All Utilitarians Should Be Classical Utilitarians
This is a crosspost from my blog post.
I recently had the great joy of meeting a group of utilitarians, but, to my complete horror, out of the twelve of them, not a single one was a classical utilitarian.
In case you don’t know, classical utilitarianism was the original form of utilitarianism promoted by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. It is often referred to as total hedonic utilitarianism, and it holds that, most basically, when one is choosing what action to take, they always ought to always take the action which produces the greatest total happiness minus suffering.
Even though this conception of utilitarianism is perfect just the way it is, people always want to modify it in some way.
That’s why, in today’s post, I want to explain each of their alternative views to classical utilitarianism, and why I think they’re wrong.
Incorrect view #1: There’s goods other than happiness
Some people have an objective list theory of well-being, which means that they believe that there are goods other than happiness that are good for people. Some candidate goods include knowledge, wisdom, aesthetic appreciation, loving relationships, and autonomy. Following this view, they argue that, when working to make the world better, we should focus on also increasing things like beauty and the accumulation of knowledge rather than just happiness.
I disagree with this view for three reasons:
First, the only reason we think these other goods are valuable is because they produce happiness. If knowledge, beauty, or love didn’t bring us joy, I don’t think we would care about them at all. Given this, it seems like we should focus on the reason we care about these goods rather than the goods themselves.
Second, it seems weird to think that something is good for someone if they don’t think that it’s good for themself. For instance, many utilitarians believe that social connections are good for all people, but hermits don’t believe that social connections are good for them. In contrast, utilitarians believe that happiness is good for people, and people almost universally believe that it is good for themselves too.
Last, happiness is the only good that you can directly experience. You may tell me that relationships are good, but I cannot measure the value of relationships directly. I can only measure how they make me feel, which is what I think we should really care about.
Incorrect view #2: Suffering outweighs happiness
Many utilitarians think that we should care much more about suffering than happiness.
I suspect that they think this for two reasons.
First, humans are naturally very risk averse. They’re willing to go to great lengths to avoid even small amounts of suffering, but they’re unwilling to take significant risks in order to experience profound happiness. Even though this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, I think it biases people towards thinking that suffering and happiness aren’t equally important when they actually are.
Second, most people rarely experience profound happiness so they’re unable to compare it to profound suffering. Although it’s very common for people to experience deep suffering, it’s very rare that people experience profound joy. As a result, I think that people accidentally believe that deep suffering is more bad than profound joy is good, but that they actually only believe this because they haven’t experienced enough profound joy to make an accurate comparison
If we take these two factors into consideration, it seems like we should actually weigh happiness and suffering pretty equally given that they’re simply two sides of the exact same scale.
Incorrect view #3: Moral views shouldn’t be too demanding
Classical utilitarians believe that correct actions are those that produce the most good. This means that, even if you do an action that’s extremely good but not the very best action that you could have done, you’re still doing an incorrect action.
People dislike this because it leads to what they call the demandingness problem, the fact that classical utilitarianism has virtually no limits on what it can demand of you. So long as an action produces the most good overall, you are always demanded to take it no matter how much suffering it causes you to endure.
To get around this problem, utilitarians have come up with many alternatives to classical utilitarianism that are less demanding. For instance, scalar utilitarians argue that actions can exist on a spectrum in terms of how good they are, such that actions that produce a significant amount of good are still considered good even if they don’t produce as much good as possible. Similarly, satisficing utilitarians argue that we have a duty to do good, but that the obligation only requires us to do a certain minimal amount of good.
I disagree with these views. Just because classical utilitarianism is demanding, that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.
For one, from the perspective of the universe, all of our suffering and happiness matters equally. As such, when one person experiences a small amount of suffering to avert the intense suffering of another, the world is made a better place because the total suffering is reduced. Even if it seems weird to demand significant suffering from one individual, it’s important to remember that things are being made better overall.
For two, most people actually already believe in extreme demandingness in many circumstances. For instance, virtually everyone believes that a slave holder should free all of his slaves even if it would cause him to become homeless. And, similarly, most people believe that you should raise a child until adulthood even if the child was conceived by accident. If we’re willing to accept extreme demandingness in certain situations, I see no reason not to accept it in all situations.
Incorrect view #4: The repugnant conclusion is unacceptable
Classical utilitarians hold a total view of population ethics. This means that, when assessing the value of a world, they do simply by adding up the total welfare of all individuals within that world.
For instance, if one world has a thousand people who would rate their lives 8⁄10 (on a scale from −10 to 10) and another world has three thousand people who would rate their lives 7⁄10, then, according to classical utilitarianism, the second world is better than the first.
Critics argue that this is problematic because it leads to “the repugnant conclusion.” If one world has a trillion people who would rate their lives .001/10 and another world has a thousand people who would rate their lives 10⁄10, then, according to classical utilitarianism, world B is better than world A. They argue that this is unacceptable because, intuitively, a world with people whose lives are barely worth living should have very little value.
To get around this, they argue that we should, instead, take other factors into account when determining the value of the world such as the average welfare of all people within the world or whether each person’s welfare is above a certain threshold.
I disagree that doing this is necessary since I don’t think that the repugnant conclusion is repugnant at all.
For one, the math indicates that the total welfare is higher so I’m willing to trust the math.
For two, just because .001 is low, that doesn’t mean that it’s insignificant or bad. I would rather have a life that’s .001/10 than not have a life at all. And, just to press the point, it seems like bugs probably have very low experiences of welfare. If it turned out that bugs are overall happy, would you want to get rid of them just because, as individuals, they’re only barely happy?
Third, from the perspective of the universe, the experiences of all people in any world are actually just one large composite. As such, a trillion barely happy people actually does combine to create a level of ecstasy that far surpasses the joy that a thousand really happy people would experience.
Lastly, even at a personal level, I would rather live for a trillion years barely happy than merely a thousand years extremely happy. After all, a life barely worth living is still a life worth living.
That’s debatable, but even where or to extent this is true, why should I care about the causal reasons I came to value something? Now that these causal reasons have shaped me into who I ended up being, I should care about whatever I should care about, looking around with my present mind and trying to ask the right further questions, not about what the process shaping me looked like.
You can take another step, moving from happiness to natural selection, which is also a process that had a causal hand in people ending up thinking that certain things are valuable. It has no claim on normativity. Neither does a particular part or aspect of the brain, when the person as a whole doesn’t agree.
Yeah, I agree. I’ve changed my view since posting this.
As such, I don’t think that people’s preferences or moral intuitions about the external world should guide what their philosophy. Instead, I think they should rely on their moral intuition that suffering is bad since it seems bad, and then come to classical utilitarianism from there.
I disagree with this one.
Yes. I think some things that are not happiness are good for me, and therefore happiness is not all that is good! In my ideal world I would be learning new things, making friends, playing fun games with them, and helping people who need it. I would much prefer this to a world where I was drugged into maximum happiness and therefore could do nothing but experience happiness. I think most people would agree! (See this fiction post.) This means happiness is not the only good.
Not really. If I complete a difficult programming project or artwork, I feel fulfilled and happy to have accomplished this. The feelings are good, yes, but they also point to the achievement itself being good. If after doing this I wake up and realize it was a dream, and there was no project after all, I think something will have been lost, even if I had felt the same feelings.
More importantly, I care about helping other people! Sure, you can say this makes them feel better, but I can’t measure that, can I? And the thing I care about is them having been helped, not me feeling good about them being helped, so I care about things out there in the world that are not my feelings.
So, what happened to this?
Like I said before, experiencing maximum happiness is not my ideal future. Also, if you could create ten copies of me, nine of which were either “experiencing profound joy” or being happy and fulfilled in the way I described above, and one of which was being horribly tortured, I would ask you to please never do that, that’s horrible. So suffering outweighs happiness for me. (This may not be true of everyone, see the character Carissa from planecrash. But then the correct thing to do is to give each person what they prefer, not to maximize all happiness!)
I agree on this one. It’s strategically unwise to try to be maximally good all the time in every action, you’ll burn out and do less good in the long run, but that doesn’t make it not true that every human is very far from being maximally good.
I’m confused on this one. Maybe you’re right? Maybe average utilitarianism is right? I do have the intuition that the small happy world is better than the big slightly-less-than-unhappy world, but I also know my moral intuitions have no sense of scale, so they may be wrong.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
After writing this, I have changed my mind to think that our moral intuitions about things, such as the value of projects, should be considered unreliable since they vary widely across people and time, and they conflict dramatically. On the other hand, the view that happiness is good as based on personal experience is very consistent and can be verified directly. (So, I would take back any arguments I made based on moral intuitions.)
It’s worth pointing out that “earning new things, making friends, playing fun games with them, and helping people who need it” are all things that produce joy, which indicates that joy is your reason for caring about them unless you can suggest another reason for why you care about them.
You have good reason to care about other’s feelings since you have your own feelings on which to verify that feelings matter.
Also, there’s other reasons to think that average utilitarianism is wrong. For instance, if there’s an alien planet where everyone’s extremely happy, then it would indicate that it would be good to press a button that would destroy our world.
If joy was my only reason for caring about those things, I would want the superhappy drug more than I want those things, since the superhappy drug is what gives me more joy. So joy is not a complete explanation for why I care about those things. (I do agree that it’s part of why I care.)
Good point. That doesn’t, however mean that total utilitarianism is right.
I think you need to justify why your preference for those things over being super happy should be considered rational.
I think he does not.
Preferences are not rational or irrational; preferences are the premises you base all your other conclusions on. You need to take these preferences as given.
If anything, you need to recognize that if someone says they don’t want things that bring pleasure, that means that when you said things like “the only reason we think these other goods are valuable is because they produce happiness”, these things are just incorrect. He’s flat out stated something that contradicts one of your supposed truths!
And a closely related issue is blissful ignorance, which I already brought up in another thread. I want certain things about the world to be true. By definition, if you fooled me into thinking they were true, I would experience as much pleasure as they were actually true and I learned that. Yet I don’t think that the two situations are equally desirable, and I would expend some resources to prevent myself from being fooled, even if fooling me will give me pleasure. So I too disagree that the only reason something is valuable because it produces happiness.
You also seem to not have read much of what has been written about these issues. You are not the first person to say “well, I’ll just accept the repugnant conclusion then”, but there are other conclusions that are harder to accept; for instance, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/#AccRepCon
It’s still important to justify the preferences. The justifications can themselves to a large extent be built on preferences, but the step of routinely re-justifying and re-endorsing the preferences keeps them yours, and also more coherent and non-circular. Mostly a value shouldn’t directly justify itself, it doesn’t have the legitimacy to do that, being merely a part of you rather than your whole mind. Instead, the aggregate of all values, applied with your whole mind, might justify/endorse its own details and their balance; this works in the same way for either values, beliefs, or plans, the only difference is the justifications that are relevant/applicable. This activity is only useful to the extent it has the potential to change something, to temper what’s already there or to introduce new inspirations.
That said, only the considerations you consider to be your own are legitimate in justifying your own preferences (and other details of the mind). So if someone else is to do that for you, they too must channel your own considerations, not theirs. Such proxy justification is probably mostly not possible at the human level (at least for values) outside isolated blind spots and trauma (where your own judgement might be so dysfunctional that a bumbling attempt by a trained professional isn’t worse, and so might help with overcoming a bad equilibrium).
I can experience 21+34 being 55 more directly, more clearly. I can also experience the meows of my cat. Legibility is no reason for normative authority. So I won’t be enslaved to my cat, I will instead placate it to stop being a bother and turn to other things for my own reasons.
Exogenous reward signals that can plausibly take over your motivations should be concerning and alarming, rather than immediately pursued. Already being within your brain only makes it more alarming, not less, and the claim to legitimacy is at best superficial until it’s more substantively examined. As a general rule, avoiding rewards or placating them (when unavoidable) makes a lot more sense in order to maintain legitimacy of the normative content of your own mind.
I think that, at least, in my experience, the idea that happiness is good seems to be an essential feature of the experience itself.
What I’m alluding to here is that I think we should trust our moral intuitions about our feelings being good or bad, but that we shouldn’t trust our moral intuitions about our external environment and hypothetical situations.
I am agnostic about the mind-body problem so I am not committed to physicalism.
Exogenous rewards are seemingly what cause all motivations so I don’t understand why one should ignore them, unless they want no motivation.
The point of the exogenous reward example is to illustrate that some rewards obviously must pass through your own judgement before being allowed to influence your motivations, and the safe by-default attitude towards rewards of any kind should be wariness rather than enthusiasm (unless actually endorsed). I don’t see how happiness (or experience more broadly) is any different in that respect, it’s merely more insidious. Some rewards do gain endorsement (at least on a situation-to-situation basis), I’m not arguing they should be universally circumvented (thus the cat).
This distinction doesn’t appeal to me, and also “moral intuitions” sounds too narrow, more abstract considerations that are not necessarily intuitive shouldn’t be ruled out. All of these things should be suspect, but also all of these things should have a chance at endorsement. Also, path-dependence should always be a cause for wariness even for the endorsed things, so optionality and aggregation are usually good, and motivation-hijacking rewards are dangerous because of lock-in risk. Ideally, there should always be a process that keeps the reflection going to potentially overrule later, and the costs of overruling later shouldn’t be allowed to get prohibitive (optionality again).
That they merely cause motivations is no reason to pay particular attention to them, other than by defending against their ability to cause changes in motivations in a way you wouldn’t endorse. I’m not claiming you should ignore them, merely that you should obviously avoid automatically endorsing (or acting on) any exogenous reward you come across. Motivations you end up with shouldn’t (automatically) care about the original causes that shaped them (such as particular exogenous rewards), only the extent to which you-as-a-whole end up endorsing their legitimacy, giving them authority over what you should endorse.
Do people universally believe happiness and the absence of suffering are good for themselves, or almost universally? (Almost all people are not hermits.) John Stuart Mill’s take on this, that we should want for others what they want for themselves, along with the freedom to make it happen, is preferable; that people want what they want is tautologically true.
(I’d still make an exception for suicidal people; they might want death, but only because they can’t see anything better, or are deluded about the consequences.)
You might feel a duty to make the world as good as it can be, but if you’ve made it better on net, I think that’s worth celebrating in itself. I would not like it if you were compelled to take the most righteous action at every juncture (e.g. if you had a computer whispering it into your ear); I think you value your own autonomy and fulfillment, and so I value it just the same.
Besides which, classical utilitarianism does not prescribe individuals’ actions; it only aims to evaluate which of multiple possible worlds (or distributions across them) is better. Act utilitarianism is the stance that we ought to steer towards the best world in expectation, and it is widely critiqued because we do not know the ultimate ethical value of our actions and someone could justify all kinds of rash decisions using it (think FTX). Rule utilitarianism instead posits rules which would most likely improve the world if generally followed and expects utilitarians to act accordingly; this is both less demanding and much less likely to have unexpected harmful consequences.
It can both be true that the correct moral philosophy is extraordinarily demanding and that the best way to follow it is the follow a moral philosophy that is less demanding.
This is circular reasoning: you accept classical utilitarianism because it has no major flaws, and it has no major flaws because you accept classical utilitarianism.
You don’t need to go that far to prove the repugnant conclusion! If stated abstractly, it’s just that more lives with less average value per life can be superior to the status quo. If you would accept that a billion similar worlds where everyone gets a dust speck in their eyes is superior to our own world, then you endorse the repugnant conclusion; you just might disagree about what the worst acceptable life it is permissible to sacrifice for is. (There are certainly people who would not accept that; I am not one of them.)
In regards to the circular reasoning thing, I agree.
On reflection, now, I think that we should only trust moral intuitions about our own experience.
As such, I think that suffering seems bad, so we should minimize suffering.
And, I don’t think we should add additional modifications to this view.
The system of utilitarianism described here seems to need to use “happiness” to refer to both an intersubjective unit of account and an internal directly-experienced quality, but these two needs clash with one another.
A unit of account needs to work nicely in arithmetic: you can compare it (“is Alice happier than Bob?”, “is Alice happier today than yesterday?”); you can sum it over a population; you can subtract suffering from happiness; you can ask about exchange rates, transfers, and tradeoffs (“by taking on 1 unit of suffering by washing Alice’s car, Bob made Alice 10 units happier; so this was a worthwhile exchange”).
But an internal directly-experienced quality doesn’t seem to have these properties. If my happiness is something that only I can experience, and your happiness is something that only you can experience, then how can we meaningfully add them up? Arithmetic over internal directly-experienced qualities is certainly not as obvious as arithmetic over units of account.
Also, this post uses “happiness”, “joy”, “welfare”, “how someone would rate their life”, and “ecstasy” to refer to the same thing. I am not sure that these are obviously equivalent.
I think we can make our best guesses about how to add them up, especially if we assume that most humans have roughly the same welfare range, which I think we have good evolutionary reasons to believe.
When I refer to happiness, joy, and welfare, I’m referring to positively valenced affective states in general.
Thanks for your thoughts!
[ Not a utilitarian, myself. I’m stuck on incomparable and unmeasurable utility—I just don’t think there’s any reasonable aggregation or comparison at scale. Also, non-realist, so it’s all personal preference anyway. Still, it’s an interesting thought experiment, and my personal preferences do include attempts at consistency. Generally, claims of someone being incorrect are likely incorrect themselves.]
These are the same point, I think. “What do we actually try to maximize?”. This is the main reason I’m not a utilitarian—I don’t think there is any usable metric that’s non-indexical or objective. This is the reason for calling it “utility” rather than “happiness”. While I agree that many views are incorrect if they’re self-contradictory, I don’t agree that “incorrect” can be applied to different personal preferences about how one’s utility function is constructed/inferred. Believing that it applies to anyone but oneself is probably incorrect.
Note: my supervillain failure mode is to convert all matter in the universe into pure hedonium.
Tricky one, as it mixes different levels of moral and meta-moral reasoning. How is compliance to a moral system measured, and is the result binary (moral/immoral, heaven/hell, etc.) or continuous (a Real number of how moral one’s total actions are)? What is “best” and what is “acceptable”, for oneself and for others, is a negotiation of what’s actually important to them, which for all humans I’ve encountered differs from their stated ideals. I tend to agree that it’s hypocritical to CLAIM universalism of legible non-indexical values while still “wasting” energy on family and nice things.
Ehn, IMO this is just another aspect of universal non-indexical Utilitarianism being wrong for me. It seems resolvable either direction—bite the bullet, or define your utility aggregation with declining marginal utility for similar experiences (note: just as impossible to define as any other utility measurement).
Yeah, I guess, I, after having reflected more, don’t think we can come to moral conclusions via moral intuitions about things other than our experience.
But, I do think we can measure happiness from a subjective perspective, which seems sufficient to consider it aggregable.
This continues the eternal talking-past-each-other between utilitarians and its foes:
a. On the one hand you’re right to call out the 2 pseudo-solutions I first bold-emphasize above as ultimately unworkable/unconvincing.
b. On the other, your two point I later bold-emphasize above simply don’t answer the demandingness problem: we’re humans, we’re beasts, we’re far from saints, and that’s undeniable, and any utilitarianistic ideas won’t change it, and it’s not a mistake to call out the discrepancy of that reality as being at odds with ‘your theory’, however much we deplore it (and I’m not apologetic to propose to be nearly 100% sure even you yourself you’ll be very far from it, despite how you write “most people actually already believe in extreme demandingness in many circumstances”).
But there is, imho a more productive way to put the entire thing—and still super simple; you may even just call it a question of wording, but I think it matters for the conversation:
The ideal is bare utilitarianism, just as you put it, yes let’s aim at that natural focal point
Aim at this as much as you can, evaluate the morality of your options by the degree to which they go in the direction of 1.
While you’ll extremely reliably fail to resist deviating from the option that would correspond most perfectly to 1., and instead chose one that is, say, more to your own material benefit and/or to that of your near and dear ones, try to neglect as little as possible the wellbeing of those beings—and potential beings—whose fate you’re superficially inclined to overlook.
If we want to operationalize an overly simplified, stylized version of this:
max U + alpha * sum(u_i) where U is your personal utility, 0<alpha<1 your altruism factor, and the u_i the utilities of all others. Extend with a more realistic preference structure, but the gist is that you want to act in line with an as high alpha as your rather egoistic self permits you.
Telling humans to pursue every and always and perfectly 1. is a bit like asking a loose stone on the roof to never fall down on people’s heads: it’s the right thing but the stone doesn’t have much capability programmed into itself to avoid doing what it naturally does, so it cannot really achieve much. It’s as ignorant as to believe we can tell people to be perfect full communists and sing kumbaya every evening while working hand in hand in perfect kindness only for the public good.
So the “small-heart utilitarianism” how I call what 1. & 2. describe, is the more realistic option—as long as we don’t wholly reengineer ourselves (physically, not purely with re-education).
For the hypothetical perfect altruist it’d collapse to bare utilitarianism as you describe it, for us earthlings it seems to me to be the natural realistic extension.
Yeah, I pretty much agree.