When I was younger, utilitarianism seemed like a great idea. It seemed to be a foolproof way of making sure that people would become mathematically inclined and actually willing to make sacrifices without suspicion that the people asking them to make sacrifices were selfish.

Unfortunately, this was very marginalist judgment. I didn't consider the matter of higher order logic. Put alternatively, I didn't consider how people can scheme, conspire, play dumb, etc. Utilitarianism is very vulnerable to manipulation and being setup, and it can even get so bad that utilitarians themselves are obligated to self-destruct to accommodate non-utilitarians. It can really get so bad that people are entitled to ignorance at the expense of utilitarians remaining competent.

This self-defeating aspect can be demonstrated through a simple adjustment of the railroad dilemma where you have five people on one track, and one person on the other. In addition to the basic utility of personhood, let's also say the five people are non-utilitarians, but the one person is a utilitarian. Should the utilitarian not still be sacrificed even if that utilitarian is the last one in the entire world such that utilitarianism is forgotten?

Even if we were to say that over the long run, sustaining the utilitarian is preferable because of the increased utility of utilitarianism, that's a subjective value judgment over how long the long run really is, subjectivity which lead to the second reason for why I reject utilitarianism now. At the end of the day, evaluating utility is an internal, mental faculty. We do not live among collective consciousness, and ultimately, the display of utility preferences can be manipulated in order to garnish selfish implications. Furthermore, if we embrace this manipulation (as in egoism), we're completely jeopardizing the duty of care towards maturing children in learning how to play utility games, and the very reliability of utility admission becomes jeopardized since nobody's certain that information actually means anything. For example, the five non-utilitarians could say they infinitely prefer living than dying without a utilitarian among them. Now, the utilitarian has no way to defend himself.

It's for this reasoning that I became a deontologist years ago. I don't see anything wrong with employing utilitarianism in the private sector where people are entitled to the privacy of their own minds as well as entitled to freedom of association in trusting others' minds.

However, in the public sector where ethical quandaries can deliberately neglect the very agency by which utility is calculated, there's no reason to believe utilitarianism wouldn't be self-destructive and that an ideology worse than utilitarianism wouldn't take its place. It should be noteworthy that Kant actually dealt with utilitarianism extensively in his second critique as well in defining concepts such as hypothetical imperatives, rules of skill, commands of law, and councils of prudence as well as the agreeable, the beautiful, and the sublime.

If you consider being a Utilitarian from another ethical viewpoint, you are already not a Utilitarian. Similarly, if you talk about the consequences of being a Deontologist, you are already not a deontologist. I'd suggest reading Fake Morality.

It seemed to be a foolproof way of making sure that people would become mathematically inclined and actually willing to make sacrifices without suspicion that the people asking them to make sacrifices were selfish.

What is? You personally being a Utilitarian? The people making the sacrifices? All involved?

This self-defeating aspect

Utilitarianism can easily be proven to be non-self-defeating. Suppose a Utilitarian and a Deontologist are both offered a choice. Suppose the Deontologist makes a choice that has better consequences. This means that the Utilitarian didn't do what had the best consequences, and therefore is not a Utilitarian. This is a contradiction, so you must have either failed to predict what the Utilitarian will do, or judged his actions by something other than how well they accomplish his goals.

Should the utilitarian not still be sacrificed even if that utilitarian is the last one in the entire world such that utilitarianism is forgotten?

The Utilitarian should not be sacrificed, because sacrificing him will cause far worse than five deaths. To my knowledge, nobody on this forum has donated a kidney for this reason. I can do better than save 4000 lives, and I'm not going to give myself a 1/4000 risk of death to save one.

We do not live among collective consciousness, and ultimately, the display of utility preferences can be manipulated in order to garnish selfish implications.

1) Utilitarianism Vulnerable to Deception or Manipuation

Akeron wrote:I didn't consider the matter of higher order logic. Put alternatively, I didn't consider how people can scheme, conspire, play dumb, etc. Utilitarianism is very vulnerable to manipulation and being setup,

[EDIT: I found something that might be what Akeron mentioned: Harsanyi's "Rule utilitarianism, rights, obligations and theory of rational behavior." From that you might conclude that a rule-utilitarian would always seek cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma and an act-utilitarian would always defect, and it might seem as though the rule-utilitarian is being manipulated. To this, I might apply Hooker's principle of sticking to rule consequentialism unless breaking the rules can prevent disaster (if I were repetitively losing the gambit). There might also be a case for arguing that the act of cooperating will contribute toward a culture of cooperation and benefit society in the long run]

Utilitarianism can be applied as a personal philosophy (a guide to how I choose my own behaviors) and as part of a political philosophy (how legislators should decide which laws or government policies to implement). As a personal philosophy, I don't think the scheming of other people has a direct role, but perhaps scheming might affect political decisions. I can't think of any good examples, but perhaps somebody would simply claim that they like XYZ so that legislators count utility for that thing. The manipulation could occur only if people said that they really like something that they don't like, and, ideally, to have an important impact on policy it would have to be a fairly large conspiracy to affect things like voting on referenda or altering opinion polls. Maybe such manipulation could be used if people claim that they like something absurd to counterbalance opposite claims made by an opposing party. I am not aware of any vulnerability like this that seems plausible on a wide scale.

2) The Modified Trolley Problem
Your modified trolley problem pits the value of five human lives against the sum of one human life plus the possibility that that human will produce a large amount of positive utility. The trolley problem was already a "marginal case" and now it has become even more extreme. If we are to believe the assumptions of the problem, obviously the human race is impervious to the message of utilitarianism and there would be no reason to believe that the last surviving utilitarian would convert so many people to utilitarianism that it would counterbalance killing the five other people. Let the utilitarian die to save the five others. If humans are incapable of making utilitarian judgment due to their genetics and environment, then that is the way it is.

3) Problems with Deontology

It's for this reasoning that I became a deontologist years ago

Now that you see why the utilitarian should die, you can return to utilitarianism! I'm guessing that there were other influences that led you to deontology, but strictly speaking, identifying a flaw with one system does not constitute evidence in support of another. In other words, the merits of a moral philosophy should be considered directly instead of assuming that one must choose either utilitarianism or deontology (false dichotomy).

An important problem with deontology is the justification for assuming that one person can divine a collection of unrelated metaphysical truths to determine which absolute laws to follow. Careful scrutiny of this problem leaves me with no reason to believe that deontology is anything more than misguided mysticism (that is not to say that utilitarianism is without its challenges). In the West, many people have directly or indirectly based their list of deontological principles from explicit or implicit theories of natural law and natural rights.

Natural law and natural rights are complex topics that date back to ancient Greece. Current ideas of natural law were shaped by early Christian ideas such as those of St. Augustine (who believed that God endowed people with a spirit through which humans can obtain perfect knowledge--and reason, which was separate from the spirit) and St. Thomas Aquinas (who merged the constructs of the spirit and the mind, believed in perfect knowledge, and believed that God gave humans reason through which people can obtain perfect knowledge). These theologians believed that God created people with an ability (some combination of reason and communication with spirits) to receive instructions about right and wrong. Many others also relied on the ideas of natural law and natural rights sometimes without making references to the Christian ideas of Aquinas, Augustine, and others. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government is a good read to see how heavily he relied on the idea of divinity and natural law--his ideas have shaped revolutions ever since, but people did not scrutinize the validity of his theological assumptions. The problem is that so many people have diametrically opposed ideas of what the basic, deontological principles of ethics should be, and this conflict is itself direct evidence that human beings are not endowed with some magical ability to identify the "right moral principles" (if such things even exist).

Aquinas, Augustine, and Locke did not have modern science as a basis for understanding the mind. They did not recognize the biological basis of empathy, which influences moral action. They did not understand the role of reasoning, attention, memory, social environment, or other factors in the formation of habits of behavior and moral beliefs. The scientific view of the "moral intuitions" of which deontologists speak is that these intuitions are the product of genetics, development, and environment as they influence the structure of brain regions that control the antecedents of behavior. Accepting an evidence-based understanding of our moral intuitions is difficult because it requires that we acknowledge that we have been suffering from many illusions, including the illusion that our feelings about right and wrong stem from some metaphysical entity in the universe that defines what is right and wrong.

From another angle, ask yourself what exactly is a deontological moral principle. Is it a physical object in the universe? Is it an attribute of a physical object? Do you assert that your emotions are detecting these physical objects and relaying them to your conscious mind even though your conscious mind cannot identify the source of those feelings? These are troubling questions that stem from our tendency to misinterpret our emotional states with direct experience of physical attributes of the universe. G.E. Moore said that when we see the color we think that we are experiencing a physical attribute of the universe and that "yellow" is a simple term in that it cannot be defined in more fundamental terms. When you consider what it means to say that something is good (or right, or moral), there is a problem: do our feelings of right and wring constitute first-hand experience of the attributes of the physical universe (like see the color yellow)? Moore said that simply naming an attribute as good does not mean that good has been defined (e.g., is "putting more ketchup on your French fries" a definition that describes what "goodness" really is?). We think that our moral intuitions allow us to identify some moral property of the universe that really exists (similar to what we think happens when we see the color yellow or see a book on a table), but nothing of the sort has actually occurred. This is his naturalistic fallacy, and it is a strong criticism of deontological ideas of "right" and "wrong."

Utilitarianism (and closely-related types of consequentialism) can be viewed as an attempt to reduce the gap between our experience of the universe and moral beliefs. If you believe that pleasure is better than pain, then you can choose pleasure over pain to manage your personal life. If you apply this to all life on earth, you might generalize your preference for life to others and believe that others value their lives just as you value your life.

There are some challenges when dealing with conflicting interests between humans, animals, and plants, but if you scrutinize egocentrism and anthropocentrism, I think that you will find that there is no objective support for the idea that you are objectively more important than other people on this planet, and perhaps you will view yourself on a more level field with nonhuman life. Valuing people, life, and even inanimate, natural objects is a challenging topic, but if you make a commitment to truth and recognize the lack of rational support for deontology, you might be motivated to pursue an understanding of such valuation.

If we are to believe the assumptions of the problem, obviously the human race is impervious to the message of utilitarianism and there would be no reason to believe that the last surviving utilitarian would convert so many people to utilitarianism that it would counterbalance killing the five other people.

He doesn't need to convert anybody. He just needs to save four lives. That would cost about $2,000. The average worldwide income is $7,000 per year. As such, he can be expected to be able to do at least that.

In any case, a Utilitarian would sacrifice the last Utilitarian if and only if the alternative was even worse.

DanielLC wrote:He doesn't need to convert anybody. He just needs to save four lives. That would cost about $2,000.

This is one of the problems with working with imaginary scenarios. We don't don't know details of what people do in the imaginary world, and I would not assume that every utilitarian donates $2,000 to the most effective causes and I would not assume that nonutilitarians do no good. There are many nonutilitarians who contribute to charity. Charity existed for millennia before utilitarianism had developed to anything near its current state. There are many nonutilitarians who pay their taxes and thereby fund programs that help many people. There are many nonutilitarians who do good deeds for religious or deontological reasons. In many cases, people who have spent years studying deontology do the same thing as a utilitarian would (not stealing, not randomly punching people, not enslaving or torturing people, helping people in need). It is the marginal cases in which deontologists and utilitarians are most likely to differ (e.g., the trolley problem and treatment of those who are "different" such as homosexuals, animals, people of other races or religions). There are even deontological (or similar) defenses for defending strict animal rights (e.g., Tom Regan). Killing five nonutilitarians without any data that shows why that is better than killing one utilitarian is a new form of prejudice similar to racism.

I didn't consider how people can scheme, conspire, play dumb, etc. Utilitarianism is very vulnerable to manipulation and being setup, and it can even get so bad that utilitarians themselves are obligated to self-destruct to accommodate non-utilitarians.

Good point. I'm not sure I understand the rest of your post but whether or not maximizing pleasure/minimizing pain is the good thing to do and whether or not promoting utilitarianism is practical or good are separate issues. As someone pointed out to me when I rejected agent-neutral utilitarianism in favor of altruism because I thought altruism had better consequences, promoting altruism for agent-neural utilitarian reasons would still make you an agent-neutral utilitarian. Again, I'm not sure I understand all of your argument.

Even though I'm also pessimistic about creating a utilitarian world and how much better it would be if people self-reported basing their decisions on (everyone affected by that decision's) pleasure/pain alone, the best way to ensure that people will behave in a way that has good consequences is if they explicitly have promoting good consequences in mind when they act.

Sorry about responding so late. When I posted this, I browsed the forum and actually thought it went inactive.

rehoot wrote:From another angle, ask yourself what exactly is a deontological moral principle. Is it a physical object in the universe? Is it an attribute of a physical object? Do you assert that your emotions are detecting these physical objects and relaying them to your conscious mind even though your conscious mind cannot identify the source of those feelings? These are troubling questions that stem from our tendency to misinterpret our emotional states with direct experience of physical attributes of the universe. G.E. Moore said that when we see the color we think that we are experiencing a physical attribute of the universe and that "yellow" is a simple term in that it cannot be defined in more fundamental terms. When you consider what it means to say that something is good (or right, or moral), there is a problem: do our feelings of right and wring constitute first-hand experience of the attributes of the physical universe (like see the color yellow)? Moore said that simply naming an attribute as good does not mean that good has been defined (e.g., is "putting more ketchup on your French fries" a definition that describes what "goodness" really is?). We think that our moral intuitions allow us to identify some moral property of the universe that really exists (similar to what we think happens when we see the color yellow or see a book on a table), but nothing of the sort has actually occurred. This is his naturalistic fallacy, and it is a strong criticism of deontological ideas of "right" and "wrong."

This doesn't seem to grasp what deontology is really about. Deontology is predicated in the necessary ontological schema required to observe the universe around us. Everything you've described above is metaphysical, not ontological, so I'm not sure how it really applies. Kant very deliberately goes through the difference between objects as they appear (phenomena) and objects in themselves (noumena). Our senses are not perfect or goal oriented, so an independent a priori schema is necessary to structure our perspectives.

I'm very well aware of Moore and the naturalistic fallacy, and I've used him (and it) plentifully in my own arguments; Kant even had a similar fallacy name called empirical idealism. That said, you seem to be conflating the faculties of sensibility with understanding. The only way these two things can be one and the same is if free will does not exist such that our "judgment" is purely objectified, but that would make any "judgment" a moot point since objects don't bear moral value.

Also, you said earlier that I was drawing up a false dichotomy, but I don't believe I did because I emphasized the matter of preserving agency in the OP.

That said, I'm willing to note that on a libertarian forum, utilitarians have been accusing me of being an emotivist in how I've brought up the matter of social anxiety regarding prohibitions on freedom of speech, so you're not the only one to criticize me on this point. I had to deliberately explain to them the difference between caring about emotions versus caring about faculty incapacitation from emotions (or mere stimulation).

There are some challenges when dealing with conflicting interests between humans, animals, and plants, but if you scrutinize egocentrism and anthropocentrism, I think that you will find that there is no objective support for the idea that you are objectively more important than other people on this planet, and perhaps you will view yourself on a more level field with nonhuman life. Valuing people, life, and even inanimate, natural objects is a challenging topic, but if you make a commitment to truth and recognize the lack of rational support for deontology, you might be motivated to pursue an understanding of such valuation.

Kant actually included a considerable section on self-preservation coming first because only our internal faculties can be confirmed beyond all shadow of a doubt. Someone who sacrifices himself out of mere faith in others' faculties would not be respecting those faculties.

http://praxeology.net/kant8.htm

As far as I can tell, there is only one exception to this, and that's in the case of slavery... which is what happens to utilitarians! When enslaved, a person's faculties aren't being self-controlled anyway, so the self-destruction of those faculties would not be prohibitive. If anything, self-destruction could even be preferred if those faculties were being intended for the destruction of more faculties such as a person being told, "Build me a bigger gun or I'll shoot you." Every time a bigger gun is built, it would get turned on the builder. In contrast, a utilitarian would have no justified escape from a utility monster.

The problem, of course, here is that people could be haphazardly provoked into self-destruction, so this is not a situation to be taken lightly. On the other hand, only internal judgment can decide whether or not a person has endured sufficient signals to imply that enslavement has taken place. Information models can be communicated, but all possible models would ultimately depend upon interpretation of stimulus directed towards the model user.

Akeron wrote:This doesn't seem to grasp what deontology is really about. Deontology is predicated in the necessary ontological schema required to observe the universe around us.

Pardon? I know what all the words in that sentence mean, but I can't for the life of me tell what you want the collection to mean. My best guess is something like 'deontology follows logically from reason', which I don't think your subsequent comments show, and I see no reason to believe - quite the opposite. While the underlying argument for utilitarianism is tough to pin down, the only coherent alternative I see is nihilism (and my view, fwiw, is that nihilism and utilitarianism are two ways of interpreting the same data).

Our senses are not perfect or goal oriented, so an independent a priori schema is necessary to structure our perspectives.

...

Kant actually included a considerable section on self-preservation coming first because only our internal faculties can be confirmed beyond all shadow of a doubt.

Our internal faculties are just as doubtable as anything else, with the possible exception of the sensation one feels at any given moment. But when contemplating a decision, its results will unfold in the future - a future in which you might have turned into a P-Zombie, or, more plausibly, there's simply no 'you' (eg Parfit's argument in Reasons and Persons, or - more consistent with what we know about the universe IMO - the what Chalmers describes on p51 of this as the deflationary view).

Someone who sacrifices himself out of mere faith in others' faculties would not be respecting those faculties.

Even if we did grant the existence of those faculties as a given, it doesn't follow that we should 'respect' them. It's also not clear what 'respect' even means here (or anywhere else, come to that. It's a horribly nebulous word). Can you explain it in terms reducible to (or at least more reducible to) the physical world? Is it 'to identify the desires of a subject and promote them'? Or 'to prolong the existence of'? Or something else?

As far as I can tell, there is only one exception to this, and that's in the case of slavery... which is what happens to utilitarians!

Exception to what? The doctrine of 'respect' you alluded to?

In contrast, a utilitarian would have no justified escape from a utility monster.

Maybe I'm being dull-witted, but your sentences seem to have very little relation to each other. I don't know how to argue against something that doesn't seem to be an argument so much as a string of themetically related assertions.

Re the utility monster, a committed utilitarian would not *want* to escape from it. The idea that he should do so comes from outside its conceptual sphere - either from basic selfishness, which all humans have in practice, but which shouldn't be confused with the ideals to which they aspire, or from something like deontology. In the latter case it's an irrelevant criticism, reducible to 'utilitarianism doesn't follow the principles of deontology', and equally as irrelevant as the reverse point - that deontology doesn't follow the principles of util. All we learn from these two statements, or from fanciful extrapolations of them such as the utility monster is that the principles of utilitarianism are not identical to the principles of deontology. And I think we all knew that.

Kant actually included a considerable section on self-preservation coming first because only our internal faculties can be confirmed beyond all shadow of a doubt.

You know that current you exists. Current you and future you are very similar, so future you also probably exists. Other humans are slightly less similar to you, etc. As such, you should care about them in that order. But that doesn't mean that you should ignore the later ones in favor of earlier ones.

If I'm 99.99% sure that future me exists, and 99.9% sure that you exist, I should worry 99.9%/99.99% = 99.91% as much about you as I do about me. Even if I only believe other people have a 0.1% chance of existing, so I only worry about them a thousandth as much as myself, there's still ways to make other people happy that are thousands of times cheaper than making myself happy, so I still wouldn't be able to justify keeping my money for myself.

Of course, this is all a utilitarian argument. I didn't reply to the rest of the post because I couldn't understand anything except that line.

I don't see a meaningful way in which utilitarianism can be falsely manipulated that doesn't have its counterpart in deontological thinking. You can falsely use utilitarian reasoning against net felicific benefit, and you can also use deontological reasoning against the personhood, like the duty and honor implied in suicidal attacks or martyrdom. I don't think false utilitarianism is more toxic in that manner. In fact, bad deontology is responsible for more atrocities in history than bad utilitarianism.

As a basis for ethical dilemmas I always demand that these be realistic, possible. If a scenario can't happen in real life, then it is worthless, deserves no discussion or consideration. I would argue that the trolley problem you describe in which the single person who, (initially from a utilitarian point of view should die,) happens to be the last remaining source of utilitarianism in the whole world, is not only absurd but also useless or contradictory. How would the person responsible for pushing the trolley decide using utilitarian thinking if he doesn't follow utilitarianism? If he does follow utilitarianism, the dying person will not be the last source of utilitarianism (the trolley pusher would be); if he does not follow utilitarianism, the discussion is a moot point. Any middle state in which the trolley pusher somehow cares for utilitarian ethics (enough to feel the ethical need to purposely kill a single person instead of five) shows, from my point of view, a considerable potential for ethical growth and commitment to utilitarianism in his future world of apparently total lack of utilitarianism.

Otherwise, having to choose between killing five non-utilitarian people or a utilitarian person that is not the last utilitarian in the whole world, the scenario is more reasonable. And I would ordinarily still choose to kill the single person instead of five, unless the utilitarian has proven with facts his true commitment to utilitarianism, to a point that his contribution to net felicific benefit is clearly bigger (within our limited knowledge of future happenings) than that of the other five people, and given that I personally (as trolley pusher) wouldn't be punished for such a choice in a manner contributing in fact less to net felicific benefit. If this person has been utilitarian for a while and we know it, having data of his ethical contributions shouldn't be difficult. "Humility kills", every utilitarian should be advertising far and wide the good contributions he makes to society, if any, and we can use this data in contrast to the average good contribution to net felicific benefit a regular citizen makes x 5. A good utilitarian wouldn't choose who to kill based on private personal affinity.

Furthermore, agreeing with one ethical theory in the private life and with another in the public life is a position I don't see justified in any case. In matters of ethics, dualism such as this one reminds me of the poison that is the dualist position of body and soul for science. If something results in good for oneself but does not result in good for the whole society or vice versa, we should be reconsidering our definition of what is good.

Akeron, if you'd be so kind, since you seem to be familiar with deontological ethics and Kant, I would like to discuss them and ask questions I have about them privately. Please let me talk to you through e-mail, you have my e-mail address here to the left next to my avatar, it's michael_retriever@yahoo.es . Thank you!

rehoot wrote:[...] This is one of the problems with working with imaginary scenarios. We don't don't know details of what people do in the imaginary world, and I would not assume that every utilitarian donates $2,000 to the most effective causes and I would not assume that non-utilitarians do no good. There are many nonutilitarians who contribute to charity. Charity existed for millennia before utilitarianism had developed to anything near its current state. There are many nonutilitarians who pay their taxes and thereby fund programs that help many people. There are many nonutilitarians who do good deeds for religious or deontological reasons. [...]

All the data given in the scenario is that the single person is utilitarian and the other five aren't. If you know the average contribution to well-being a regular citizen makes, the average contribution to well-being a utilitarian citizen makes, and the probable outcome of your decision, the choice to take could very well be saving the utilitarian. If you have other data showing some person or people in the group of five contributes more to well-being than the average utilitarian, the choice is to kill the utilitarian.