right", Bentham clearly says that the object of moral law (and legislation) is "happiness to the great number". It's why I find very hard to consider equally the interests of 10% of a population and those of the other 90%, in the case of opposition.

Quote:

(I) Pain is worse than pleasure is good, so all our efforts should be spent minimising pain, maximising pleasure is only important where it has no effect on the amount of pain.

I cannot see why, within the premises of an utilitarian system, pain is worse than pleasure is good. In Epicurus moral that can be understood. But here, without other references, how can we reach that conclusion?

Thomas gave the example of pain and pleasure in the case of rape. He assumed that the pain of the victim is always worse than pleasure of the rapist. But why? How can you measure pleasure and pain?
And if, in only one case, a very special case, the pleasure of the rapist was greater than the pain of the victim, that would make rape morally good? I think you can only answer "yes".

Quote:

(II) Some amount of pain is acceptable in exchange for pleasure, but only an amount we would all be willing to experience in return for the pleasure.

But that is not the problem. The problem is pain for a minority in exchange of pleasure to most people. And that is why I talked about slavery. Regarding slavery most of greeks, or romans or americans slave owners in 1800 where happy with the situation. Most of americans who took land to the indians sending them to reservations were pleased with the situation. And they were the "great number" regarding population. So slavery is morally good until the point when the pain of the slaves becomes greater than the pleasure of the owners. The same with indians.

Quote:

(III) When making utilitarian calculations, our focus should start on the party most effected by the act. Considering their interests equal to all others, we start by asking: if I were this person, would I consider my pain to be outweighed by the pleasure that will also result? If no, then is seems the balance weighes towards the bad.

[/QUOTE]

But why start with the part most affected by the act? I am not against your reasoning, but I don't think it has anything to do with utilitarianism. There is no criteria in utilitarianism that allows you to make the question "if I were this person".

0 Replies

djbt wrote:

Thanks also for the link the the Singer/Posner discussion. You say Posner is a utilitarian, but he does not sound very much like one to me.

Richard Posner, together with Gary Becker, created a variant of utilitarianism that goes by the name of "Law and Economics". The two have recently started up a Blogthat gives you a pretty good impression of the way they think. (And if joefromchicago is still following this thread, he can tell you all about what's wrong with their way of thinking.) You are probably right when you observe that Posner doesn't sound very utilitarian in his correspondence with Singer. I suspect the reason is that before you make utilitarian arguments, you sometimes have to make a choice whose utility counts and whose doesn't. This choice cannot be itself utilitarian.

Perhaps a similar reason is underlying our differences in free trade. Since Ricardo (1817), we know that when two countries trade, some of their inhabitants get richer, some of them may or may not get poorer, but both countries always gain in money terms. However, trade can change the income distribution within a country in a way that constitutes a utilitarian loss within the country. Therefore, if trade with India makes rich Americans richer and poor Americans poorer (which it probably does), if you assume that the same dollar has greater utility to an poor American than to a rich American (which it probably does), and if you make the value judgment that utility to Americans counts much more for you than utility to Indians, so you can dismiss the utilitarian gains from trade to Indians, then utilitarian reasoning can produce a case against free trade. Most utilitarians, though, don't make a difference between the utility to compatriots and utility to foreigners, so end up arguing for free trade.

0 Replies

val wrote:

I agree with the two initial premises. But in his critique to "natural right", Bentham clearly says that the object of moral law (and legislation) is "happiness to the great number". It's why I find very hard to consider equally the interests of 10% of a population and those of the other 90%, in the case of opposition.

Perhaps not incidentally, your quote omits two important words: it is "the greatest happiness to the greatest number" that a system of rules ought to maximize according to Bentham. In other words, he thinks there is a tradeoff between the intensity of pleasure and pain on the one hand, and the quantity of people feeling it on the other.

val wrote:

Thomas gave the example of pain and pleasure in the case of rape. He assumed that the pain of the victim is always worse than pleasure of the rapist. But why? How can you measure pleasure and pain?

In the case of slavery, by observing if its conditions are re-created under freedom of contract. If the utility of slavery to slaveholders was greater than the disutility of slavery to slaves, the conditions of slavery (gang-labor agriculture) would be recreated at some wage which former slaveholders are willing to pay, and former slaves are willing to accept. No such thing was observed after the Civil War in America, so we know that at least the slavery in the ante-bellum South was a net destroyer of happiness.

In the case of rape, hard empirical data is necessarily hard to get, because it is logically impossible to consent to be raped. In this case, one important information source was introspection ("How much would it please me to rape someone? How much would it pain me to be raped? Huh, pretty conclusive bottom line here.") Another source was talking to other people about this. It's not as hard evidence as willingness to pay, but still, pretty conclusive.

val wrote:

And if, in only one case, a very special case, the pleasure of the rapist was greater than the pain of the victim, that would make rape morally good? I think you can only answer "yes".

Not if you assume that almost everyone values the predictability of clear legal rules over the chaos that arises when every punishment depends on the court's opinion of what goes on in the offender's and the victim's soul.

0 Replies

I don't agree with utilitarianism. For one, it is too problematic to compare the degree of happiness to the degree of suffering. Secondly, it does not consider the axiom of respect for all persons. Thirdly, it is too easy to rationalize it to something that tries to justify the oppression of the minority for the sheer pleasure of the majority.

0 Replies

Thomas

Quote:

Perhaps not incidentally, your quote omits two important words: it is "the greatest happiness to the greatest number" that a system of rules ought to maximize according to Bentham. In other words, he thinks there is a tradeoff between the intensity of pleasure and pain on the one hand, and the quantity of people feeling it on the other.

Believe me, Thomas, it was incidental. And for a good reason: what do I care about "greatest happiness to the greatest number" if it means misery for those who had not the luck of being part of "greatest number"?

Quote:

In the case of slavery, by observing if its conditions are re-created under freedom of contract. If the utility of slavery to slaveholders was greater than the disutility of slavery to slaves, the conditions of slavery (gang-labor agriculture) would be recreated at some wage which former slaveholders are willing to pay, and former slaves are willing to accept.

"Disutility of slavery to slaves"? Thomas, are we talking about the same thing? It is not disutility. It is suffering, indignity, dehumanisation.

("How much would it please me to rape someone? How much would it pain me to be raped? Huh, pretty conclusive bottom line here.") Another source was talking to other people about this. It's not as hard evidence as willingness to pay, but still, pretty conclusive.

Yes, good idea. Interviews wity victim and rapist, and, why not in TV, in those reality shows? "How much pain did you feel, miss? The greatest pain of your life? Or only a median pain? And you sir? Was it the greatest pleasure of your life? Well, it was the best rape I have ever done." It would be a show with a very large audience. With large beneficts to the station. So a good and moral show, according to your values. And the ideal would be if in the end the victim, all self dignity destroyed, killed herself. It would be a "must".

The worst thing about your ideas is in the fact that they are the kind of perspective of most of our western politicians, from Blair to Bush.

0 Replies

val wrote:

"Disutility of slavery to slaves"? Thomas, are we talking about the same thing? It is not disutility. It is suffering, indignity, dehumanisation.

Yes, we are talking about the same thing.

val wrote:

Yes, good idea. Interviews wity victim and rapist, and, why not in TV, in those reality shows? "How much pain did you feel, miss? The greatest pain of your life? Or only a median pain? And you sir? Was it the greatest pleasure of your life? Well, it was the best rape I have ever done." It would be a show with a very large audience. With large beneficts to the station. So a good and moral show, according to your values. And the ideal would be if in the end the victim, all self dignity destroyed, killed herself. It would be a "must".

A variant of this is already being done. It's called a "court trial"; it's also considered a pretty effective way of putting rapists into their well-deserved jail, and the closest thing there is to giving the victims a minimal sense of closure.

val wrote:

The worst thing about your ideas is in the fact that they are the kind of perspective of most of our western politicians, from Blair to Bush.

Which ideas would you propose instead, and in which countries have these ideas lead to a more decent society, as judged by your morals?

0 Replies

Thomas

I already told you what my moral values are. They are questionable, as everything is. And there are no countries to follow them. I am not a prophet or a politician. They are my ideas, my moral perspective, that I try to follow in my life.

About "court trial". There is a point you missed: a trial supposes already a previous moral (and legal) judgement about rape. What we were discussing was exactly the moral qualification of rape. I still believe utilitarianism cannot give an answer. Only in a specific case of rape. Not rape itself. As you know, legal typifications must be "abstract and universal", never casuistry.

0 Replies

val wrote:

About "court trial". There is a point you missed: a trial supposes already a previous moral (and legal) judgement about rape.

Not in the common law process it doesn't. Even without a previous moral and legal judgment in the matter, a common law judge can let both parties bring on their evidence and make their arguments, and rule in favor of whoever he thinks makes the more persuasive case. Hundred rulings later, another common law judge will look at the hundred precedences and distill a legal doctrine from it. In reality its more suble than this. But it's close enough to make my point, which is that legal rules can evolve bottom-up rather than top-down, and there is good reason to expect that legal rules evolved that way will be utility-maximizing. I have no conceptual problems with moral rules that evolve the same way.

0 Replies

Thomas

I must say I am surprised with your statement. In fact, I thought that German right was similar to the portuguese. And in criminal law always prevails the roman sentence "nullum crime sine lege, nulla poena sine lege" (that means, "no crime without a law that qualifies it as crime, and establishes the correspondent penalty").

0 Replies

val wrote:

Thomas

I must say I am surprised with your statement. In fact, I thought that German right was similar to the portuguese. And in criminal law always prevails the roman sentence "nullum crime sine lege, nulla poena sine lege" (that means, "no crime without a law that qualifies it as crime, and establishes the correspondent penalty").

That is true. German law, like Portuguese law, is a decendent of Roman law and has inherited this principle from it. But I was explicitly talking about the "common law", which has historically governed England and its former colonies. The common law is essentially judge-made, and it has evolved more or less in the fashion I described in my last post.

0 Replies

Utilitarianism

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know