thought experiment concerning utilitarianism:

there is a population of racist whites with a minority of blacks. The blacks are forced to attend their own schools that have lower educational standards. There is a liberation movement to have the blacks in the same schools as whites, but doing this will cause the whites irrational fear/anxiety. An individual whites suffering is not greater than the benefit brought to an individual black, but since the whites are in the majority, added up, their suffering will be greater than the benefits brought to the blacks if the movement takes effect.

Do we accommodate the whites or blacks?

We act impartially, meriting the suffering of each individual equally and this makes the premise of the question very doubtful: "the whites are in the majority, added up, their suffering will be greater than the benefits brought to the blacks if the movement takes effect". Assuming this premise to be false, as is the case in all realistic scenarios, the movement ought to take effect.

Find a way to get rid of the irrational fear and anxiety. The most obvious way would be to stop the segregation, though I'm not sure that would be the best way. Once the racisim ends, there's no cost to having them all attend the closest schools, and you get the best of both worlds. If you keep it up long enough, it will outweigh the costs of ending the racism.

RyanCarey wrote:We act impartially, meriting the suffering of each individual equally and this makes the premise of the question very doubtful: "the whites are in the majority, added up, their suffering will be greater than the benefits brought to the blacks if the movement takes effect". Assuming this premise to be false, as is the case in all realistic scenarios, the movement ought to take effect.

Right. In all real-world scenarios, the effects of racism are much more harmful to the discriminated group. But even if somehow there really was a balance such that the white suffering is greater, one still would have to take the indirect effects of perpetuating an institution of racism, which are also dire.

I don't find that thought experiment unrealistic, but if you insist, here is another: You are the choirmaster for a prestigious all-white private school. The school's caretaker's black son has impressed you with his singing voice, you consider having him sing with the choir however you know this will cause anxiety amongst the other students who are xenophobic. You make the following discernments: 1) the anxiety the whites would experience will be greater than the joy/happiness of the boy if you allow him to join. 2) the xenophobia of your students has a strong hold on them and any attempts to eliminate or reduce it will fail. Do you allow the boy to sing?

This thought experiment is realistic, including the discernments. There are people who are so drenched in a racist ideology that you are able to discern that they will remain xenophobes despite any attempts a choirmaster may make.

In this circumstance i would choose to have the boy join despite the anxiety it will cause the other students. To me, since the suffering of the whites is based on xenophobia vs liberty/freedom/fairness, i side with the boy. So for this circumstance, i would not follow utilitarianism.

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My thought experiment is similar to the Trolley Problem except we are comparing two different types of suffering: non-liberty and irrational fear/anxiety. Will the liberty of a minority group always outweigh the suffering it causes a large group? no matter how severe the anxiety? No matter how large the majority group / how small the minority group?

Any practical utilitarian will, of course, not be able to analyse every one of their decisions in detail, and so will have to use some heuristics. A prime example of a helpful, though not foolproof, rule, is the consideration of motives. One will have greatly more success by arbitrating in favour of a person seeking freedom, at the expense of a xenophobic one, rather than trying to perform a 'back of the envelope', 'naive utilitarian' calculation in situations like this. This is because vigorously opposing discrimination is usually the best way to get people to cooperate and flourish in the long-run. If I get a serious impression that this may cause widespread suffering, or may cost some animal or human lives, then I need to make some proper fundamental utilitarian calculations. (as per Hare's Two Level Utilitarianism).

If you specifically stipulate that this choir will forget the decision, are completely unable to learn, and their xenophobia is permanently irreversable, as well as that the white choirboys would ruminate about the decision to an equal extent as the discriminated black choirboy - all of which seem implausible - then yes, you could force me into the supposedly utilitarian conclusion of being ostensibly racist.

nonbiologist wrote:In this circumstance I would choose to have the boy join despite the anxiety it will cause the other students. To me, since the suffering of the whites is based on xenophobia vs liberty/freedom/fairness, I side with the boy. So for this circumstance, i would not follow utilitarianism.

In real-life, I don't think this represents discarding utilitarianism, because again -- the pain from xenophobia is not all that strong against the pain of persistent discrimination, especially as the xenophobic people begin to see that their fear is sorely misplaced. And even despite the pain from xenophobia, allowing the boy to sing could do some work toward undoing the institution of discrimination, which would have many indirect benefits to all those discriminated elsewhere.

But besides this trouble of coming up with a scenario, I think you make an interesting point that I'm definitely sympathetic to -- why even care about suffering based on xenophobia, or say the pleasure a rapist derives from such a deed? In so far as utilitarianism wants to make itself intuitive, it does need to provide some sort of answer to that. It doesn't seem enough to just say that the harm to the raped will in all realistic situations outweigh the sexual pleasure of the rapist.

I suppose my answer here is that I want people to be happy for their own sakes. I want that rapist to be happy and have a good life too. However, for direct and indirect reasons, there just is no realistic reason to allow a rapist to continue, because short of a Utility Monster, the rapist will always do drastically more harm to others than the benefit to theirself. So that good life just can't involve rape, even though I do value the sexual pleasure involved.

I might need a better answer than that. I'd have to think about it some more.

OK, this cuts a knife through the ideas of "all happiness is equal" (something similar to Bentham's version of utilitarianism) and "some pleasures are better than others" (something like J.S. Mill's version). I would typically say that people's preferences should be counted equally based on the general idea that preferences are subjective and without an objective basis for comparison. In this case, there might be an objective basis for comparison, but it is tricky.

I might assert that the proclaimed basis for segregation is fallacious if there is a lack of evidence for that basis. More specifically, the ideal criteria that I would use is that evidence is not only objective, but that it can be objectively determined to constitute a valid moral distinction. I think Singer used an example like saying that a pig fundamentally lacks the capacity to vote in political elections, so it makes no sense to fight for voting rights for pigs. In that case, there is a objective basis for a moral distinction between voting rights for humans and voting rights for pigs. If the the case were about voting rights for men vs. women, the CLAIM might be that women lack the ability to 'vote correctly' or 'vote well', but those claims would be without and objective basis (they are subjective claims).

In the segregation case, if the fear has no basis for a moral distinction, then, at the very least, intelligent societies should start with an education campaign to free people from their irrational beliefs so that the democratic process can prevail to end an irrational institution. Let's say that 85% of the people oppose segregation, and they oppose it for purely irrational reasons. This is now a question about democracy versus some type of power-based political system. I have a strong aversion to the idea that the person or persons who control the military automatically obtain correct philosophical insight into all issues, so I don't like the idea of adopting a policy of "let the people who control the military/police enforce policies that they think are right even when most people oppose it." Notice that the typical philosophical answer would be to assume that the speaker is in control of the government and to assume that the speaker has perfect knowledge of what is actually correct and is therefore justified in forcing people to do things that they do not want for their own good. Which is worse: arbitrary military rule or irrational segregation. I won't answer directly at this time.

I'd also like to add that there are some institutions of discrimination that are probably worth keeping around, like fraternities/sororities and separate bathrooms. Thus discrimination is not intrinsically evil, but rather evil when it has negative consequences.

nonbiologist wrote:thought experiment concerning utilitarianism:

there is a population of racist whites with a minority of blacks. The blacks are forced to attend their own schools that have lower educational standards. There is a liberation movement to have the blacks in the same schools as whites, but doing this will cause the whites irrational fear/anxiety. An individual whites suffering is not greater than the benefit brought to an individual black, but since the whites are in the majority, added up, their suffering will be greater than the benefits brought to the blacks if the movement takes effect.

Do we accommodate the whites or blacks?

You kill the blacks, this reduces their suffering to 0 and the whites can be even happier!

I was confronted with this objection (in the form Bernard Williams put it) in a seminar on Practical Ethics. This was after we had discussed the arguments for vegan(ish)ism, where most people had the opinion that vegan(ish)ism is too demanding / not really called for. Most people seemed to find the racism thought experiment a convincing objection to utilitarianism, at first glance.

So I asked them to really visualize what the racism thought experiment specifies, and then reflect on their own consistency. Here [with the racism hypothetical] we have a case with an unchangeable irrational prejudice, where a minority is treated "unfairly", and where the majority actually suffers more. In the vegan(ish)ism case, we had a changeable disposition or prejudice, where a majority is treated "unfairly", and where the human minority clearly suffers less.

So before we even start considering not killing / not keeping segregated the blacks, for consistency's sake, let's make it absolutely clear that non-vegan(ish)ism would be the much more repugnant conclusion here, and that, given that most people strongly object to veganism already and claim that they personally would suffer too much, the aggregated suffering of the majority, given integration, would really have to be huge. And that's the problem with the example, the hypothetical is constructed in a way that the utilitarian, obviously, has to give the "repugnant" answer, but thereby the example becomes very unrealistic and hard to accurately imagine (also because it exploits various strong intuitions), so it would be unjustified to conclude that utilitarianism is flawed simply because we may find the example counterintuitive.

nonbiologist wrote:thought experiment concerning utilitarianism:

there is a population of racist whites with a minority of blacks. The blacks are forced to attend their own schools that have lower educational standards. There is a liberation movement to have the blacks in the same schools as whites, but doing this will cause the whites irrational fear/anxiety. An individual whites suffering is not greater than the benefit brought to an individual black, but since the whites are in the majority, added up, their suffering will be greater than the benefits brought to the blacks if the movement takes effect.

Do we accommodate the whites or blacks?

If the Whites were (hedonistic) utilitarians, they would feel connected to the happiness and suffering of the Black students so their being allowed a higher education or to attend the schools of their choice would cause the Whites sympathetic happiness that I think would override their xenophobia (that could be reduced through other means as well). If they still preferred to attend an all White school, one option could be to improve the standard of education for the Black schools.

It is hard to resist moral dumbfounding––i.e., an ad-hoc utilitarian reason why our intuitions are right––for your thought experiment. (Not that the responses thus far have been ad hoc.) That said, racism almost always leads to negative utility in the long run, whatever the short-term benefits. So, yes, you should integrate for utilitarian reasons; in the long term, it will lower the level of racism of the country, as others have pointed out.

I don't think hedonistic utilitarians should use ad hoc reasoning to justify intuitions that involve a concern for anything other than pleasure and pain and avoiding this isn't hard for me to do (not that I'm a 'practicing' utilitarian, and I might think of something that contradicts this later or come to feel differently, but I think my intuitions basically match up with my meta-ethical beliefs). If by 'racism' you mean not caring about the well-being of racial out group members, I don't think it should ever be catered to or tolerated. Racial prejudice should also be discouraged, if for no other reason than for the benefit of prejudiced people, but evidence shows that ethnically homogenous environments tend to have less conflict, less crime and more altruism, ethnic differences can exacerbate tension even when it isn't an explicit issue and participants aren't 'consciously' prejudiced and people from ethnically homogenous societies actually self-report higher levels of happiness, I don't know how much of this can be changed how much is due to biology. I wouldn't necessarily see a problem with voluntary racial separatism.

To me, since the suffering of the whites is based on xenophobia vs liberty/freedom/fairness, i side with the boy. So for this circumstance, i would not follow utilitarianism.

I think all pleasure and pain is unconditionally worth sympathizing with but a utilitarian should always discourage character traits or desires that stem from someone's not identifying with and caring about the pleasure and pain of any other being. I would argue for the boy being allowed to sing only if either a) there isn't some alternative to make everyone happy (like reducing their xenophobia some other way) or b) if their xenophobia stems from or is sustained by their not caring about his well-being.

Thus discrimination is not intrinsically evil, but rather evil when it has negative consequences.

I agree if by 'discrimination' you mean unequal treatment and not unequal consideration.

Ubuntu wrote:

Peter wrote:Thus discrimination is not intrinsically evil, but rather evil when it has negative consequences.

I agree if by 'discrimination' you mean unequal treatment and not unequal consideration.

Right. Unequal consideration is wrong by definition. Or at least by my definition, anyway.