I think your analysis of the ‘gladiatorial objection’ misses something:
I hope I’m not caricaturing you too much if I condense your rebuttal as follows: “People wouldn’t really enjoy watching gladiators fight to the death. In fact, they’d be sickened and outraged. Therefore, utilitarianism does not endorse gladiatorial games after all.”
But there’s a problem here: If the negative reaction to gladiatorial games is itself partly due to analyzing those games in utilitarian terms then we have a feedback loop.
Games are outrageous --> decrease utility --> are outrageous --> etc.
But this could just as well be a ‘virtuous circle’:
Games are noble --> increase utility --> are noble --> etc.
If we started off with a society like that of ancient Rome, couldn’t it be that the existence of gladiatorial games is just as ‘stable’ (with respect to the utilitarian calculus) as their non-existence in our own society?
Couldn’t it be that we came to regard such bloodsports as being ‘immoral’ for independent, non-utilitarian reasons*? And then once this new moral zeitgeist became prevalent, utilitarians could come along and say “Aha! Far from being ‘fun’, just look at how much outrage the games would generate. If only our predecessors had been utilitarians, we could have had avoided all this ugly carnage.”
(Perhaps you will bite the bullet here, and grant that there could be a society where gladiatorial games are ‘good’ by utilitarian standards. But then there doesn’t seem to be much hope for a utilitarian justification of the idea that, insofar as we have outlawed bloodsports, we have ‘progressed’ to a better state of affairs.
Or perhaps you will say that bloodsports would always be judged ‘bad’ under ideal rational reflection (that is, they go against our CEV). I think this is a much stronger reply, but it’s not clear that CEV actually makes sense (i.e. that the limit is well-defined).)
* Sadly my knowledge of history is too meagre to venture an account of how this actually happened.
I have many other objections to utilitarianism up my sleeve. To give the gist of a few of them:
Utilitarian calculations are impossible in practice because the future cannot be predicted sufficiently far.
Utilitarian calculations are impossible even if theory because outcomes are incommensurable. The indeterminacies concerning whether ‘more people’ are preferable to ‘happier people’, and how far a superbeing’s happiness is ‘worth more’ than a human’s, are special cases of this, but incommensurability is ubiquitous. (For instance, just try weighing up all of the effects of the decision to buy a car rather than use public transport. The idea is there is a Right Answer Out There seems to me an article of blind faith.)
Utilitarianism holds ‘terminal preferences’ to be beyond reproach. It does not allow for the possibility that an entire self-contained society ought to change its system of preferences, no matter how ‘brutal’ and ‘destructive’ these preferences are. (The point about gladiatorial games is a special case of this). It denies that one can make an objective judgement as to whether a paperclipper is ‘wrong’ and/or ‘stupid’ to fill the universe with paperclips. Ultimately, might makes right in the struggle between humanity and clippy.
Utilitarianism faces some awkward choices in how it values the lives of ‘ordinary people’ (people who live reasonably happy lives but do not make lasting ‘achievements’ e.g. progress in science). If their value is positive then apparently it would be better to fill the universe with them than not, which seems absurd. How is it worthwhile or noble to try to explore the entire ‘soap opera of Babel’? Isn’t it just a stationary stochastic process? Haven’t you seen it all once you’ve seen the first few billion episodes? But if their value is zero (resp. negative) then it seems that nuking an entire planet full of ‘ordinary people’, assuming it’s not the only such planet, is morally neutral (resp. desirable). The only way of resolving the contradiction of human life being both incredibly precious and utterly worthless is to deny that the premise that we need to assign it some value in order to decide how to act.
Sadly my knowledge of history is too meagre to venture an account of how this actually happened.
Well, we have Christianity to blame for the decline of gladiatorial games.
Incidentally, now that we know Christianity to be false and thus gladiatorial games were banned under false pretenses, does recursive consistency require us to re-examine whether they are a good idea?
I hear that there already are voluntary, secretive leagues of people fighting to the death, even though the sport is banned. I don’t know whether most fighters are enthusiastic or desperate for cash, though. But considering that becoming a Formula One pilot was a common dream even when several pilot deaths per year were the rule, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the former.
Notwithstanding NihilCredo’s point, the lack of gladiatorial combat today is most likely due to a genuine change in taste, probably related to secular decline in social violence and availability of increasingly varied entertainment (movie theaters, TV, video games etc.). The popularity of blood sports in general is decreasing. We also know that folks used to entertain themselves in ways that would be unthinkable today, such as gathering scores of cats and burning them in a fire.
Notwithstanding NihilCredo’s point, the lack of gladiatorial combat today is most likely due to a genuine change in taste, probably related to secular decline in social violence and availability of increasingly varied entertainment (movie theaters, TV, video games etc.).
For gladiatorial games specifically, their decline was caused by Christian objections. Sorry, you don’t get to redefine historical facts just because they don’t fit your narrative.
gathering scores of cats and burning them in a fire.
We also know that folks used to entertain themselves in ways that would be unthinkable today, such as gathering scores of cats and burning them in a fire.
It makes me suspicious when some phenomenon is claimed to be general, but in practice is always supported using the same example.
There’s no shortage of well-documented blood sports both before and during the Christian era. I know of few as shocking as bogus’s example (which was, incidentally, new to me), but one that comes close might be the medieval French practice of players tying a cat to a tree, restraining their own hands, and proceeding to batter the animal to death with their heads. This was mentioned in Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror; Google also turns up a reference here.
I suppose there’s something about cats that lends itself to shock value.
The entertainment value of forced gladiatorial games on randomly-selected civilians… I personally would vote against them because I probably wouldn’t watch them anyway, so it would be a clear loss for me. Still, for other people voting in favor of them… I’m having trouble coming up with a really full refutation of the idea in the Least Convenient Possible World hypothetical where there’s no other way to provide gladiatorial games, but there are some obvious practical alternatives.
It seems to me that voluntary gladiatorial games where the participants understand the risks and whatnot would be just fine to a consequentialst.
It’s especially obvious if you consider the case of poor people going into the games for money. There are plenty of people currently who die because of factors relating to lack of money. If we allowed such people to voluntarily enter gladiatorial games for money, then the gladiators would be quite clearly better off.
If we ever enter a post-scarcity society but still have demand for gladiatorial games, then we can obviously ask for volunteers and get people who want the glory/social status/whatnot of it.
If for some reason that source of volunteers dried up, yet we still have massive demand, then we can have everyone who wants to watch gladiatorial games sign up for a lottery in exchange for the right to watch them, thus allowing their Rawlsian rights to be maintained while keeping the rest of the population free from worry.
With the gladiatorial games, you seem to have focused on what I intended to be a peripheral point (I’ll rephrase it later so this is clearer).
The main point is that forcing people to become gladiators against their will requires a system that would almost certainly lower utility (really you’d have to have an institution of slavery or a caste system; any other way and people would revolt against the policy since they would expect a possibility of being to be gladiators themselves).
Allowing people who want to, to become gladiators risks the same moral hazards brought up during debates on prostitution—ie maybe they’re just doing it because they’re too poor or disturbed to have another alternative, and maybe the existence of this option might prevent people from creating a structure in which they do have another alternative. I’m split on the prostitution debate myself, but in a society where people weren’t outraged by gladiatorial games, I would be willing to bite the bullet of saying the gladiator question should be resolved the same way as the prostitute question.
In a utopian society where no one was poor or disturbed, and where people weren’t outraged by gladiatorial games, I would be willing to allow people to become gladiators.
(in our current society, I’m not even sure whether American football is morally okay)
“The main point is that forcing people to become gladiators against their will requires a system that would almost certainly lower utility (really you’d have to have an institution of slavery or a caste system; any other way and people would revolt against the policy since they would expect a possibility of being to be gladiators themselves).”
It seems to me that, specifically, gladiatorial games that wouldn’t lower utility would require that people not revolt against the system since they accept the risk of being forced into the games as the price they pay to watch the games.
If gladiators are drawn exclusively from the slaves and lower castes, and the people with political power are exempted, then most likely the games are lowering utility.
@ Prostitution: Don’t the same arguments apply to paid labor of any type?
In the case of prostitution, similar arguments apply to some extent to all jobs, but “to some extent” refers to very different degree.
My test would be as follows: ask how much people would have to be paid before they would be willing to take the job (in preference to a job of some arbitrary but fixed level of income and distastefulness) Compare that amount to the price that the job actually gets in a free market. The higher the ratio gets, the worse the moral hazard.
I would expect both prostitution and being a gladiator to score especially low in this regard.
I think your analysis of the ‘gladiatorial objection’ misses something:
I hope I’m not caricaturing you too much if I condense your rebuttal as follows: “People wouldn’t really enjoy watching gladiators fight to the death. In fact, they’d be sickened and outraged. Therefore, utilitarianism does not endorse gladiatorial games after all.”
But there’s a problem here: If the negative reaction to gladiatorial games is itself partly due to analyzing those games in utilitarian terms then we have a feedback loop.
Games are outrageous --> decrease utility --> are outrageous --> etc.
But this could just as well be a ‘virtuous circle’:
Games are noble --> increase utility --> are noble --> etc.
If we started off with a society like that of ancient Rome, couldn’t it be that the existence of gladiatorial games is just as ‘stable’ (with respect to the utilitarian calculus) as their non-existence in our own society?
Couldn’t it be that we came to regard such bloodsports as being ‘immoral’ for independent, non-utilitarian reasons*? And then once this new moral zeitgeist became prevalent, utilitarians could come along and say “Aha! Far from being ‘fun’, just look at how much outrage the games would generate. If only our predecessors had been utilitarians, we could have had avoided all this ugly carnage.”
(Perhaps you will bite the bullet here, and grant that there could be a society where gladiatorial games are ‘good’ by utilitarian standards. But then there doesn’t seem to be much hope for a utilitarian justification of the idea that, insofar as we have outlawed bloodsports, we have ‘progressed’ to a better state of affairs.
Or perhaps you will say that bloodsports would always be judged ‘bad’ under ideal rational reflection (that is, they go against our CEV). I think this is a much stronger reply, but it’s not clear that CEV actually makes sense (i.e. that the limit is well-defined).)
* Sadly my knowledge of history is too meagre to venture an account of how this actually happened.
I have many other objections to utilitarianism up my sleeve. To give the gist of a few of them:
Utilitarian calculations are impossible in practice because the future cannot be predicted sufficiently far.
Utilitarian calculations are impossible even if theory because outcomes are incommensurable. The indeterminacies concerning whether ‘more people’ are preferable to ‘happier people’, and how far a superbeing’s happiness is ‘worth more’ than a human’s, are special cases of this, but incommensurability is ubiquitous. (For instance, just try weighing up all of the effects of the decision to buy a car rather than use public transport. The idea is there is a Right Answer Out There seems to me an article of blind faith.)
Utilitarianism holds ‘terminal preferences’ to be beyond reproach. It does not allow for the possibility that an entire self-contained society ought to change its system of preferences, no matter how ‘brutal’ and ‘destructive’ these preferences are. (The point about gladiatorial games is a special case of this). It denies that one can make an objective judgement as to whether a paperclipper is ‘wrong’ and/or ‘stupid’ to fill the universe with paperclips. Ultimately, might makes right in the struggle between humanity and clippy.
Utilitarianism faces some awkward choices in how it values the lives of ‘ordinary people’ (people who live reasonably happy lives but do not make lasting ‘achievements’ e.g. progress in science). If their value is positive then apparently it would be better to fill the universe with them than not, which seems absurd. How is it worthwhile or noble to try to explore the entire ‘soap opera of Babel’? Isn’t it just a stationary stochastic process? Haven’t you seen it all once you’ve seen the first few billion episodes? But if their value is zero (resp. negative) then it seems that nuking an entire planet full of ‘ordinary people’, assuming it’s not the only such planet, is morally neutral (resp. desirable). The only way of resolving the contradiction of human life being both incredibly precious and utterly worthless is to deny that the premise that we need to assign it some value in order to decide how to act.
Well, we have Christianity to blame for the decline of gladiatorial games.
Incidentally, now that we know Christianity to be false and thus gladiatorial games were banned under false pretenses, does recursive consistency require us to re-examine whether they are a good idea?
I hear that there already are voluntary, secretive leagues of people fighting to the death, even though the sport is banned. I don’t know whether most fighters are enthusiastic or desperate for cash, though. But considering that becoming a Formula One pilot was a common dream even when several pilot deaths per year were the rule, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the former.
Notwithstanding NihilCredo’s point, the lack of gladiatorial combat today is most likely due to a genuine change in taste, probably related to secular decline in social violence and availability of increasingly varied entertainment (movie theaters, TV, video games etc.). The popularity of blood sports in general is decreasing. We also know that folks used to entertain themselves in ways that would be unthinkable today, such as gathering scores of cats and burning them in a fire.
For gladiatorial games specifically, their decline was caused by Christian objections. Sorry, you don’t get to redefine historical facts just because they don’t fit your narrative.
Wait, that sounds like fun.
Can you shed any light on why, or what would be fun about it? This confuses me.
It makes me suspicious when some phenomenon is claimed to be general, but in practice is always supported using the same example.
There’s no shortage of well-documented blood sports both before and during the Christian era. I know of few as shocking as bogus’s example (which was, incidentally, new to me), but one that comes close might be the medieval French practice of players tying a cat to a tree, restraining their own hands, and proceeding to batter the animal to death with their heads. This was mentioned in Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror; Google also turns up a reference here.
I suppose there’s something about cats that lends itself to shock value.
I would say yes, we should re-examine it.
The entertainment value of forced gladiatorial games on randomly-selected civilians… I personally would vote against them because I probably wouldn’t watch them anyway, so it would be a clear loss for me. Still, for other people voting in favor of them… I’m having trouble coming up with a really full refutation of the idea in the Least Convenient Possible World hypothetical where there’s no other way to provide gladiatorial games, but there are some obvious practical alternatives.
It seems to me that voluntary gladiatorial games where the participants understand the risks and whatnot would be just fine to a consequentialst. It’s especially obvious if you consider the case of poor people going into the games for money. There are plenty of people currently who die because of factors relating to lack of money. If we allowed such people to voluntarily enter gladiatorial games for money, then the gladiators would be quite clearly better off. If we ever enter a post-scarcity society but still have demand for gladiatorial games, then we can obviously ask for volunteers and get people who want the glory/social status/whatnot of it.
If for some reason that source of volunteers dried up, yet we still have massive demand, then we can have everyone who wants to watch gladiatorial games sign up for a lottery in exchange for the right to watch them, thus allowing their Rawlsian rights to be maintained while keeping the rest of the population free from worry.
With the gladiatorial games, you seem to have focused on what I intended to be a peripheral point (I’ll rephrase it later so this is clearer).
The main point is that forcing people to become gladiators against their will requires a system that would almost certainly lower utility (really you’d have to have an institution of slavery or a caste system; any other way and people would revolt against the policy since they would expect a possibility of being to be gladiators themselves).
Allowing people who want to, to become gladiators risks the same moral hazards brought up during debates on prostitution—ie maybe they’re just doing it because they’re too poor or disturbed to have another alternative, and maybe the existence of this option might prevent people from creating a structure in which they do have another alternative. I’m split on the prostitution debate myself, but in a society where people weren’t outraged by gladiatorial games, I would be willing to bite the bullet of saying the gladiator question should be resolved the same way as the prostitute question.
In a utopian society where no one was poor or disturbed, and where people weren’t outraged by gladiatorial games, I would be willing to allow people to become gladiators.
(in our current society, I’m not even sure whether American football is morally okay)
“The main point is that forcing people to become gladiators against their will requires a system that would almost certainly lower utility (really you’d have to have an institution of slavery or a caste system; any other way and people would revolt against the policy since they would expect a possibility of being to be gladiators themselves).”
It seems to me that, specifically, gladiatorial games that wouldn’t lower utility would require that people not revolt against the system since they accept the risk of being forced into the games as the price they pay to watch the games. If gladiators are drawn exclusively from the slaves and lower castes, and the people with political power are exempted, then most likely the games are lowering utility.
@ Prostitution: Don’t the same arguments apply to paid labor of any type?
In the case of prostitution, similar arguments apply to some extent to all jobs, but “to some extent” refers to very different degree.
My test would be as follows: ask how much people would have to be paid before they would be willing to take the job (in preference to a job of some arbitrary but fixed level of income and distastefulness) Compare that amount to the price that the job actually gets in a free market. The higher the ratio gets, the worse the moral hazard.
I would expect both prostitution and being a gladiator to score especially low in this regard.