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Utilitarianism

John Stuart Mill

Intrinsic and Instrumental Value

Instrumental value is the value something has in virtue of its consequences, or its effectiveness at causing something else that’s valuable to happen.

The instrumental value of a hammer is its effectiveness at securely putting nails through boards.

Practice is instrumentally valuable because it builds skill.

Intrinsic value is the value something has simply because of what it is, and not because of what it does.

The feeling of Morality in Traditional Cultures Every society has to solve a variety of economic and social problems. Two universal problems are:

1. Producing enough of the right material goods in the right proportion.

2. Getting along with each other.

Tradition-based societies solve these problems with traditions. For example:

• Family-based education in a craft or trade solves the problem of production by ensuring society has a stable proportion of people doing each requisite job.

• Monogamy, and to a more extreme extent, matchmaking, solves the problem of spouse-partnering.

The feeling of Morality in Traditional Cultures Traditions evolve to solve social problems without our conscious choice or awareness that this is what the tradition is doing.

In traditional societies, people don’t consciously accept monogamy or family-education because they solve a social problem. Traditional practices and beliefs are felt to be intrinsically right on their own.

Traditioooon! Tradition!

Utilitarians and Moral Progress The first utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, lived in Britain during the industrial revolution, a time when their culture was still dominated by tradition. They advocated for sweeping social change on utilitarian grounds.

• Equality for women.

• De-stigmatizing sex, legalizing divorce.

• Eliminating censorship and state- enforced religion.

• Eliminating corporal punishment.

Hedonism

Utilitarians disagree with traditional morality. They are hedonists, which means they think the only things with intrinsic value are “good feelings” and the absence “bad feelings”.

The Principle of Utility, aka The Greatest Happiness Principle

“Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”

In other words, the principle of utility says:

“The best thing to do in any situation is the action that does the most to increase net global happiness, and any other action is the wrong thing to do.”

Who’s pleasure?

Egoism is the view that only your own pleasure is intrinsically valuable.

But this has many weird consequences, including the consequence that nothing that doesn’t effect you is morally evaluable.

Utilitarianism assumes that everyone’s pleasure is equally intrinsically valuable. It’s pleasure simpliciter that matters, no matter who it “attaches” to.

Net Global Happiness

Happiness-ometer

The Act-Utilitarian Decision Procedure

1. Identify all options for action. 2. For each action, determine how much

wellbeing/pleasure would result from performing that action.

3. For each action, determine how much suffering/pain would result from performing that action.

4. For each action, sum the wellbeing/pleasure and suffering/pain to arrive at the net resulting wellbeing/pleasure.

5. Perform the action that results in the maximal amount our wellbeing/pleasure

What appetizer should the friends order?

Measuring Pleasures

Mill’s friend and mentor, Jeremy Bentham, proposed five criterion for measuring the instrumental value of an action in producing pleasure:

1. How intense is the pleasure it produces?

2. How long is the pleasure’s duration.

3. How likely is it that pleasure will be produced?

4. How soon will the pleasure be produced?

5. How pure is the action ? (i.e. how much pain is produced alongside the action?)

6. Mill added: how human (versus animalistic) is the pleasure?

What is meant by pleasure and pain?

Mill intends these terms broadly, to include both “high” and “low” pleasures and pains.

In common with the less cognitively advanced animals, humans take pleasure in food, backscratches, sunbathing, and sex.

But humans also have distinct pleasures, like literature, music, winning championships, scientific discovery, and personal relationships.

What is meant by pleasure and pain?

Similarly, humans share pains with the less cognitively developed animals, like the pains of starvation or physical injury.

But humans are also uniquely susceptible to the hardships of loss, failure, social depravation, and existential dread.

What is meant by pleasure and pain?

“It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable…

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”John Stuart Mill

Distinguishing between two types of utilities. Actions have utility insofar as they result in pleasure. But we should distinguish two relevant effects.

The first is the direct effecting of pleasure in sentient beings. Backscratches are directly pleasurable.

The second is an increase in one’s capacity to feel pleasure, either in a larger amount, or in response to new stimuli. Reading difficult literature does not always directly produce pleasure, but changes one’s outlook, so that one derives more pleasure from life.

I doubt this was what Mill was thinking by “high” pleasures versus “low” pleasures, though.

Problems for Utilitarianism

• The problem of ignoring people’s intentions.

• The no-rest problem (and the elimination of the supererogatory).

• The problem with equality (and the Utility Monster problem).

• The problem with justice.

• The Problem with desert.

The problem with Moral Knowledge and Intentions

We can’t always know which action is the most instrumentally valuable for creating happy consequences.

What if I give a friend a book as a gift that I think they will really like, when in fact they will hate it, and a different book that I passed over would have brought them great joy. Did I do the wrong thing?

Praise and Blame

The utilitarian can define praiseworthiness and blameworthiness in terms of the intention behind an action. Someone is praiseworthy if they perform the action they think will maximize happiness, and blameworthy otherwise, even if they are wrong.

Praise/blame and moral/immoral action can thus come apart, since someone can be praiseworthy for doing the objectively wrong thing and blameworthy for doing the objectively right thing.

The no-rest problem

Utilitarianism can be a very demanding moral theory. It seems that most of the time there is an action that is instrumentally superior for maximizing happiness than the action I am actually performing. Can Utilitarianism ever justify going to a baseball game, the spa, or the movies? Are these actually immoral things to do? It’s strains credulity to think that people are doing something immoral if they go to an occasional baseball game.

The Obligatory, Permissible, Impermissible, and Supererogatory

Morally Obligatory: what you must do, morally speaking.

Morally Permissible: what you may do, it’s not wrong to do this.

Morally Impermissible: what you may not do, it’s always the wrong thing to do this.

Morally Supererogatory: going above and beyond. It’s not morally obligatory, and not doing it is morally permissible, but doing it is a good thing.

The no-rest problem is related to a further consequence of taking a strong utilitarian stance: it upends this traditional divisions of moral categorization of actions. The supererogatory no longer exists, and the permissible and the obligatory become the same thing.

The no-rest problem

One possible modification to utilitarianism is to change it’s principle from “do whatever maximizes net global happiness” to “do anything that increases net global happiness.”

The difference is that the second principle does not demand that you do whatever does the most to increase net global happiness, any increase will do.

However, such a principle is hard to justify without bringing in other values, which means giving up hedonism.

The problem with Equality (and the Utility Monster)

The problem with Equality (and the Utility Monster)

We can avoid the utility monster by adding a condition on the utilitarian decision procedure that morally permissible actions must distribute happiness as equally as possible. Sometimes there might not be an action that distributes happiness equally, but when there is, that action is to be preferred.

The problem with this is that it would require us to forgo actions that massively increase global happiness in an unequal way if another action barely increases global happiness in an egalitarian way.

The problem with Justice

Should an innocent person be found guilty if it would please the entire city and prevent a riot (and lots of unhappiness)?

Rule Utilitarianism

The principle of Rule Utilitarianism:

“The right action is the action allowed by the rule (or set of rules) which, if generally followed, would maximize happiness more than any alternative rule (or set of rules).”

Rule Utilitarianism

The problem with rule utilitarianism is that it is either too strict or, upon analysis, it turn back into classic utilitarianism.

The rule “Never lie” is too strict, it wouldn’t maximize happiness as much as “Never lie, unless you have a very good reason.” What sorts of reason are good reasons according to utilitarianism? Answer: increasing global happiness. So rules end up having exceptions, and the exception is that your allowed to break the rule if you’d increase happiness by doing so, which means we’re back to the same principle as classic (act) utilitarianism!

The Problem with Desert

Desert (pronounced like dessert) is what you deserve. Utilitarianism ignores desert when dictating what you should do. If giving the kid who’s bullying your child the ice cream you were going to give to your kid would maximize happiness (maybe the bully will enjoy it more), then utilitarianism says the right thing to do is to give the bully the ice cream. But the bully doesn’t deserve it, so this doesn’t seem right.

How much is a life worth?

The UK suffered two terrible train accidents in 2000 and 2001, in which a total of 14 people died and 150 were injured. There were clamors for introducing a safer automated train signaling system, but it would have cost 6 billion dollars.

How much is a life worth?

• British rail travel is actually remarkably safe. There are only 300 railway deaths in the UK each year, and 200 are suicides. Most of the others are trespassers. Only about 10 are passengers, and these are mostly from slips and falls. In contrast, about 3,500 people die on the UK roads.

• The law of diminishing returns makes it very expensive to reduce fatalities even further.

• It would cost 6 billion dollars to install an automated train signaling system, yet it would save just a couple lives a year, tops. Lets say it saves 12 a year. Then we’d be spending $500,000,000 to reduce the “lives lost a year on trains” rate by 1 life a year. We’d then multiply that by the number of years we expect this effect to last to get an estimate of the total lived saved by our $500,000,000 dollars.

How much is a life worth?

Roads are way more dangerous than taking a train or flying. Furthermore, we know that roads in poor conditions are more dangerous than roads in better conditions. But it costs money to makes road conditions safe. How much should we spend to fix a road that kills 1 person a year due to its bad condition?

http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statis tics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview

How much is a life worth?

How should we calculate the monetary value of a life?

Economists and policy makers used to calculate it by expected future earnings, but this had lots of problems. (Like what? Think about inequality).

Today they estimate the value of a life by how much they think citizens are willing to pay to reduce the risk of death.

How much is a life worth?

The British government will spend $1.74 million to reduce the death rate from a bit of infrastructure by 1 death a year, while the US will (purportedly) spend $6 million a year.

So the US government thinks its taxpayers are willing to spend $6,000 to not roll a die that has a 1 in 1000 chance of killing them. And $60 to not roll a die that has a 1 in 100,000 chance! (And $3 million to avoid flipping a coin).

The Survival Lottery

The math behind the lottery. Without the lottery ten out of every one thousand people die from genetic organ failure every year, so each year you have 1% chance of dying from organ failure.*

With the lottery, ten out of every one thousand people still suffer an organ failure every year, but they don’t die. Instead, two people die so their organs can be harvested to save the ten people. Consequently, each year you have a 0.2% chance of dying from “being harvested.”

*This isn’t real data, it’s simplified data used for the explanation.