Contextual Evil
Evil is not just a goodness minimization problem.
For example, considering the trolley problem, what is more evil—doing nothing, and thereby letting five people die, or acting to change the course, thereby killing one person? Notice the use of the passive voice there, which may help to illustrate why it isn’t immediately obvious that letting something bad happen is more evil than causing something bad to happen.
I judge a person’s morality by whether or not their existence makes the world better or worse, not by whether or not their existence, compared to an ideal alternative, makes the world better or worse. If you are a switch operator at the trolley fork, and your job is literally to make these kinds of decisions, then you are replacing “the everyman”—your morality is compared to that, and if the everyman would act to save five lives by sacrificing one, then you do achieve some evil for not doing so. (The everyman, for these purposes, is kind of the statistical smear of alternatives, supposing you did not exist; or whoever would have your job if you didn’t exist.) You aren’t just there, you are substituting for the everyman, who would otherwise have your job; your existence is substituting in for the statistical default.
However, if you’re just a bystander who randomly happens to be near the switch, then there is zero moral judgment regardless of what anyone else would do, because the statistical default is an empty space where you stand; if you kill multiple people by saving one, then you’ve probably succeeded at making the world a more evil place, assuming you didn’t kill some great villain.
Granted the situation is more complicated than this; I’m supposing all potential victims of the trolley are equally responsible for the situation. If the one guy is there to repair the tracks, and is supposed to be there, and the multiple people are there because they want to get you to switch the trolley because they want to kill the one guy, well, the moral calculus gets a lot more complicated.
Note that I am leaving it up to the person making the decision what the correct moral calculus is; the important thing is that morality should properly be viewed as contextual; alternatively, as a kind of opportunity-cost-externality-of-existence, as opposed to a simple value, not that the correct morality is some particular kind of morality. That is, the rules in this case are in fact deontology-compatible; if it doesn’t seem so at first, well, remembering that law is deontological is nature, consider that many aspects of law are based on a comparison to what a reasonable person would say or do in that situation (consider medical malpractice, for example—a doctor doesn’t get in trouble for doing what any other doctor would do in a given situation).
For evil maximization purposes, the same kind of evaluations apply. If you are the switch operator, regardless of which choice you think is the evil one, you don’t get “evil points” for doing what the default alternative, or a reasonable statistical approximation, would do in that situation; you didn’t actually make the situation worse. A villain is not merely the absence of a hero; evil is not merely the absence of good. You don’t get to be a supervillain merely by ignoring starving people overseas; you don’t get credit for the evil things you didn’t do.
No, if you want to truly be evil, you have to make the situation worse: You have to switch the trolley to kill more people. A true supervillain doesn’t just take credit for the way the world already is.
Upvoting specifically since I loved this hypothetical scenario:
You say evil is not just goodness minimization, but what does that mean for utilitarianism, which has no specific concept of “evil” as distinct from “bad”?
I suspect there might be a qualia differential.
What is your internal experience of morality?
“Evil is not just a goodness minimization problem” makes sense, but “Badness is not just a goodness minimization problem” doesn’t make sense to me. Your analysis hinges on a concept of evil as distinct from merely bad.
In the trolley problem, sacrificing the one to save the five will always lead to less badness, because fewer people are dead in the resulting state of the world than would otherwise be. This is why utilitarianism always chooses to sacrifice the one to save the five, ceteris paribus. Whether less badness is the same thing as less evilness is not considered, because utilitarianism has only one concept of utility. There may be additional contextual facts, e.g. that the person making the decision is employed as a switch operator. But unless these facts influence the resulting world-state (i.e. the number of casualties), they will not factor into the utility calculation.
Therefore, I do not think that your analysis works with utilitarianism. Though it may work for other ethical systems.
Utility, as measured, is necessarily relative. By this I don’t mean that it is theoretically impossible to have an objective measure of utility, only that it is practically impossible; in reality / in practice, we measure utility relative to a baseline. When calculating the utility of doing something nice for somebody, it is impractical to calculate their current utility, which would include the totality of their entire experience as summed in their current experience.
Rule utilitarianism operates in the same fashion much more straightforwardly, considering utility from an act as the average deviation from a relative position, which I think it is safe to call “normal”.
Once we observe that utility is measured from a relative baseline, a normal, then it is meaningful to talk about acts which are of negative utility; the meaningful comparison is not to an absolute number, but to a relative measure, which any given act can fall beneath.
Insofar as we treat utilitarianism as having an absolute number which cannot be measured by which is the important criteria, “badness” itself is meaningless; badness compared to what? Now, you might say that the correct point of measurement is to the highest-positive-utility act; that utilitarianism says that all acts are measured relative to this. But this is not a position I believe is universally supported; certainly Karl Popper argued against this view of utilitarianism, proposing the framework of negative utilitarianism (I think he invented it?) as a solution to problems he saw with this worldview. Negative utilitarianism measures two distinct values, prioritizing one over the other.
Assuming we do stick to a relative measure, once we observe that acts, or the failure to act, can be of negative, neutral, or positive value, with respect to that relative “normal”, it is meaningful to talk about negative-utility acts as distinct from an inaction relative to a positive-utility act. We can then call negative-utility acts “evil”, neutral acts “bad” (I think a better term here is “suboptimal”), and good acts “good”, and in doing so, recover an important part of the way most human beings experience ethics, which includes a component we call “evil”, as distinct from “good”, which itself is distinct from “neutral”.
Or, to put all this another way—our moral intuitions do not in fact say that goodness and evil are fungible, and in particular, that somebody who murders somebody for every seven lives he saves is anything like a good person, and insofar as utilitarianism doesn’t acknowledge this, it fails to actually be a good representation of human ethics, which is to say, the ethics we actually care about. It should add up to normality, after all.
Total Act Utilitarianism is what comes to mind when I think of a “standard” utilitarian theory. Your theory seems like a kind of rule or non-total variant. Your alterations would be much unliked by someone like Peter Singer, who thinks that we have an obligation to help people simply because us doing so could improve their lives. Where you see neutrality, he would see obligation.
I disagree, and I think that you are more of a relativist than you are letting on. Ethics should be able to teach us things that we didn’t already know, perhaps even things that we didn’t want to acknowledge.
As for someone who murders fewer people than he saves, such a person would be superior to me (who saves nobody and kills nobody) and inferior to someone who saves many and kills nobody.
In what sense is it an obligation? By what mechanism am I obligated? Do I get punished for not living up to it?
You use that word, but the only meaningful source of that obligation, as I see it, is the desire to be a good person. Good, not neutral.
This is a point of divergence, and I find that what ethical systems “teach us” is an area full of skulls. (However, I am, in fact, far LESS of a relativist than I am letting on; I am in fact a variant of absolutist.)
Question: Would a version of yourself who did not believe in your ethics, and saw “neutral” as a perfectly valid thing to be, be happier than the version of yourself that exists?
Some moral theories have zero “slack”: everything that is not mandatory (morally good) is forbidden (morally evil). It seems that yours is not one of them, but they do exist.
I suppose that people who adhere to them think that any other system is morally repugnant, and they can have that opinion if they want, but it seems completely impractical and downright counterproductive even if there was some absolute standard by which they could be said to be “correct”.
One way of understanding these “zero slack” theories is not that they approve/condemn things as morally good vs morally evil, but rather that they provide a single ordering of actions from best to worst. There is no negative (evil) half of the spectrum. Some things are just worse than others, and you should aspire to the best that you can, an idea which I don’t think is counterproductive at all.
Yes, but then it sounds like those who have no such altruistic desire are equally justified as those who do. An alternative view of obligation, one which works very well with utilitarianism, is to reject personal identity as a psychological illusion. In that case there is no special difference between “my” suffering and “your” suffering, and my desire to minimize one of these rationally requires me to minimize the other. Many pantheists take such a view of ethics, and I believe its quasi-official name is “open individualism”.
You would prefer that we had the ethical intuitions and views of the first human beings, or perhaps of their hominid ancestors?
Yes.
I think this requires an assumption that there exists on obligation to end our own suffering; I find that a curious notion, because it presupposes that there is only one valid way to exist.
What bearing do their ethical intuitions have on me?
(What bearing do my ethical intuitions have on future hominids?)
The obligation in this theory is conditional on you wanting to end your own suffering. If you don’t care about your own suffering, then you have no reason to care about the suffering of others. However, if you do care, then you must also care about the suffering of others.