In response to faithlessgod's suggestion, here's a thread on objections to consequentialism and/or utilitarianism and our responses to them. In response to GordonHide's comments, I'll split them into two sections - criticisms that apply to any form of consequentialism, and criticisms that apply only to utilitarianism.

Anyone who wants to can post a response to some or all of the points - please make it as clear as possible which you're responding to. Hopefully this will effectively become a multi-author FAQ.

General objections to consequentialism

1) In some situations [insert your favourite thought experiment here], consequentialism says we should do something which is clearly immoral.

2) In some situations, applying consequentialist ethics would create a situation which is clearly undesirable.

3) In still other situations, making consequentialist deliberation would lead to negative consequences

4) In yet other situations, applying consequentialism would mean becoming non-consequentialists.

5) Most consequentialist values are impossible to measure, so following aggregative consequentialism is impossible.

6) It’s impossible/undesirable to impose a structure on ethics. Better to rely on our judgement, and take one situation at a time.

7) Saying we should prefer some type of consequence is like saying we should respect people’s rights – a fundamental axiom that you either accept or don’t.

8) It's very hard or impossible to evaluate actions the way consequentialists say we should, because they might have very long term consequences.

9) I don't like applying labels to myself.

Specific objections to utilitarianism

10) Happiness isn’t a universal sum which everyone contributes to or subtracts from, it’s a subjective experience that varies from each individual to the next. Utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons.

11) Utilitarianism demands impossible sacrifice from us (this Demandingness Objection seems to apply to most forms of consequentialism, but maybe less so than to util).

12) ) Utilitarianism says that our only goal is to maximise happiness, but people obviously don’t act as though it is.

13) I agree with the sentiment of increasing wellbeing, but I disagree with the idea of using people for the benefit of others. It treats them as less than human because it disregards their intents and goals. So utilitarianism is a good starting point for ethics, but we must also respect human dignity.

Let me know if you can think of any that I've missed, or can think a better way of phrasing anything above. Also, let's keep this thread for immediate responses to the common objections so that it remains clear - if you want to argue a point, better to start it in a new thread.

Thanks,

A

First, I put my vote of support behind this project. I like that it promotes utilitarianism and that it is practical: 1. It starts at home - Felicifia's home - the internet. 2. It deploys a strength of forum-posters, explaining why they're wrong and we're right.

I just read an essay relevant to this topic, RM Hare’s How to Argue With an Anti-utilitarian. It taught me:
> that RM Hare was adversarial in his defence of utilitarianism
> that the first step in debunking an objection to utilitarianism is discovering whether we are thinking intuitively or critically.

I think that we should categorise objections according to the thought-processes of non-utilitarians. i.e. I think we can name categories more usefully than ‘semantic confusion’, ‘misapplication’, ‘indoctrination’ etc. So with this in mind, I suggest:

Objection by Intuition:
1
2
and, I'm sure, many more to come

Objection by logic
Applied utilitarianism is inconsistent or incoherent
3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10

Many people are not utilitarian so utilitarianism is not true (relativistic)
5

The idea that we ‘should’ do one thing or another is not true (nihilistic)
9

NB. In 5, like 4, objectors seriously misunderstand utilitarianism, thereby seeing it as contradictory. So 5 could be lumped in with Applied utilitarianism if there is a consensus on this. Also, Applied utilitarianism could potentially be split, I see 3 and 4 (contradiction) as a pair, 6 and 7 (incoherence) as a pair. And then 8 and 10 only half-fit in applied utilitarianism, but I felt I couldn't make a better fit anywhere else.

Added a couple more that I've seen people say around here.

Arepo wrote:1) In some situations [insert your favourite thought experiment here], consequentialism says we should do something which is clearly immoral

Pardon me, but if your moral system tells you that something OK by consequentialism is immoral then you aren't a consequentialist. Are you? Perhaps I misunderstand. Are you talking about restricted choice - least of two evils?

Arepo wrote:2) In some situations [insert next thought experiment], applying consequentialist ethics would create a situation which is clearly undesirable

See above.

Arepo wrote:3) In still other situations, applying consequentialist ethics would lead to a situation that's clearly contrary to utilitarian goals

Does this matter? Not all consequentialists are utilitarian. A problem for utilitarianism maybe but not consequentialism in general.

Arepo wrote:4) In yet other situations, applying consequentialism would mean becoming non-consequentialists

Perhaps you could give an example.

Arepo wrote:5) Utilitarianism says that our only goal is to maximise happiness, but people obviously don’t act as though it is

What's that got to do with consequentialism?

Arepo wrote:6) Happiness (and similar concepts) are impossible to measure, so following aggregative consequentialism is impossible

Again, not directly related to consequentialism.

Arepo wrote:7) Utilitarianism demands impossible sacrifice of us

See above.

Arepo wrote:8) It’s impossible/undesirable to impose a structure on ethics. Better to rely on our judgement, and take one situation at a time

I thought that's what consequentialists were doing?

Arepo wrote:9) Saying we should make people happy is the same as saying we should respect people’s rights – an unjustifiable axiom that you either accept or don’t

Again, not directly related to consequentialism.

Arepo wrote:10) Happiness isn’t a universal sum which everyone contributes to or subtracts from, it’s a subjective experience that varies from each individual to the next

See above.

Arepo wrote:11) It's very hard or impossible to evaluate actions the way utilitarianism says we should, because they might have very long term consequences

You can only make your best attempt. ...And shouldn't you have said "the way consequentialism says we should"

Arepo wrote:12) I don't like applying labels to myself

I certainly don't.

Arepo wrote:Let me know if you can think of any that I've missed, or can think a better way of phrasing anything above. Also, let's keep this thread for immediate responses to the common objections so that it remains clear - if you want to argue a point, better to start it in a new thread.

Thanks

A.

Thanks Gordon, that's very helpful. To clarify a couple of things, these are criticisms levelled at consequentialism/utilitarianism by nonconsequentialists, so they're unlikely to be phased by a 'you're not a consequentialist' response. I should make that clearer in the OP, though.

I should also clearly separate objections to consequentialism from objections to utilitarianism. At the moment I've got written 'utilitarianism' where the criticism applies only to that, and 'consequentialism' where it applies more broadly, but I've obviously mixed them up in at least one place (#3).

I deliberately avoided giving specific examples, since thought experiments are almost endless, but the details are inevitably irrelevant, since the fundamental objection always seems to be one of those in 1-4. Maybe I could give egs in a footnote, at the end of the post.

So, some editin' required...

[ETA] Some editin' done. More still to come - but I've messed up your reply Ryan, sorry. You might want to reorder your #s to fit mine.

1. This is true of of every ethical theory, probably including your own. One example I've heard of for the including your own part is essentially praying while smoking is good (praying is always good) but smoking while praying is bad (it's sacrilege). Virtually all of these also involve assuming something that never applies in real life (for example, the muslims who think a cartoonist should be killed for a comic with Muhammad not being outnumbered by christians who don't) or involve not noticing less direct, but equally important effects. Also, some are just plain stupid (you can't stop a train by pushing someone in front of it, no matter how fat he is).

2. By the definition of consequentialism, every other action must result in a situation that's less desirable. Either that or it relies on incomplete information, in which case coming up with a situation like this for any ethical theory is trivial (if he acts like a consequentialist, go on a murder spree).

3. How's this different than 2?

4. If you assume that the person is omniscient, this is impossible. In reality, it happens all the time. We call it making rules of thumb.
Edit: what I mean is, it's best to not try to think everything through at every moment. You'd never do anything. This is why we make rules of thumb.

5. Measuring it requires making large numbers of unfounded assumptions and simplifications. So does statistics. Considering that's a rather large branch of mathematics, I think we can live with a few assumptions.

6. That's meta-ethics. I can't speak for all of us, but I think it's not so much that we're imposing something on ethics, as we're imposing what we believe to be ethics (consequentialism) on reality. In any case, if you believe in determinism, you are going to be imposing a structure no matter what. Even if you don't, we all know that even though there's no clearly defined and logical structure to human thought, it's still pretty structured. In any case, completely not structured just means random. Does that seem right? I know I just used the fallacy for argument 1.

7. I agree completely. Why is this an argument?
Edit: I'll change that to: Consequentialism requires only one such axiom, unlike other ethical philosophies. By Occam's razor, ours is more likely correct.

8. We can try.

9. It's not just about what you like. The question is: is there greater Utility in applying labels to yourself?
Edit: This is an objection to calling yourself consequentialist, not an objection to actually being one. As such, it doesn't really belong here.

10. I know. That's why we made up the word "utility". It's the universal sum which everyone contributes to or subtracts from. Maybe you don't believe in such a thing. That's pretty much the definition of not being a utilitarian.

11. Utilitarianism doesn't demand anything. It just says it would be better if we did do (almost) impossible sacrifices. Just try.

12. That's because they're not (ideal) utilitarians. Utilitarianism wasn't meant to describe what you think.

As much as I like the whole "I can't be perfect, but I can try" counter-argument, it tends to result in another problem. You can't try perfectly, so you try to try, but you can't try to try perfectly.... Should we include that as an argument? Does anyone have a good counter-argument for it?

On objection 11, Utilitarianism demands impossible sacrifice from us

DanielLC wrote: Utilitarianism doesn't demand anything. It just says it would be better if we did do (almost) impossible sacrifices. Just try...
As much as I like the whole "I can't be perfect, but I can try" counter-argument, it tends to result in another problem. You can't try perfectly, so you try to try, but you can't try to try perfectly.... Should we include that as an argument? Does anyone have a good counter-argument for it?

I like your discussion. I can answer it by taking is back to basics: utilitarianism tells us that greater happiness is better. We should do what creates happiness. Trying is an action. So in all cases, we should try in so far as it is helpful. That counts for trying to maximise X, trying to perfectly do Y, trying to try Z. Something like flying to the moon superficially might seem like it'll have positive consequences. But flying to the moon won't have positive consequences because it won't occur. It's impossible.

I answer objection 11 below, touching on impossibility and sacrifice. (It's a work in progress, but please criticise)

Firstly, on sacrifice: utilitarianism describes sacrifice rather differently from other ethical systems. It doesn't describe self-sacrifice as good in itself. Fundamentally, utilitarianism tells us the opposite. It tells us all of our happiness and/or preferences are equal. On poverty, for example, it says that one should decide an appropriate amount of wealth to share with others so that the combined happiness of all people is optimal. Utilitarianism suggests that:
we do not disregard our own needs or others' needs
we sacrifice our own wellbeing only to an extent that is psychologically sustainable

What utilitarianism does not do is tell us to try to act in a way that is impossible. For example, it doesn't advocate that we try to fly to the moon. Of course, if we returned from such a trip, it would create quite a buzz, but we shouldn't attempt to do so because these positive consequences are not going to be realised. These kinds of imaginary consequences don't count. So when we sacrifice our own wellbeing, we have to be realistic.

--
Now, I note that some of your answers are circular reasoning. They just say "If you don't agree with us, then you're not a consequentialist". Well, what we're trying to do here is refute objections to utilitarianism persuasively. Some of the current arguments are no better than the argument "god wrote the bible, therefore the bible is true, therefore there is a god". In particular, I'm looking at
Gordonhide's answers 1 & 2
DanielC's answers 2 & 9

Hi rather than get lost in referring to numbers I will quote each list item in my response.

Arepo wrote:General objections to consequentialism

1) In some situations [insert your favourite thought experiment here], consequentialism says we should do something which is clearly immoral.

Argument from intuition - response intuition can be mistaken, switch to critical level.

Arepo wrote:2) In some situations, applying consequentialist ethics would create a situation which is clearly undesirable.

Hmm...it might be undesirable but if it is not immoral... this is rather unclear. I think you were indicating more the unreasonableness or injustice objections?

Arepo wrote:3) In still other situations, applying consequentialist ethics would lead to a situation that's clearly contrary to their goals.

Of course, how is this an objection? If nothing was ever contrary to anyone's goals and no-one had any complaints there would be no reason for this forum!

Arepo wrote:4) In yet other situations, applying consequentialism would mean becoming non-consequentialists.

I think we need an example to make this clear. Are some consequentialisms self-defeating? Possibly - but that does not refute consequentialism per se.

Arepo wrote:5) Most consequentialist values are impossible to measure, so following aggregative consequentialism is impossible.

Argument from impracticality. The challenge is met by showing they are not impossible just variably difficult but even guesses and estimates are better than giving up before one has even started. And what alternatives are being proposed that are demonstrably better? None that I have seen,.

Arepo wrote:6) It’s impossible/undesirable to impose a structure on ethics. Better to rely on our judgement, and take one situation at a time.

Is this an argument from casuistry or pragmatism? Impossible and undesirable are two radically different positions on this.

Arepo wrote:7) Saying we should prefer some type of consequence is like saying we should respect people’s rights – a fundamental axiom that you either accept or don’t.

Ahem rights can be derived from utilitarianism and so does not trump utilitarianism but then rights are not absolute. (In DU there are no fundamental axioms of this type so no black and white acceptance is involved).

Arepo wrote:8) It's very hard or impossible to evaluate actions the way consequentialists say we should, because they might have very long term consequences.

So lets ignore any and all consequences? Throwing out the baby with the the bathwater?

Arepo wrote:9) I don't like applying labels to myself.

You alabelist!!

Specific objections to utilitarianism

Arepo wrote:10) Happiness isn’t a universal sum which everyone contributes to or subtracts from, it’s a subjective experience that varies from each individual to the next.

One reason I reject HU.

Arepo wrote:11) Utilitarianism demands impossible sacrifice from us (this seems to apply to most forms of consequentialism, but maybe less so than to util).

Altruism demands sacrifice, utilitarianism does not have to.(DU avoids demanding sacrifice).

Arepo wrote:12) ) Utilitarianism says that our only goal is to maximise happiness, but people obviously don’t act as though it is.

Correct, (DU relies on this).

A good start but some stuff is too vague or too specific e.g. Objections to utilitarianism should to utilitarianism simpliciter not a specific version such as hedonic or happiness utilitarianism.

How about objections to nonconsequentialism? I think the idea that doing the right thing makes the world worse just seems wrong.

I've just set up a thread for discussion of our responses, so we can keep this one focused on direct responses to the question.

Here's another common objection to utilitarianism (or consequentialism more correctly)
13. I agree with the sentiment of increasing wellbeing, but I disagree with the idea of using others as means. This notion seems to treat others as tools rather than as equals. It seems to depict others as "less than human" because it disregards others' intents and goals. So utilitarianism is a good starting point for ethics only if we bear in mind human dignity and the right to be treated as ends but never as means.

What do you mean by "using others as means"? Does paying people for their services count? What exactly does whoever has that objection think we're doing? It's not like we're masterminding a huge Xanatos Roulette.

I've found a response to the latest objection which I found:
http://www.philosophyetc.net/2005/05/utilitarian-respect-for-persons.html

What do you think?

Here is another objection. Drawn from youtube comments, actually. It's one I don't think will prove too troublesome:

Utilitarianism is self contradictory....
The contention is: "Any action can be described as good or evil based on the ammount of happiness it brings"

Now, in order to deem the amount of good or evil something brings, you must commit to an act of comparison; in other words, deliberate on what the good to bad ratio is, you must make a cost benefit analysis of what the greatest happiness is. But wait, that is an action. So before we can make the analysis, an analysis must be made using the ethical ramifications of utilitarianism on whether the analysis is preferable.

Well, the same is true for that action, and the action that must inevitably follow that. This goes on to infinity. It is a paradox.

How must the (act) Utilitarian avoid this? Well, they must assume the action is moral. However, this is in ethical violation of the Utilitarian principle. And thus, Utilitarianism defeats itself."

Here is another

In order to ensure consistency of application, a central committee would be assigned the task of evaluating consequences to a minute degree, and drawing up detailed tables of happiness values.These would at least govern every aspect of public life, if not personal life. Any individual who refused to accept the choice prescribed by applying the maximisation law to his situation must be punished accordingly... Utilitarianism, like Communism, is hopelessly Utopian. It provides an attractive model for ethical decision making, but turns out to be totally impractical...as withCommunism, unscrupulous individuals can useits broad principles to justify any means availableto achieve their ends.

Drawn from the essay "The Poverty of Utilitarianism"

Here is an expression of objection 8, drawn from a critique of Peter Singer written by Roger Scruton

If I give my money to Oxfam in order to help people in the developing world, then this is justified, because some of the money, I believe, will get through to someone who will benefit. But equally, if I don't give a penny to Oxfam and actively campaign against its work, on the grounds that the money will merely encourage the political systems that maintain people in poverty, then this too excuses me. One or the other of those views may be false (possibly both are). But how can I know? And how can I know in time to make the decision?

Here is another criticism of Peter Singer and utilitarianism:

An additional error in Singer's thinking is the assumption he makes that the suffering (or happiness) of individuals can somehow be added to each other and thus create "all this suffering in the world." C. S. Lewis explains that if you have a toothache of intensity x and another person in the room with you also has a toothache of intensity x, "You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x." There is no composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as the sum of collective human suffering, because no one suffers it.

It was drawn from this essay

Here is a reply to criticism 3. It's shown to be defective by examples from Peter Railton's Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality

A highly competitive tennis player comes to realize that his obsession with winning is keeping him from playing his best. A pro tells him that if he wants to win he must devote himself more to the game and its play as such and think less about his performance. In the commitment and concentration made possible by this devotion, he is told, lies the secret of successful tennis. So he spends a good deal of time developing an enduring devotion to many aspects of the activity, and finds it peculiarly satisfying to become so absorbed in it. He plays better, and would have given up the program of change if he did not, but he now finds that he plays tennis more for its own sake, enjoying greater internal as well as external rewards from the sport.
...
a sophisticated consequentialist has reason to inculcate in himself certain dispositions to act rapidly in obvious emergencies
...
Many decisions are too insignificant to warrant consequentialist deliberation ("Which shoelace should I do up first?") or too predictable in outcome ("Should I meet my morning class today as scheduled or should I linger over the newspaper?").
...
The sophisticated consequentialist need not be deceiving himself or acting in bad faith when he avoids consequentialist reasoning. He can fully recognize that he is developing the dispositions he does because they are necessary for promoting the good.

A further objection is that the lack of any direct link between objective consequentialism and a particular mode of decision making leaves the view too vague to provide adequate guidance in practice. On the contrary, objective consequentialism sets a definite and distinctive criterion of right action, and it becomes an empirical question (though not an easy one) which modes of decision making should be employed and when. It would be a mistake for an objective consequentialist to attempt to tighten the connection between his criterion of rightness and any particular mode of decision making: someone who recommended a particular mode of decision making regardless of consequences would not be a hard-nosed, non-evasive objective consequentialist, but a self-contradicting one.

Peter Railton is not a utilitarian, he's a consequentialist who believes in making morality more intuitive and less demanding than I do. But this objection of "self-defeatingness" is used to criticise to all sorts of consequentialisms and it fails for utilitarians just as it fails for egoists or tennis-pros

I'll improve the opening post soon, by the way.

Here is a reply to criticism 8 taken from Peter Singer's interview here about 26 mins in

Peter Singer: It requires very complex calculations because we don't have a set of simple moral rules that say don't do this, do that, we have to work out what the consequences of our actions are as in this area that we're talking about about what kind of aid is effective, it's very difficult to work out what the consequences of our actions are and it's sometimes very difficult to know what's the right thing to do.

Interviewer: But you think we nonetheless should do what we think is best no matter however imperfect a guess that may be

Peter Singer: I don't really see what else we're supposed to do. It would seem to me wrong to say well because I can't calculate the consequences I'm just going to follow this simple set of rules. Because I can't calculate the consequences. But why follow this simple set of rules, where do they come from? I don't believe we have any god-given rules, I don't think that our moral intuitions are a good source of rules because that's the product of our evolutionary history which may not be appropriate for the moment that we're in. So despite the difficulty, I don't really see what the alternative is to trying our best to figure out what the expected utility is.

The best objection I've heard to utilitarianism is that if it's correct, than Medieval townspeople were justified in burning cats for entertainment, provided that the audience in each case was so large that aggregate pleasure outweighed the suffering of the cat. Anyone have a response to this one?

That example would be better in the present day, as we're now much better at insuring a large audience.

People burning cats for entertainment is likely to make them more cruel, and cause more problems in the long run.

Other than that, I'd have to know what exactly the problem is. If it's the idea that the cat is forced to be burned against its will, is this any different than townspeople being bored against there will? If it's the inequality of it all, I've read there's some proof that equality being important implies that there can be times when it's good to add a person whose life is arbitrarily bad. I can't find the reference at the moment. I find this a much worse paradox. Also, people are perfectly okay with having inequality within their own life (holidays and whatnot), and I don't really see how this is different.

biznor, your example here sounds very similar to the "lynching is fun" case, where you are a minority, but the racist town would get a lot of pleasure hanging you. so the case was designed to show, if you were a consistent utilitarian, you would be forced to admit that you let yourself be hanged.

Basically, allowing practices like these would lead to them being performed generally, which would have bad consequences. If you take Hare's two-level utilitarian view, there is the intuitive or "rule" based view for everyday actions like not murdering, stealing, lying, etc. Then there is the critical "act" view where you can have time to really contemplate a situation, and perhaps breaking some of those rules might have better consequences than following them in certain instances. If these Medieval townspeople thought that the practice of burning cats was an appropriate form of entertainment, this would lead to the needless suffering of many other cats in the future.

In my opion, the Medieval townspeople also have a false belief. If you have the desire to drink out of your water bottle but unbeknownst to you it is filled with poison, your desire to drink this water bottle is based on a false belief that the bottle only contains fresh water. Your aim was to quench your thirst and not to die which is what would have happened if you were allowed to drink from the bottle. The Medieval townspeople as well as the racists have a false belief about the nature of cats and humans of different races and their capacity to suffer.

The problem I have is that there seems to be a good case that can be made for cat-burning on the utilitarian theory, even if it's not absolutely certain that such an action is optimal. Sure, it might be true that such entertainment would make people more cruel, but that's just a bold assumption about sociology with no evidence to back it up. It is just as likely that allowing people to burn cats would have no impact on how compassionate or cruel the culture was. Since the benefits of cat-burning are far more certain and probable than the possible, negative side-effects, it is likely that cat-burning was justified.

I've read there's some proof that equality being important implies that there can be times when it's good to add a person whose life is arbitrarily bad.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Perhaps you could give an example?

If these Medieval townspeople thought that the practice of burning cats was an appropriate form of entertainment, this would lead to the needless suffering of many other cats in the future.

See my first paragraph. We really don't know why people in the Middle Ages were so much more callous and cruel than people today (though there are a number of proposed explanations, see the clip below); we don't have enough information to conclude that cat-burning contributed at all to the apparent lack of compassion that existed in Medieval cultures.



I have also considered the possibility that the townspeople have a false belief about the cat. Perhaps they would not be so callous if they weren't speciesists. The problem is that people in the Middle Ages were almost as callous to other humans as they were to cats (see clip). It seems unlikely that their false beliefs were the cause of their insensitivity.

One last thing I'd like to say is that this argument presents as much of a problem to speciesist rights theorists as it does for utilitarians. If utilitarianism can't account for the wrongness of cat-burning, animals may very well have rights.

For an essay version of the lecture in the video I posted, use this link:
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/2009april/Pinker054.php

thanks for posting the video biznor, had seen this already but not for a while. Pinker, secret utilitarian? he sites both Wright, a utilitarian sympathizer, as well as Singer as having two views that he finds to be plausible for his thesis on the decline in violence in the video. I went back and checked my copy of Pinker's "The Blank Slate" and he references both "The Expanding Circle" and "A Darwinian Left" by Singer to make his main point in his chapter on politics as well. A copy of "The Expanding Circle" was hard to track down. Long out of print, I was going to buy a copy but it's at least 30 dollars for a used one on any book site, so I went to my university library to reference it. Singer says it is one of his least well known works in "Peter Singer Under Fire". Here is the main epigraph at the beginning of "The Expanding Circle":

The moral unity to be expected in different ages is not a unity of standard, or of acts, but a unity of tendency....At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world.

--W.E.H. Lecky, The History of European Morals

So if we take this as a starting point, clearly the the Townspeople had a "smaller circle" than we, and did not include the interests of the cat or the "animal world" in their consideration because they were both literally and figuratively "sub-human" to them, to use the same phrase as Pinker. They also did not have a sufficiently "cosmopolitan" attitude; they did not have the Darwinian history that shows our common ancestry with the tortured cat(s).

biznor, you say that cat burning may not be optimal, and that it might be true that this form of entertainment could make people more cruel, but you are still skeptical. I personally fail to see how it would be just as likely to be impact-neutral on the compassion of the Townspeople, and I also do not see how the benefits are more certain than the negative side-effects. Even if we do not have precise evidence about why inhabitants of the Middle Ages were not compassionate, this still does not mean that they were justified on utilitarian grounds to burn their cats. Perhaps these people were just as cruel to other humans, I think this is still a false belief, or maybe having an insufficiently "cosmopolitan" attitude. And so I don't find this scenario is a problem for utilitarians; I think that the cat burning was wrong, and that the cats do not have "rights" as such.

Something that rarely gets offered in these discussions is that maybe, when you make the circumstances extreme enough, cat burning becomes ok. That's basically what these examples are trying to get at, and it's basically a truism for consequentialists - any finite amount of unpleasantness can theoretically be justified by preventing a greater unpleasantness.

I'm fine with that, personally, and I'd turn the question around to anyone who criticises - can you really imagine no calamity so bad that you wouldn't consider sacrificing a cat to prevent it? Once you've got them to agree to that, it's like that old (and mildly sexist...) joke:

Man: Would you sleep with me for £1,000,000?
Woman: Yeah, I suppose so.
Man: Will you sleep with me for £5?
Woman: What kind of person do you think I am?!
Man: We've established that. Now we're just haggling.

I've found another objection to consequentialism, which I feel is just as strong as the last one I raised. I would be interested in hearing how other utilitarians respond to it.

Utilitarianism may proclaim that in some imaginary, hypothetical circumstance, in which we must either allow one person to die a terrible, painful death, or allow googols of people to get mild headaches that last a matter of seconds, it would be better to prevent the headaches.

The utilitarian RM Hare would begin by challenging the objector to state whether he is objecting on an intuitive or analytical basis. If the objector is using pure intuition, he must concede that our intuitions can not always be trusted in odd hypothetical scenarios such as this worldwide headache. If, on the other hand, the objector is analysing the scenario analytically, he must be prepared to come to a conclusion that he was not prepared for when he began the analysis. That is, in analysis, unintuitive conclusions are okay.

The utilitarian, ultimately, argues that our analysis should favour one terrible and painful death over a sufficient number of headaches. Although our intuition leads us to favour a million headaches, our intuition is wrong. It is systematically wrong in this sort of scenario because the human mind places unreasonable emphasis on quality of experience at the expense of quantity of experience.

Here's another thread where I've treated the issue: http://felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=213#p1440

I have mild headaches frequently. I don't know exactly the cause but I take a pill that takes them away sometimes, not always. They are annoying. If I knew that dying myself or killing somebody I would make people have no more mild headaches ever again (which is not the case) I'd do it. The amount of unhappiness all the mild headaches produce adds up quickly in comparison to a single death. It is quite obvious.

I like your (RM Hare's) answer RyanCarey. I'm all for analytical philosophy. That killing or dying might feel wrong is not a compelling argument against it when there's a considerable reward to be had.

Biznor,

There are a couple of possible responses. One is that the suffering to the cat is so great that there would need to be an audience that is extremely large in order for it to be worthwhile (this depends on how much utility weight you give to the suffering of cats, since it is almost certainly less than humans).

Another possible response is the negative utilitarian response that no amount of happiness can justify suffering.

A third possible response is that certain forms of suffering and happiness are just categorically different and thus no amount of one can aggregate to the other, even though aggregate utility still applies in many or most cases.

The utilitarian stance on individual rights (ie. burning cats if it increases pleasure in more beings than it causes suffering in) is why I can't consider myself to be a utilitarian, even though I consider myself to be a consequentialist. I think it's acceptable to sacrifice one's interest to prevent even greater harm to another (ie. using force to prevent a rapist from harming a woman, it will cause him distress but less distress than it would cause the woman to not stop him) but I don't understand the (stereotypical, maybe straw man?) utilitarian argument that 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few'. 100 people suffering is no worse than 1 person suffering, at least not on the basis that there's one hundred of them. Suffering is a private, subjective experience, nobody else has direct access to what you feel because your 'mind' is a self-contained, separate universe. I'm open to any counter argument, maybe I just don't understand what utilitarianism actually means. Until I'm convinced otherwise, I'm going with hedonist-consequentialism/an ethics of empathy.

One person suffering can be worse if they're suffering bad enough.

Look at it in terms of expected utility. You don't know how bad each individual person suffers, but if all you know is that they suffer, and you have to make a guess, you'll get the same answer for each person. 100 people suffering is, on average, 100 times worse than one person suffering. This is true no matter how you distribute how much they're likely to suffer.

DanielLC wrote:One person suffering can be worse if they're suffering bad enough.

Look at it in terms of expected utility. You don't know how bad each individual person suffers, but if all you know is that they suffer, and you have to make a guess, you'll get the same answer for each person. 100 people suffering is, on average, 100 times worse than one person suffering. This is true no matter how you distribute how much they're likely to suffer.

I can understand comparing one person's state of mind to *a*nother person's state of mind, but I don't understand comparing one person's state of mind to the consciousness of 100 other people. I can see saying that punching someone in the nose is acceptable if it prevents someone else from getting cancer but I don't see the logic in saying that it's acceptable to give one person cancer to prevent 100 other people from getting cancer. I've tried hard to understand the justification for 'the needs of the many' argument but I can't. Maybe I'm missing something.

Would you say that it's better for zero people to have cancer than one? Does this change if another person happens to have cancer? If you "move" cancer from one person to another, there would be no net change in utility, so it would follow that one person having cancer is better than two other people having it.

As another way of looking at it, would you rather be punched in the nose once or one hundred times? Each time, you have a different state of mind and a different consciousness. If that's not enough, shift the punches in the nose to other people.

^^ I can't really criticize the first argument, although I don't know if I agree, but I know I would not kill my wife in order to save a million lives. I view an individual as an entire mental universe in themselves, not just a 'unit'. As for the second argument, wouldn't being punched in those nose hurt more the second time than the first? Or by 'different states of mind/consciousness' do you mean I wouldn't recall having been hit before?

I think Daniel’s point is that each experience of being punched in the nose is qualitatively different – cf. the classic Heraclitus idea ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man’).

So you can’t compare one punch to the next, but you might still wish to receive fewer of them (and be willing to trade on other qualitatively different happy/painful experiences to avoid receiving them).

My views have changed since I last posted. I think I can consider myself to be a hedonistic utilitarian, I'm no absolutely certain yet.

Does this work : causing someone to suffer is only justifiable if doing so is *necessary* in order to prevent a greater amount of suffering or produce a greater amount of pleasure. So these sadistic speciesists would have to show that there was no other possible way for them to gain pleasure except by torturing cats and that's obviously not practical.

If they have something else that results in higher net happiness, they should do that. Exactly where to put the burden of proof is a complicated question. Putting it them would probably be best, since there's likely going to be plenty of not-quite-sadistic-enough speciesists for every one sadistic enough for it to be worth while, and they'd certainly like to convince you it is.

One thing to think about is if someone makes a video of torturing one cat (or person for that matter) and puts it online. That way, all the sadists will get to see it, so it would produce tons of happiness, but it only produces disutility once.

DanielLC wrote:If they have something else that results in higher net happiness, they should do that. Exactly where to put the burden of proof is a complicated question. Putting it them would probably be best, since there's likely going to be plenty of not-quite-sadistic-enough speciesists for every one sadistic enough for it to be worth while, and they'd certainly like to convince you it is.

One thing to think about is if someone makes a video of torturing one cat (or person for that matter) and puts it online. That way, all the sadists will get to see it, so it would produce tons of happiness, but it only produces disutility once.

In any event, I will be hugging my cat close tonight .

"It was never contended or conceited by a sound, orthodox utilitarian that the lover should kiss his mistress with an eye to the common weal" (John Austin, The province of jurisprudence determined, 2nd Edition, 1861, p. 101)

In this case, I think "common weal" means "commonwealth."

http://tinyurl.com/3ox7e39

I don't understand what he's trying to say.

DanielLC wrote:I don't understand what he's trying to say.

Was that a reference to my post earlier that day: "It was never contended or conceited by a sound, orthodox utilitarian that the lover should kiss his mistress with an eye to the common weal" (John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, 2nd Edition, 1861, p. 101)

Austin was denying that utilitarians always act for the benefit of the greatest good by saying that guys kiss their girlfriends because of selfish desire. I think his comment was directed toward Bentham's work with respect to the conduct of governments. As an individual, I could adopt a selfish utilitarianism in which kissing my girlfriend is an expected consequence of utilitarianism, but if I had a day-job as a politician I might need to look toward the greatest good for the entire city (or state or nation). I think Austin is denying the second type of motivation.

Austin's comments would apply to individuals who assert that they choose their personal actions to benefit some greater good (the city, all humans, all life forms, etc.). It is common in this forum for people to justify vegetarianism because the alternative reduces global utility. Austin might make the inference that the vegetarians claim to always act "with an eye toward the common weal" in all situations, but I see this as an error. What vegetarians might do is avoid positive acts that cause disutility (i.e., avoid killing animals for food or paying somebody to do so), but at the same time vegetarians can pursue selfish interests as long as they incur minimal disutility to innocent bystanders (e.g., listening to music instead of digging a water well for a poor person).

Well this objection says that kissing one's girlfriend is selfish and un-utilitarian. I think that there are a lot of things that are utilitarian about kissing one's girlfriend. Firstly, if you don't engage in romance, you won't sustain a relationship, and that could well cause you greif. It could reduce your productivity too. Secondly, utilitarianism doesn't demand people to do the impossible. People can't be persuaded to live without romance, and encouraging them to do so is a waste of time. Utilitarianism depends on its persuasiveness. Consider this. If I directly act to reduce poverty, I may contribute one lifetime's salaries to this cause. If I instead persuade two others to be utilitarian, this can contribute up to twice as much to this cause. If I live my life as a moderately effective evangelist for utilitarianism, I can be twice as effective as I would be if I had directly donated to charity. Trying to live without romance is futile, and it will inhibit efforts to spread utilitarianism. So utilitarianism should embrace romance.

Arepo wrote:6) It’s impossible/undesirable to impose a structure on ethics. Better to rely on our judgement, and take one situation at a time.

8) It's very hard or impossible to evaluate actions the way consequentialists say we should, because they might have very long term consequences.

10) Happiness isn’t a universal sum which everyone contributes to or subtracts from, it’s a subjective experience that varies from each individual to the next. Utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons.

11) Utilitarianism demands impossible sacrifice from us (this Demandingness Objection seems to apply to most forms of consequentialism, but maybe less so than to util).

13) I agree with the sentiment of increasing wellbeing, but I disagree with the idea of using people for the benefit of others. It treats them as less than human because it disregards their intents and goals. So utilitarianism is a good starting point for ethics, but we must also respect human dignity.

These seem to be the most accurate.

Put even more concisely, consequentialism forces people to assume the risk of suffering, frustration, and punishment. The point of living under the rule of law, however, is overcoming the state of nature.

In other words, consequentialism, ironically, DISCOURAGES people from being rational since people don't know potential benefits in advance of experience. People are not allowed to be risk averse because they have to assume risks to find out what happens. Those lacking confidence are condemned as hopeless.

Consequentialism also seems to be an excuse for bad communicators. For example, a parent who hits a kid to teach that kid how not to behave rather than actually explaining why something is wrong.

Consequentialism also relieves people from communicating what's right. For example, a parent could teach a kid nothing, and then expect that kid to act out, forcing the kid to assume the risk of punishment in learning right and wrong.

In short, I don't see any difference between a utilitarian society and a hostage situation.

Hi Akeron. Are you conflating consequentialism with operant conditioning? I see no reason consequentialism would support the things you suggest, and even if it did, "global" consequentialists should realize that and then change course.

Alan Dawrst wrote:Hi Akeron. Are you conflating consequentialism with operant conditioning? I see no reason consequentialism would support the things you suggest, and even if it did, "global" consequentialists should realize that and then change course.

You're still assuming global consequences will necessarily be better.

For example, a consequentialist wouldn't see a problem with sacrificing individuals for the sake of the collective.

A consequentialist also wouldn't see a problem with utility monsters.

Lastly, a consequentialist has to account for "In the long run, we're all dead." Consequences which take place after an inflicter passes away don't mean anything. There's nothing inhibiting an inflicter from hurting others in pursuit of "Moon or bust."

In the case of operant conditioning, this means a conditioner wouldn't see a problem with forcing a pupil to endure a gauntlet of punishment, even if that means the pupil's complete destruction because the conditioner only wants haughty pupils.

Ergo, the conditioner would be taking one's own externally granted quantitative thickskin for granted, ignoring the internal qualitative subjectivity of personhood.

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Put simply, the consequentialist ignores a priori reason, believing people must assume the risk of learning from experience.

If we can see that the consequences of doing things as you suggest are bad, then they aren't consequentialist things to do after all. Consequentialism is about doing what works. In some cases, it may be that following seemingly non-consequentialist rules works better.

Put simply, the consequentialist ignores a priori reason

It only ignores a priori reason if that gets better results. For all intents and purposes, ignoring knowledge never gets better results.

What about proofs of Utilitarianism as a whole? E.g., how do we know suffering is bad and pleasure is good? I am only aware of Mill's nortorious proof in Chapter 4 of Utilitarianism and some writings by Sidgwick, but most modern literature I found focuses mostly on Mill's proof.

To me, Utilitarianism just seems right, but of course that's inadequate from a critical point of view. Are there any proofs beyond just "People seek happiness and avoid suffering"