Utilitarianism is a doctrine that one should decide what is the better moral choice based on whether the choice produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It is consequentialist because an action’s effects dictate which action is morally superior. However, this emphasis on prioritizing the outcome of a decision rather than commonly accepted moral rules has caused many controversies. This essay will introduce the two major schools of utilitarianism, explain how utilitarianism will justify its moral choice for the moral dilemmas presented by three thought experiments, and offer its own view on its preferred choice for each experiment.
There are two major schools of utilitarianism. The first school is act utilitarianism. Act utilitarians think breaking commonly accepted moral rules is acceptable if they result in greater good than not breaking these rules, as long as these immoral actions do not compromise the utilitarian mission of maximizing fulfillment for everyone in the long run. One can violate any commonly accepted moral rule for the better outcome. In contrast, rule utilitarians believe that utilitarianism should function under certain inviolable constraints set by certain moral rules. Because one does not know the quality of outcome for all immoral actions that are intended to produce the better results, it is best for everyone to follow certain rules that are likely to produce better results in the long run than risky immoral actions that produce less short-term gains than long-term losses. One cannot, under rule utilitarianism, violate pre-established moral rules that produce more positive outcome in the long run than any other moral rules.
J.C. Smart is an act utilitarian philosopher who argues that utilitarianism can prevent some misery deontological theories permit. Sometimes following commonly accepted moral rules rigidly can seem more unreasonable because it causes barely any harm and sacrifices large benefits that result from making morally flexible act utilitarian decisions. He proposes a scenario where two people are on a desert island, Person A is dying and asks Person B to donate Person A’s gold to the South Australian Jockey’s Club after person A’s death. Person B says yes. But what if later Person B wants to donate the money to a hospital and breaks the promise because it will help more people? Is this a more moral choice than keeping the promise?
Deontological theory will urge Person B to keep his original promise. That everyone keeps his promises is crucial to the stability of a society. If Person B breaks the promise, he will indirectly contribute to making his society more unstable. On the other hand, Smart argues that what one should do may not be what deontological theory suggests in this case. Breaking the promise creates almost no harm and greater benefits than keeping the promise because the hospital will obviously do more good with the gold than the Jockey’s Club.
This case eliminates one of act utilitarianism’s greatest shortcomings, which is the production of long-lasting nonnegligible potential negative effects and the failed production of a larger amount of fulfillment after one does something immoral for the greater good. Breaking the promise made on a desert island won’t contribute to social instability or harm a dead man, and the hospital will likely use the money on saving people’s lives. The most negative externalities are: 1) the potential weakening of Person B’s character trait as a “consistent promise keeper,” although Smart may not consider maximizing utility by breaking the promise hurts the man’s moral character, and 2) “psychological tensions” one will experience when one is asked to promise something else (350 Smart). Smart thus believes it is more right, in this case, to sacrifice the dead man’s interest and weaken one’s moral character for creating more fulfillment for everyone else.
I will donate the money to the Jockey’s Club if I subscribe to a Kantian deontological perspective that believes one must practice a moral law that contributes to the health of a society at all costs. Promise keeping does promote a sustainable and functional society. I will feel guilty and morally compromised either way when I do not fulfill Person A’s promise or not use the money for a more utility-maximizing end because I am not helping save lives. Then what I do is left to my personal preference. If the Jockey’s Club is specifically dedicated to a sportive purpose, although not generating the greatest good for everyone else in the society, I am not proactively harming anyone by donating the money to the Jockey’s Club. Also, what I can do better to contribute to society does not automatically decide whether I should break a sacred promise I gave to a dead man. I care about fulfilling the promise and upholding the deontological ideal more and should not feel obligated to break my promise to Person A if not donating the gold to the hospital is not directly inflicting harm.
Before I introduce the third experiment, I will present John Rawls’ criticism of utilitarianism. He believes that utilitarianism does not care about how satisfaction is achieved or distributed because the maximization of the greater good justifies any action or violation of commonly accepted moral rules (337 Singer). Because it is justifiable for one individual to maximize his fulfillment and sacrifice some of his present interests for the sake of future interests, utilitarianism mistakenly also thinks it is justifiable for an entire society to sacrifice its innocent participants for its long-term aggregate fulfillment for everyone else. Utilitarianism neglects the fact that individuals have separate wills and bodies. This omission is the basis of the moral legitimacy of utilitarianism that makes it morally justifiable to unify everyone under one agenda and sacrifice anyone for the greater good. The utilitarian utopia will thus behave as if it is effectively constructing a perfect society based on the preferences of “an impartial [and rational] spectator,” who will define what is fulfillment for every individual and make them follow his “coherent system of desire” (338 Singer). Such a society, since everyone is seen as collected in a single person, also is justified to decide what measures to implement and when to create, enforce, and violate its commonly accepted moral rules at its own discretion, so it maximizes the greater good at all costs based on this system (338 Singer). It will act like a business, in which everyone is assumed to be a social unit that submits to the interests of the collective whole. Such a business-like utilitarian society will focus on eliminating inefficiencies and costs and increasing profits based on the rational and uniformly enforced set of ruthless strategies derived from this “coherent system of desire.”
I disagree with the Rawls’ idea that utilitarianism in practice will always effectively disregard separateness of individual because its aim is based on the definition of fulfillment, and this disregard does not justify there is something fundamentally wrong with all versions of utilitarianism. If the individual reserves the right to one’s personal definition of fulfillment in a rule utilitarian society that prohibits killing, “a coherent system of desire” is not a necessary byproduct of utilitarianism. Some individuals may define fulfillment differently as finding a sense of meaning rather than experiencing an abundance of pleasure. If individuals are allowed to form their own systems of desire, all of which the rule utilitarian society holds as equally sacred, this variation of utilitarianism does respect the separateness of individual and will not sacrifice human lives. It does not create rules justified by calculating and aggregating everyone’s interests. Because the variety of different individuals’ interests will conflict and cannot be reconciled with rules for one person, It will construct rules as if they are for different individuals with conflicting interests. My utilitarian rules will still be based on the goal of maximizing fulfillment, but they are not going to be created as if they are for one person.
Rawls may argue that rule utilitarianism may still sacrifice the interests of individuals for other individuals’ interests in reality, although my rule utilitarian society does not sacrifice human lives. However, sacrificing one individual’s interest lawfully and morally for others’ interests is unavoidable in any rule-based social system in practice because resources are limited and their allocation will be allocated strategically for a morally justifiable purpose. A deontological moral system cannot escape the same criticism because the moral rules may be correct and accepted, but their implements will cause unjust sacrifices regardless (e.g. eminent domain).
Dostoevsky introduces a thought experiment that makes his readers wonder about whether the certainty of the creation of a utopia can justify any injustice and sacrifice from only one individual. Imagine one can create a perfect utopia where everyone is happy and at peace, under one condition—we must torture an innocent child forever. Dostoevsky asks if the beneficiaries in the utopia can accept their happiness built on the suffering of this innocent child and remain forever happy (332 Singer).
According to act utilitarians, the suffering of the child is arguably significantly less than the enormous amount of good his sacrifice will produce for everyone else. Violating the child’s human rights and many commonly accepted moral rules held upheld by most societies thus is permissible, especially when the maximization of net good for everyone is certain.
If all humans are psychopathic and rational utilitarians, then this arrangement is justifiable. To make his case stronger, if the utopia is all robots instead of humans, the child being tortured is a robot too, then this utopia is completely justifiable and sounds like a great place to live in for robots. Convincing robot/human psychopathic act utilitarians that there is something fundamentally wrong with act utilitarianism becomes impossible in this case.
I will grant that there is nothing wrong with this utopia per se within the act utilitarian framework, but this is obviously not the ideal system, so it is not okay to torture a child to create this utopia. It assumes the result of a perfect utilitarian utopia, so it sounds much better than a deontological society because Dostoevsky has not jointly proposed a comparable deontological utopia. Since this utilitarian utopia is grounded in imagination, to draw a fair comparison, I should also propose a perfect deontological utopia that manages to make the people just as happy where their rights and morality are also permanently upheld. Now, how can the utilitarian utopia be better? This deontological utopia has the best of both worlds. Its society does not need to compromise its morality to create maximal fulfillment. This contrast reveals that if one supports act utilitarianism, one has lost the faith in the possibility of achieving maximal fulfillment efficiently without compromising morality and human rights whenever the end justifies the means. This assumption makes the ideal implementation of act utilitarianism suboptimal compared to that of deontological morality. If it is possible to imagine and have faith in creating and sustaining a deontological utopia, torturing the baby is not the ideal solution to achieving human prosperity.
Citation
Smart, J. J. C. “Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism.” The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 25, 1956, p. 344., doi:10.2307/2216786.
Singer, Peter. Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2013.
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