I did a search here and I'm surprised that the demandingness objection has not gotten more attention. Unless you're keeping the bare minimum amount of money to survive and donating the rest and spending as much time as possible promoting total well-being, you're drawing an arbitrary line. I'd definitely acknowledge that some arbitrary lines may be much better than others in terms of their consequences, though. I'm curious how each of you decide where to draw the line. How much "non-utilitarian" fun do you have? By "non-utilitarian," I mean you just do what you enjoy without worrying about whether you're promoting total well-being. Do you ever have trouble justifying having such fun?

I haven't yet decided to draw a line, but doing so seems like a good idea. Otherwise, I'll probably continue yo-yoing between trying too hard and giving up. Here's a thread wherein people list their hobbies.

By "non-utilitarian," I mean you just do what you enjoy without worrying about whether you're promoting total well-being.

Sometimes I do what I enjoy, but I still worry that I'm not promoting total well-being. It can detract from the experience. It doesn't bother me when I'm with others, but when playing the piano I sometimes feel as though I'm throwing sand in the eyes of starving children or torturing animals. Does anybody else have this problem? Robert Wiblin does, and he has some ideas about line drawing as well.

Thanks; that is interesting info. I definitely have the same feeling you described. On line drawing, I meant more that we have informal lines between the amount of sheer fun unrelated to utilitarianism we allow ourselves to have and how much is too much.

The demandingness objection could be used against any type of ethical ideal. You shouldn't expect utilitarianism-associating humans to be perfect utilitarians any more than you would expect Christianity-associating humans to be perfect biblical Christians. Most humans don't follow moral ideals without compromise. This shouldn't keep people away from the idea of utilitarianism specifically.

Maybe it's because utilitarians lean toward rationality, and are therefore expected to be more consistent and engage less in motivated ignorance than others.

But I think apart from this, the demandingness objection may be based on some overconfidence in altruistic action. Charities, even if they do efficiently what they claim to do, may have indirect rebound effects, e.g. helping the poor may reduce the motivations of others, including governments and local communities, to help the poor; handouts may decrease the motivation to work; funding research may shift funds from other sources to less valuable causes; advocating vegetarianism may lead to more wild-animal suffering, reducing existential risk may lead to many more future torture victims, and so on.

Given this general level of uncertainty, purchasing at least the most cost-effective ways to reduce your own suffering and create pleasure could well be utility-maximizing.

The problem with the demandingness objection is it sees things in terms of good/evil or right/wrong with a single bright line of right at the level of "perfect utilitarian" and everything below it being terrible moral monster level. Of course, this is a bit of a hyperbole, but instead I recommend a different view -- better/worse.

You're not a moral monster by any means for being at the utilitarian level you are, indeed I suspect many people here at Felicifia are a standard deviation or three above the mean. However, we can always be "better", and that's something we can all encourage ourselves to work toward.

I think the demandingness objection disappears a second time around when we recognize that it really isn't all that hard to do some high impact activities, like donating a portion of income to an effective charity (or living a frugal lifestyle in order to donate more) or refraining from eating meat (or all animal products). Many people here at Felicifia would be happy to share with those in doubt about making the lifestyle transition.

As for blameworthiness, I'll be blogging my own thing [s]within the week[/s] (Update: sometime in January), but I recommend reading Richard Chappell's "Singer's Pond and Quality of Will" in the meantime.

A way of reframing the demandingness objection is as the ethicalness opportunity. With Kantianism, virtue ethics etc, as long as you politely nod at your neighbour, pet your cat regularly etc, you’re (almost) equally as good as anyone. Consequentialism is the only framework that actually recognises those who really go out of their way to effect huge changes as being abnormally good people.

Arepo wrote:A way of reframing the demandingness objection is as the ethicalness opportunity. With Kantianism, virtue ethics etc, as long as you politely nod at your neighbour, pet your cat regularly etc, you’re (almost) equally as good as anyone. Consequentialism is the only framework that actually recognises those who really go out of their way to effect huge changes as being abnormally good people.

I'm not disagreeing with what you guys are saying but I don't think your comments fully get rid of the objection. As long as you're doing less than what you possibly could do to promote well-being, you're drawing an arbitrary line to demarcate what you feel is acceptable for you. Other people - meat eaters, even serial killers, etc. - draw their arbitrary lines at different places than you do. As long as the line is arbitrary, can we say that one spot is right and the others are wrong? I'm not saying I fully believe the criticism but I do think it's one of the biggest limitations of utilitarianism. I still can't think of any better ethical theory though.

LJM1979 wrote:As long as you're doing less than what you possibly could do to promote well-being, you're drawing an arbitrary line to demarcate what you feel is acceptable for you. Other people - meat eaters, even serial killers, etc. - draw their arbitrary lines at different places than you do. As long as the line is arbitrary, can we say that one spot is right and the others are wrong? I'm not saying I fully believe the criticism but I do think it's one of the biggest limitations of utilitarianism. I still can't think of any better ethical theory though.

We can't say one spot is right and one spot is wrong, but we can say one spot is better and one spot is worse (relative to utilitarianism). That's kind of the whole point. I'd love to motivate meat eaters to not eat meat and motivate serial killers to not serial kill, but somehow I don't think putting them both in the same broad bucket of "evil" or "wrong" is going to help.

peterhurford wrote:

LJM1979 wrote:As long as you're doing less than what you possibly could do to promote well-being, you're drawing an arbitrary line to demarcate what you feel is acceptable for you. Other people - meat eaters, even serial killers, etc. - draw their arbitrary lines at different places than you do. As long as the line is arbitrary, can we say that one spot is right and the others are wrong? I'm not saying I fully believe the criticism but I do think it's one of the biggest limitations of utilitarianism. I still can't think of any better ethical theory though.

We can't say one spot is right and one spot is wrong, but we can say one spot is better and one spot is worse (relative to utilitarianism). That's kind of the whole point. I'd love to motivate meat eaters to not eat meat and motivate serial killers to not serial kill, but somehow I don't think putting them both in the same broad bucket of "evil" or "wrong" is going to help.

Is there such a thing as "wrong" at all, or are there just "better" and "worse"?
On edit: Perhaps in theory, there are right and wrong, but in practice there are only different degrees of wrong. I can see what you're saying then about different "buckets" of wrong.

Is there such a thing as "wrong" at all, or are there just "better" and "worse"?

I want to say that certain things are wrong, like torturing animals because there's nothing good on TV. But failing to prevent animals from being tortured is just as bad in terms of consequences as torturing them yourself is (other things being equal). If consequences alone determine whether an action is wrong, almost everybody is acting wrongly almost most the time. That's a bit strange.

We could say, I'm better than most people because I eat less meat and donate more money to more-effective charities. But most people don't know what you know. They might be less open-minded, or less educated. They may live in a traditional society, and they may not enjoy the degree of freedom that we have.

This would be a problem for non-moral evaluation as well. A sub–three-hour marathon would have been very good for Paul Ryan, but a given for a professional. But that seems to be based mainly on our expectations. Should we call actions "right" when people act better than we expect them to, and "wrong" when they act worse?

Another possibility would be to call actions "wrong" when doing so maximizes the balance of happiness over suffering.

Or we could eschew "wrong" except when, say, communicating with children. Maybe this is equivalent to the previous option.

-I can't delete this?

Ubuntu wrote:One individual's well-being is a part of the total well-being so I don't think there is 'non-utilitarian' fun unless you mean taking pleasure in the pain or misfortune of others. As for drawing a line between how much you do for other people and for yourself, I don't know where the line should be drawn but there's only so much of a difference you can make up until the point when the 'inconvenience' to you would outweigh the benefit to anyone else.

Well any time you spend money, there's always the issue of how much you're advancing your utility vs. how much utility would be gained by donating the money. Also, any time you have fun, there's the issue of whether doing something else could advance the utility of multiple living beings and perhaps add more net utility. That could even include working instead of playing and then donating the extra money to an effective charity.

LJM1979 wrote:Is there such a thing as "wrong" at all, or are there just "better" and "worse"?
On edit: Perhaps in theory, there are right and wrong, but in practice there are only different degrees of wrong. I can see what you're saying then about different "buckets" of wrong.

I don't think the concept of "wrong" is very useful, because there are very different shades of wrong. However, that's not to say that nothing deserves condemnation. Generally, I go with a "quality of will" account and think people should be condemned for negligence, malice, and generally doing worse than the average person. I think praise is underrated.

I'll be exploring blameworthiness more in depth on my blog soon (Update: soon = January).

peterhurford wrote:I don't think the concept of "wrong" is very useful, because there are very different shades of wrong. However, that's not to say that nothing deserves condemnation.

I think it fundamentally is saying nothing ‘deserves’ condemnation. Desert is one of those horrible metaphysically bankrupt concepts that should have no place in utilitarian discussion - rather we can say that condemning things sometimes promotes overall utility and thus is sometimes the optimal approach if promoting utility is our goal.

Arepo wrote:

peterhurford wrote:I don't think the concept of "wrong" is very useful, because there are very different shades of wrong. However, that's not to say that nothing deserves condemnation.

I think it fundamentally is saying nothing ‘deserves’ condemnation. Desert is one of those horrible metaphysically bankrupt concepts that should have no place in utilitarian discussion - rather we can say that condemning things sometimes promotes overall utility and thus is sometimes the optimal approach if promoting utility is our goal.

I think of "desert" like I think of all other moral concepts -- within frameworks. I suppose you could eliminate them for analytic clarity; and I've definitely advocated that, though my current pendulum has swung back to making use of them as shorthand. So I speak of "morality" and "good"/"bad" a lot within my utilitarian framework.

How does desert work? Well, I think of it mostly as a social contract -- we set up a society in which having such or such qualities or doing such and such work entitles you to a certain thing, you get that thing by virtue of having your quality. In this case, by having the quality of malice, you are entitled to condemnation. No wacky metaphysics required.

It's utilitarian too, because I think having these desert frameworks are utility maximizing for the most part. Though I could also see why they fall short. A good example is that of people working for income -- I think people will work harder if they think they genuinely deserve their income, but will in turn be less likely to be altruistic to the less fortunate. Perhaps desert re-enforces unfortunate conceptions of poor people as intrinsically not worth helping?

I have struggled this year with my charitable giving: I have pledged to give at least 50% of my pre-tax income to charity in 2012 but I saw that I could give more. Because of that I agonized over many purchases (money spent on every non-essential purchase could have gone to charity instead!). Psychologically it was taxing on me, and especially on my relationships (primarily with my girlfriend, but also with parents and friends).

I am drawing on a parallel between this and effectively personally promoting veganism: if you are too strict (e.g. "here's a list of 10,000+ products you should memorize and never buy again") no one will join your cause; a more lenient approach to animal product consumption will win over many more converts (and thus do more to prevent total animal suffering than staying hard-line). It's hard to know where to draw the line, but it seems almost surely to be not at the extreme end.

It will surely be harder to encourage others to be more utilitarian than to encourage them to be more vegan (one's a subset of the other ) but it's not impossible. I'm thinking if you can get several people a fraction of the way towards utilitarian behavior by drawing the demandingness cutoff line further away from the extreme. If you wouldn't be able to do that while being 'hardcore', it may be better to be more lax.