Debate with Matthew Adelstein on Utilitarianism (1/5)
Once more against the bean counters
This is my first post in a five-part debate with Matthew Adelstein (his first post is here). I guess I have a built-in advantage because I don’t have to present any comprehensive moral theory, but just give reasons to doubt that utilitarianism provides such a theory. This is much easier because I don't have any comprehensive moral theory that’s clearly correct.
As far as I know, all attempts to find this have proven flawed, but I think that weak deontology is less flawed, and more importantly that in light of moral uncertainty people should make choices that take into account the possibility that most reasonable moral theories could be correct. An outcome where some formerly utilitarian readers conclude that there’s a 40% chance utilitarianism is correct, a 40% chance that it’s somewhat flawed, and a 20% chance that all three of the main tenets listed below are flawed would still be productive and should lead to rational changes in behavior.
Huemer’s Knowledge, Reality, and Value disentangles utilitarianism cleanly into three parts:
Consequentialism: The right thing to do is always whatever produces the best consequences overall in the long run. That is: You should always make the choice such that, if you make it, the greatest amount of good will exist, out of all the choices available to you.
Hedonism or preferentism: The only intrinsic good is pleasure (for the “hedonistic utilitarian”) or desire-satisfaction (for the “preference utilitarian”).
Impartiality: The utility of all beings is equally important. One should not, e.g., privilege one’s own interests over those of others, or one’s own family over other families, or one’s own species over other species. Just produce the greatest total benefits, regardless of who gets them.
Consequentialism suffers from well-known thought experiments in which intuitions leads toward decision-making based on factors other than consequences. These are well known so I won’t list them: I mentioned some in Just Say No to Utilitarianism and you can find some more in the first section of Michael Huemer’s blog post Why I Am Not a Utilitarian.
I’m not sure if Matthew supports hedonism but hedonism is relatively strong, compared to the weaker links.
The weakest of the three tenets is impartiality. It conflicts with the strong intuition that people have particular obligations to specific people as a result of their relationships to them. Parents have an obligation to consider the interests of their children over the interests of strangers, all else equal.
In general, hedonistic utilitarianism is suspiciously limited. It says that there is only one good thing, pleasure (but not rights, beauty, knowledge, etc), and one moral consideration for action, consequences (but not intent or obligation). I don’t see good reasons to discount these intuitions altogether.
I’m not sure what angle Matthew will take, so I’ll only anticipate two counterarguments in advance. First, there’s a response rejecting the intuitions in the specific cases on the grounds that they’re based on an emotional reaction that isn’t morally relevant. Utilitarianism also rests on intuitions and a case just as strong could be made that those intuitions have an emotional motivation.
A recent quote from the EA Forum commented that effective altruists, who are most often utilitarians, “are just people who are really excited about multiplication, and who think multiplication is epistemically and morally sound.” This is suspicious, since the kind of person who values in an ethical theory a quantifiable or mathematical quality, or an ease in reducing ethical discussions to empirical discussions, would be drawn to utilitarianism regardless of its accuracy. Though I (lovingly) call them “bean-counters,” the utilitarian diet is mostly bullets, which they often bite suspiciously gleefully, suggesting a missing mood.
The second counterargument I’ll respond to is the weirdly circular argument that I’ve seen most clearly in Scott Alexander’s Consequentialist FAQ. In the second part, titled “Morality must live in the world,” he just asserts his conclusion, which is that it’s incoherent to make moral decisions based on anything but consequences. I use “incoherent” deliberately because his description doesn’t show awareness that there is an alternate position at all. He uses a thought experiment in which it’s given that murdering kittens is ethical, and then reasons that the guilty feeling and legal process that would result shows that this thought experiment is actually a contradiction. I struggle to react to arguments like this beyond just repeating hypothetical examples that show the (widespread, commonsensical) intuition that consequences are not the only moral consideration.
Looking forward to the future debate posts.