I call this the Argument from Hypocrisy. In Governing Least , Moller powerfully develops a parallel objection: While utilitarians often urge self-sacrifice, they rarely preach other -sacrifice.
But given their principles, they totally should! Challenges to living with utilitarianism tend to focus on what I called options— the option we think we normally have to flout the overall good when we rather sleep in, or buy a subwoofer instead of donating to charity. But what really cuts ice are constraints on our actions.
Singer and others emphasize that they can accept that they do not, as utilitarians, have the option to loaf about when they could help others, however much they fall short. The only views left on the table at this point are precisely those that are willing to contemplate that, at least in some circumstances, rubbing out Grandma and stealing from our children is the right thing to do.
Just consider contexts in which we are specifically seeking to articulate them, as when we instruct our children. Do revisionist utilitarians sit down their sons and daughters and implore them to steal from their friends when it is possible to do so undetected and to divert the money to famine relief? There are many books by revisionist utilitarians telling us that we ought to do more to live up to the demands of morality through self- sacrifice; the fact that there are so few urging us to engage in more other -sacrifice would be surprising if revisionists really could take their philosophy seriously in practice.
Notice, again, that Moller is not invoking the Argument from Hypocrisy. They barely even preach it! Suspicious, to say the least. By bizarre coincidence, this SMBC comic was the very next article in my blog feed. Are you and Weinersmith in the same book club? They are not in the same book club, but in the same book. It actually makes perfect utilitarian sense to not make a big deal deal about this or discuss it publicly: it would make fewer people utilitarian causing people to die re effective altruism.
Utilitarianism assumes knowledge not in evidence. I need to do a post on this. Praising other-sacrifice would be praising someone for killing his grandma or stealing from his children. This is not a good argument against utilitarianism. Utilitarians do preach other sacrifice; everyone does. Almost no-one thinks that no costs can ever be imposed on innocents for the sake of the greater good. In spite of the absolutist rhetoric of libertarians and other absolutist nonconsequentialists, you clearly do accept that the innocent may sometimes be harmed for the sake of the wider social good.
We accept this cost for the sake of the wider benefits of the criminal justice system. Even statist libertarians accept this.
Therefore, utiltiarians, along with Bryan Caplan and other libertarians, preach other-sacrifice. The criticism seems rather the type of other-sacrifice you accept, which is an entirely different debate. But is a complete prohibition on this plausible? What if you had to imprison your child for two minutes in order to stop millions being killed by an terrorist? Make it two seconds, whatever you need to get the right answer. The threats of bad men seam to be another argument against utilitarism.
Central Intelligence Agency gets wind of a plot to set off a dirty bomb in a major American city. Agents capture a suspect who, they believe, has information about where the bomb is planted. Is it permissible for them to torture the suspect into revealing the bomb's whereabouts? Can the dignity of one individual be violated in order to save many others? Greatest Balance of Goods Over Harms If you answered yes, you were probably using a form of moral reasoning called "utilitarianism.
So long as a course of action produces maximum benefits for everyone, utilitarianism does not care whether the benefits are produced by lies, manipulation, or coercion.
Many of us use this type of moral reasoning frequently in our daily decisions. When asked to explain why we feel we have a moral duty to perform some action, we often point to the good that will come from the action or the harm it will prevent. Business analysts, legislators, and scientists weigh daily the resulting benefits and harms of policies when deciding, for example, whether to invest resources in a certain public project, whether to approve a new drug, or whether to ban a certain pesticide.
Utilitarianism offers a relatively straightforward method for deciding the morally right course of action for any particular situation we may find ourselves in. To discover what we ought to do in any situation, we first identify the various courses of action that we could perform. Second, we determine all of the foreseeable benefits and harms that would result from each course of action for everyone affected by the action. By emphasizing the "higher" pleasures of the intellect , Mill is adding other criteria to the criterion of pleasure.
Morality is proportionate to the happiness in being truly human and not to the sum of units of pleasure. Further, is the intellect alone what is essentially human? Even if it is, it is not the intellect alone that gives humans pleasure. Bentham's notion allows you to distinguish between pleasures in terms of quantity even though you do not admit differences in quality.
Poetry reading provides a greater quantity of pleasure due to fecundity. You will recall the subsequent occasions. It allows simple straightforward calculation.
It keeps pleasure as the sole standard of morality. Mill would argue that with proper opportunity and training, people, do, in fact, easily distinguish between and assign differing values to mental and physical pleasures. A Beethoven symphony is evaluated as providing a higher quality pleasure than a belch by people experienced in both. Such judgments are made all the time. People are not animals. Their unique function of reason leads them to value the higher pleasures.
Problem : In utilitarianism one considers only the sum total of pains and pleasures, not their distribution. Even though the sum total of units of happiness might be the same, it might be distributed "unfairly" in various societies. A slave society might produce the greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest number. Compare for example, these three societies with units of utility:. The total amount of value in Society C is greater than that in Society A where the distribution is even.
Even rule utilitarianism must approve this distribution --even slavery, if this is what is involved. Example slightly modified from B. Death of one for pleasure of others problem may be solved by use of rule rather than act utilitarianism. However, act utilitarians have arguments against rule utilitarians. These include an abandonment of maximizing happiness if following a generally beneficial rule does not maximize happiness in a given case.
Some utilitarians argue that a principle of distributive justice must be added to the principle of utility Frankena. Another attack came in a University of Melbourne supplement carried by Fairfax media a few days later. That means that we can torture people to get information helpful to a good cause, she tells us. Or that an assassination of Adolf Hitler, which would have saved millions of lives, would have been morally justified. We are to treat even an Adolf Hitler, or a terrorist, as a member of the human race.
They are the reason there has been such an outcry against the CIA torturing detainees at Guantanomo Bay. Kymlicka gives several types of utilitarianism, concentrating his attack on Jeremy Bentham, a forerunner to Mill, and on Singer. It is also the version that Soderlind says gives us approval to torture.
Singer advocated a version termed preference utilitarianism in his book Practical Ethics. So why do ethicists, moral philosophers and newspaper contributors condemn utilitarianism? Your guess is as good as mine.
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