Yeah funny. I’ve written about a hundred articles defending utilitarianism and yet I find myself less willing to support those things than is typical. Weird.
I'm one of the critics who strongly rejects utilitarianism and consequentialism –– and I'm also pretty strongly against the list of things you list as things you're against. I think they're bad ideas for reasons mostly orthogonal to utilitarianism, so I don't think this list really gets at anything about utilitarianism.
You are mostly like me, except I do not agree that giving kids the choice whether or not to go to school is any better than giving them the choice to run out into traffic, play with sharp objects, or not brush their teeth. The fact that the harm of not going to school is distant doesn’t factor.
The distinction between “moral rule” and “greater good” seems quite arbitrary here.
One could say that the “moral rule” is that lies are bad, and that free speech is merely a utilitarian justification for allowing lies.
I don’t know if there’s a “moral rule” against removing people from places for 7 hours a day. “Forcible separation” sounds like a bit of a stretch—the connotation of forced separation implies significantly longer separation.
One could have a moral rule that says “don’t knowingly incite mobs to kill Asians”—but view wipe spread dissemination of truth about COVID a necessary measure to advance society.
One could believe that there is a moral obligation to protest through the most visible means—irrespective of effectiveness—but decide not to annoy some people for fear of consequences.
I think you may be rather more charitable here than necessary or perhaps defensible. People largely like in-group causes and dislike out-group causes. Thinking seriously about the pros and cons weakens the sense of innate rightness on our side. Scott we're clearly facing inhuman barbarians here, we don't need any bean-counting to dtermine our rectitude in the face of such evil.
What about killing everyone who wants to do the things you consider bad? How utilitarian can one really be if one is not willing to drown this world in blood to create a better one?
"These all seem like bright-line cases of violating a sacred principle for the greater good, but for some reason the people worried about “utilitarianism” and “the greater good” never talk about them."
What? People who worry about utilitarianism do talk about those exact things, all the time. They're all incredibly common libertarian/classical liberal talking points, and often espoused by deontological libertarians and classical liberals whose opposition to the state is rooted in an opposition to utilitarianism in general.
Non-consequentialists don't see "utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good". That's a utilitarian framing of the issue. The very concept of a "greater" good, as if you could measure or compare or do math with goodness, is the problem to begin with.
When the people you don't like want to censor speech or cancel people or whatever, they don't frame that mentally as performing a lesser evil in service of a greater good, unless they have consequentialist leanings to begin with. The censoring or cancelling are acts that are good in themselves. Or they evince certain personal virtues that are good in themselves. There is no justification in terms of future good that might result from present evil, as if we could predict future consequences or that they are even relevant to moral choices! The act in itself, or the personal qualities that lead to the act in themselves, should be judged by itself.
So when you look at people that accuse utilitarians of thinking as if you can perform lesser evils in service of greater good, and then respond by thinking of the lesser evils they do in service of greater goods, you're not refuting them. You're doing exactly what they are accusing you of, what they find problematic.
Side question. I'm curious as to whether your opposition to mandatory public schooling is entirely because it's mandatory or in part due to you thinking it's actively bad for kids or a waste of time at best?
Why are so many otherwise intelligent people so hung up about ideological consistency? Why do they put themselves in a box, stressing over whether there is something wrong if they or someone else believes that some policy or action or thought doesn't conform to a construct of belief that results in the best outcome for the most people or results in a bad outcome for some people or doesn't lead to equality or helps some at the expense of others or reflects conservative values (whatever they are this day, "am I supposed to for free trade or protectionism) or progressive ones (are Jews the oppressors or the oppressed). It seems to me that this preoccupation with ideology, is just a way to be intellectually lazy and avoid having to struggle with the reality that in the end the world is messy, there is no one compass you can rely upon, you just have to fight your way through conflicting values and make the best judgment you can, understanding that actions have consequences, that someone comes out ahead and someone does not and that no matter what we decide now, we may never know or only know in hindsight whether it was the right thing to do.
I don't think restricting free speech is actually a "bad thing" in the relevant sense. If you punish a mob boss for ordering his subordinates to commit a robbery, is that "doing a bad thing for the greater good"? What's innately evil is violently suppressing the truth. (Actually, even this is probably insufficiently nuanced -- I think it's fine to punish someone for leaking classified information to a wartime enemy, for example -- but trying to develop a fully-worked-out model of the moral principle that free speech proxies would probably take too long to fit in a blog comment.) So, in theory, enforcing laws against misinformation doesn't require doing any evil. In practice, we shouldn't do this because the risks of trusting the state to judge what is misinformation are too high to be worth it, but that's not a deontological argument.
I'd suggest it's because the small scale individualist utilitarianism you describe invariably ends up eroding the laws and regulations put in place to protect "ordinary people" from the invasive governmental strong-arm do-as-your-told form of utilitarianism.
I think people are ok with doing bad things to achieve greater good, as long as it is done as part of a rule they know to be a predictable part of social contract. Conversely, people oppose to the meta-rule which would let individuals make on the spot, subjective, utilitarian judgements, because that's unpredictable and might lead to constant fear. I'd be afraid to get into a taxi in a society in which it would be ok for the driver to make a decision to sacrifice me for a greater good based on their view of values.
I think normative and consequential approach converge once you start taking second (third, nth) orders into account. An action is only achieving a greater good, if a society which adopted it as a rule would be nicer.
But this is difficult, as it requires careful consideration of all pros and cons by various members of society, some precomitment, enforcement, and becomes undistinguishable from democratic process of establishing norms.
On the other hand I'm generally anti-utilitarianism but it's hard to find actual real-world scenarios in which I'd actively _disagree_ with utilitarianism. My disagreements with utilitarianism are either pretty abstract (utility can't be computed in practice and therefore can't be maximised in practice) or only occur in hypothetical philosophical situations, not real ones.
I think most anti-utilitarians have this in common; you won't often find someone who explicitly says "it's right to do X, even though doing Y would make the world a better place". Non-utilitarians will usually have an argument why the thing that they propose doing for un-utilitarian reasons also just happens to be the utilitarianally optimal thing anyway.
My guess? This is less about you (Scott) than your comments section, but in the space here, the general vibe often seems to be "ethics as sport," ie "let's play out any argument no matter how many common taboos we are contemplating violating because we understand this is all part of a game we are playing to arrive at some kind of deeper consensus or understanding of principals or common notions or whatever." Which yes, gives people the vibe that this is a space where people think anything is at least theoretically permittable. To most people, ethics is more like war, you don't suggest arguments unless you are laying the groundwork for an attack. So the sentence "the most cogent argument I can think of for eating babies" will make most people think you are trying to legitimately justify the eating of babies, not that you are conducting rationality katas or whatever the fuck people think they are doing around here.
This, btw, is why in most spaces if people discuss morality at all, they spend half the time virtue signaling, when everybody knows what tribe you belong to, it allows you to make hypothetical arguments without anyone thinking you are trying to secretly incept outcomes that run counter to the groups common moral code. But with utilitarians (or at least, internet rationalist-utilitarians), the highest common goal of the tribe is "let's discuss anything and everything in the most rational light possible, no matter how uncomfortable," and thus the only virtue signaling you get is people racing to show how adept they are at justifying absolute horror that they don't even really believe in, just to prove they are capable of the exercise.
I think the anti-utilitarians come in various flavors.
1. The Nate Silver flavor: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1742636333624107121 of doing-bad-things-has-good-result-and-don't-worry-about-indirect-consequences. This is, by far, the most common. This is attacking a very naive utilitarianism that doesn't exist in a serious way.
2. The I-need-a-philosophy-job flavor. I have a friend who is a philosophy professor; I don't want to degrade the entire profession. But the absolutely awful critiques I've been reading for decades persist. (Some critiques require work and there are hard problems. But man, so many are just bad. In college, I read a textbook that explained that utilitarianism was wrong because if you ate Corn Chex instead of Wheat Chex and you would have liked the Wheat Chex better you had acted immorally and obviously that defeated utilitarianism. I made up the names of the cereals, but not the argument.)
3. As you observe, the math-is-bad flavor. These folks seem to be wrong, and uninterestingly so.
I would note - as I think our host has - that deontologists seem to do better at utilitarianism than utilitarians, primarily because rule-following generally works well. I do think in practice given our human limitations, rule-following is a good default heuristic. And maybe I'm wrong about all of this.
Utilitarianism and Consequentialism are not the same things. You can be a non-Utilitarian and a Consequentialist, and you can be a Utilitarian without being a Consequentialist, despite what professional moron and evil person, Peter Singer, might say in a cited paper.
You are a Utilitarian because you're a Utilitarian. You've self described this way, you've wrote about how you think this is the only theory of ethics that even tries to "solve the problem", you've strenuously defended the position in the past, and you frequently talk about other moral theories in such ways as to suggest you are incapable of understanding alternate positions in the first place. This isn't an insult, you've admitted this in previous blogs, including ones specifically about things missing from one's awareness.
This post is itself is an example, since I have no idea who these people are who are pro the first list, but against the second. Don't worry, I'm against both lists, because the first list is obviously bad, and for the second list, I'm forced to fill in the blanks of what you actually mean by your own personal actions, to which I am against.
"So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?"
I think utilitarians are uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and also utilitarians are very likely to accept everything in that first list. To be sure, it's completely possible to be a utilitarian and reject the first list, but I notice most self described utilitarians have no understanding of anything, whether they be blog authors or Peter Singer, so I would be really surprised to see an example that I believed. We might point to Peter Singer especially as the most obviously willing-to-do-evil Utilitarian, somebody who clearly doesn't understand anything, and, due to prominence, a large chunk of why Utilitarianism gets a bad rap from normal people who are just into politics and not philosophy.
But ignoring the reason from mere prominent individual, I think your confusion is based on, once again, an inability to understand the alternatives.
In itself, "calculating lives" is not utilitarianism, nor consequentialist. Nobody cares about that. What is utilitarianism is the part where you say that the calculation is the crux of the "science" of ethics, and the consequentilist part is where you say the nature of the outcome-as-outcome is the most important and/or primary factor in determining what to do.
Somebody like great hero Achilles might take both the calculation of lives, and the consequences of the action as important in a moral judgement, for example "we must kill as many of the enemy as possible." But great hero Achilles is a virtue ethicist, and so the consequences-in-themselves are not the marker, but rather how they conform to the virtues necessary for heroism, such as bravery, piety, martial prowess, leadership, and so on, is the marker. The calculation of lives or their maximisation is not the primary motive, but rather, these are the extension of what it means to create victory, which in this case is heroic.
But IF Achilles was a utilitarian consequentialist in the mould of most internet utilitarians, or Peter Singer, we might decide to maximise the deaths of our enemies and lives of our friends. But we need to realise that all animals are equal and infanticide is fine, also we need to be long thinkers and consider future enemies and friends. In conclusion, utilitarianism is a mathematical attractor for the annihilation of all life in the universe. Absolutely perfect for people obsessed with AI, people who think everything can and should be put under the label of "science", and other such Moloch worshippers.
As a non-utilitarian, I too am against the things you are against in your first list.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math). If you do this, sometimes people will look for a legible explanation for their discomfort, and they’ll seize on “doing an evil thing for the greater good” - even if the thing isn’t especially evil, trying to achieve a greater good at all seems like a near occasion of sin.
I get your point. But my problem with utilitarianism isn’t about mixing human lives with math, but rather that utilitarianism ignores natural rights of individuals, in favor of third party (often the government or its “experts”) calculations for large group of people. These third parties do not know how their calculations or policies are going to affect people they meant to affect, they can never calculate it with the perfect information, information only individuals themselves possess. Me knowing what I know about myself, can use math all I want to calculate what’s good for me and test them out in the real world, but I would not think I can/should do it for other people. There are two problems with “Doing an evil thing for the greater good”: 1) the “evil things” sometimes violates individual’s natural rights. 2) there is no such thing as the greater good. What’s good for me might not be good for you. Everyone’s so different in terms of believes, personality, individual circumstances at any given time. The best one to decide what’s good for a person is a person himself. Not an outside calculation with imperfect information and the goal to maximize group interest.
I think most greater good arguments are slippery slopes. And yet I am comfortable with the caveat you have, even though I am a deontologist. Man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing animal, which is what scares me about the whole consequentialist attitude.
I have a pet theory that humans evolved a distrust of anyone relying heavily on system 2 for their decisions because system 2 is better at deception than system 1. (Not everyone using system 2 is an evil mastermind, but every evil mastermind is using system 2.)
Honestly, it doesn't seem like you're a utilitarian or a consequentialist. You don't seem to have any coherent moral philosophy at all. Which is fine, because no one does. Everyone just does what makes them feel good. It's not any more complicated than that.
I think most people are deontologists, even if they don't realize it, even if they're atheists. They have specific commandments that demand specific actions, and also a (sometimes quite crude) framework for dealing with conflicts between commandments. Sometimes the framework involves utilitarianism, but other times it involves a hierarchy. And they view it as a hostile and profane act for someone else to come in and start homogenizing their sacred commandments with math.
Just as people don't like putting prices on sacred things (such as a mother's love, or clean air), because that transforms them into secular things which can be traded in the market. Money is market is economics is math, and once you start denominating your virtue in numbers, you've lost touch with the Source.
Now anyone more clever than you can throw some numbers at you and make you do whatever they want.
"I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality" -- Yes, this.
Utilitarians, and people who are against utilitarianism, may both say "the ends justify the means," but they mean it differently. A utilitarian would mean that the action has expected positive net utility. An anti-utilitarian would typically mean that the ends are /permanent/, while the means are /temporary/.
I'm only slightly over-generalizing when I say that there are two types of people: people who think of reality as a state, and change as discrete transitions between states; and people who think of reality as a continuous dynamic system. People who model change in the world with state transitions don't count the cost of the path from here to there, because there is no path. The in-between part literally doesn't exist for them; it doesn't count in their (subconscious) utility function. And people who model the world with state transitions, believe that states are stable, and actions are initiated only by agents; so if you achieve a new state, you'll remain in that state until someone instigates some other revolutionary state transition. The new, more-perfect state will be permanent, unless you failed to eliminate all the evil people who would try to change it. So it's the only thing that counts.
The state-based model of reality is part of a larger system of metaphysics and ethics, that found in Plato, Christianity, Marxism, and the Social Justice Movement, which believes that the morality of actions can be certain, and forbids the use of numeric calculations in ethics in order to guarantee certainty. Where there are measurements, there are errors; where values of different goods are compared, there are disagreements. So for instance Marx didn't adopt the labor theory of value because it makes sense--it doesn't--but because it provides an objective measure of value that everyone can agree on. Modeling reality as a continuous dynamic system would require measuring all sorts of things, including how long an incentive must be applied before society reaches its new, more-perfect state. This kind of ethical system refuses to measure, so it just ignores that part of the calculation.
Ethical systems of this type usually avoid using numeric values at all by making ethical valuations ordinal (position in a sequence), not cardinal (an independent numeric measure). An ethical rule of lower ordinality (coming earlier in the sequence) always takes precedence over a rule of higher ordinality (later in the sequence). This is why SJWs think it makes sense to say "first we will eliminate all racism; next we will eliminate global warming; next we will eliminate homelessness." It is immoral under these systems to give anyone a tax break while one person is still homeless. In fact, these systems simply provide no way to think ethically about taxation--taxation is numeric, and can't be integrated with or connected to their system of ethics.
These systems still come into irreconcilable conflicts when they must rank a high-priority rule applied to a low-priority object (eg "do not hurt chickens") against a low-priority rule applied to a high-priority objects (eg "feed humans enough protein").
Scott, I'm curious how you as a utilitarian make up your mind on issues like the above.
When faced with a particular disruptive protest, do you sit down and calculate all possible outcomes, their relative probability, assign a utility value to each, and make up your mind based on that?
Or do you fall back on some general sorts of principles like "it's wrong to inconvenience people even if you think it's for a good cause" and "this sort of thing is generally counterproductive anyway"?
I suspect it's closer to the latter than to the former, in which case are you _really_ being a utilitarian, or are you just following the same sort of heuristic-based morality that a non-utilitarian would?
"trying to play down concerns about COVID because that might incite mobs to attack Chinese people. This violates the usual moral rule against deception to serve the supposed greater good of preventing the panic."
Not quite a fair description-- individuals really were attacking Chinese people randomly.
I tend to agree with your positions here, but I think what people are getting at when they describe your positions as more utilitarian is that they exhibit certain tendencies common in utilitarianism, namely focusing on legible, quantifiable, localized, easy-to-calculate/predict harms/benefits over illegible, unquantifiable, diffuse, difficult-to-calculate/predict harms/benefits. Now, I'm not entirely against that tendency, but I think it is a genuine hurdle to deal with when trying to reason consequentially, and I think the list of issues you posted on each side very clearly falls into this dichotomy, with the first list generally involving a localized harm for a diffuse benefit, and the latter list involving a localized benefit for (perhaps) a diffuse harm
I’m confused by what statements like “forcably separating children from their families” are meant to imply. It seems like some real concerns about schooling have been turned into abstract principles that don’t make a lot of sense once I think about them more.
For one thing, it sounds like something done without parents’ consent. That seems rare? It seems like parents, at least, have choices, since private and home-schooling exist? In practice, this “family separation” is typically parents making their children go to school.
If parents decide that, all things considered, their local public school is pretty good, characterizing it as an unusual form of coercion seems wrong. It doesn’t seem different from parents making many other decisions they make for their kids. Is sending the kids off to summer camp wrong too?
It seems like the answer is always going to be “it depends,” but typically parents are given pretty wide latitude when deciding what’s best for their kids.
Also, most parents work and need someone else to take care of the kids while they work, because many jobs are incompatible with babysitting. So isn’t this “forceable separation” really due to the necessity of working to make a living?
And as to “confining them in a space that they’re not allowed to leave” - isn’t that the state of all children? At young ages there are physical limits (playpen, barriers). Later, parents will watch over their kids or make rules that they need to follow. It’s not like they can live where they wish and go where they please.
Maybe there’s some better way of describing what’s wrong and what needs to change.
I think this footnote is a bit disingenuous to the pro-gun side:
> being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives to protect the right to bear arms.
I think a more correct description of their position would be:
> being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives today to protect against tyranny in the future.
This is definitely a utilitarian argument (lives today for lives in the future), but it isn't just sacrificing lives for the sake of being able to own a gun.
> Shaming, insulting, and doxxing people on the “wrong side” of an issue. This violates the usual moral rule against bullying to serve the supposed greater good of discouraging people from taking the “wrong side” of an issue.
...That is not a "usual" moral rule. As far as I can see, very few people have any issue with telling others that their opinions are bad and that they should feel bad. This is just a case of your values being non-standard.
All the things you list as reasons people call you utilitarian just seem like very normal political views lots of people have. I guess I find it unlikely this is really why people consider you a utilitarian? Isn't it more likely you get called a utilitarian for beliefs you have that are rare among non-utilitarian, like (just to take a random example I remember) that the math shows eating beef is morally better than eating chicken?
Somehow I just know selling organs is going to lead to the same outcome as we currently have with home mortgages. Where older people already own all the land you need to exist, and many young people will be pressured into selling their health to let an elderly citizen live a bit longer, just so that they can get a rung into the property ladder to have a stable roof over their head. Then the ones that make it to old age, will repeat the cycle, harvesting young peoples' organs to live another few years.
Hi, Scott. Congrats on your (relatively recent) paternity.
Myself, I have a deep-seated dislike for Utilitarianism, and I'd attribute it to a pendulum swing - I was a committed Marxist when young, and I've grown to loathe any discourse of ends-justify-means EVER. That, indeed, is my greatest gripe.
I don't think I have an aversion to 'calculating things', but I frame things like paid organ-donation as the starting/facilitating step to a Greater Evil that will plausibly follow, meaning I would fight from getting started in the first place. I also have a Kantian dislike for lying that makes me extremely prone to a similar unwillingness to any trade-offs in this regard.
Another thing that irks me about Utilitarianism (just one more, as I could go on forever) is its disregard for individuals as such. Natural and inviolable rights might be a social construction, but building them as axioms that should never be broken is less prone to the typical bad tampering of "Benevolent" others.
comply with how some would have them live. Respect personal choice as a “universal” for all. To site just two examples, instead of the majical “sacred rule” nonsense try the fundamental right to defend oneself, or the right to use and dispose of one’s own body as personally chosen. There are good counter arguments for every position you’ve selected where coercion is chosen as a means to some end.
1) People with more deontological intuitions and preferences are seen as more trustworthy and preferable than consequentialists (even by people who report having consequentialist intuitions!), and this seems attributable to their being perceived to be more reliable and thus predictable - the preference swaps when you frame the consequentialists as more behaviourally consistent. Though consequentialists reliably do whatever produces the best consequences, since what counts as best varies with context, this makes them seem unreliable (Everett et al., 2016; Turpin et al., 2021). Is this just an evolutionary hang up, or something that's still relevant? I think the latter, because...
2) It seems conspicuous that the first group of things Scott endorses are 'norms that are already largely operative in society' (don't ban speech, don't harass, don't lie, don't shame) while the second are proposed changes to the current status quo with mostly untested consequences (New drugs, new gene editing, sell your organs. Note the main exception to the first category, getting rid of traditonal schooling, seems like more of a break from what's come before). Although utilitarians care about 'the greater good' they also really care about stable cooperation and coordination, which relies on people internalising norms and upholding them mostly unquestioningly. I'm nowhere near the first to say this, but there's a very plausible case to be made that once we're at the level of deciding which norms we want people to internalise for the long haul, the first category are the ones utilitarians would want people to land on (rather than 'attempt to maximise utility'), and this is going to require being disposed towards not breaking them even when it really seems like doing so would produce better consequences.
Let me try this again. I have a better approach that doesn’t pretend to know best as to how others should live, nor fails to mention other arguments for positions than those you’ve mentioned. Try thinking about morality in terms of not using force to have others comply with how some would have them live. Respect personal choice as a “universal” for all. To site just two examples, instead of the magical “sacred rule” nonsense, try the fundamental right to defend oneself, or the right to use and dispose of one’s own body as personally chosen. There are good counter arguments for every position you’ve selected where coercion is chosen as a means to some end.
I don't really follow the argument here. You agree that you are utilitarian (or at least that that is a "fair descriptor"). I'm confident that you believe the utilitarian calculus supports your favoured policy in each of the examples you give (and I mostly agree with you). Therefore somebody who supported the opposed policies on utilitarian grounds would simply be empirically mistaken. But since you've given them as examples of "things many non-utilitarians believe are okay", they presumably support them on non-utilitarian grounds.
Supporting, on non-utilitarian grounds, policies which offend against the utilitarian calculus doesn't make someone a stealth utilitarian.
The simplest explanation for why people do not see the items you listed as true exceptions to the usual morals, is that they do not really believe in rules like (I will use the verbiage they might adopt) freedom of platform use for Nazi recruitment drives, letting weirdos make their children as crazy as they are, telling people the truth when you think they'll do something stupid as a response to it, never interrupting the complacency of the public even when they are ignoring something awful, or setting aside a practice that has defined who is "in" and who is "out" for most of their childhood, right when it looks like the wrong people have managed to get "in."
In fact, I think it's been rather broadly advertised that, among a certain milieu, freedom of speech in particular is no longer a sacred principle. The question on their minds: would you violate their ("the") principles for the greater good? Conversationally, "your" principles are a stand-in for their principles.
When people here are talking about utilitarianism or ethics in general, I am never sure if they are talking about utilitarianism just being true or false, or about it being the nicest system for our civilization to use.
If you are a serious moral realist, you just think a certain morality is true. This could mean a moral rule really exists somewhere in the universe, or, as I find more plausible, people in different states of the world are somehow comparable. So one can say that Pete is objectively better off in World A as compared to World B. All else being equal, world A is better than world B.
If one believes utilitarianism is true in this sense, it really just doesn't matter what our intuitions are or whether people often abuse utilitarianism for governmental overreach that causes greater harm. Utilitarianism would just literally be the correct framework in which one can decide whether a person, or a group of people, is better or worse off in World A or B. A moral system would just be true, like the laws of nature.
The other common viewpoint is that it doesn't make sense for the universe to contain ethics, which is an extremely good counterargument. But in that world, why are we even talking about ethics? Clearly, we all want to be happy, and most of us also want civilization to be well off, not oppressive, and so on, but why? If ethics is just made up by evolution to improve cooperation, why care about it?
I remember one Less Wrong comment about which open philosophical questions one has strong opinions on that went something like this:
"1. Clearly, moral realism is false and antirealism is correct.
2. Clearly, utilitarianism is the best moral system."
To me, this sounds like saying, "Clearly, physics isn't actually real and an illusion; also, clearly, Einstein was right about everything."
I think there are only 2 options:
1. either we live in a universe that somehow contains moral rules (probably utilitarian ones), or
2. there are no rules, and the world is just nihilistic.
Either it is actually bad if random people you don't know suffer, because suffering is just objectively bad. Or it just doesn't matter if people suffer; it's just atoms behaving in a certain way.
I suspect people find option 1. to be too woo and unscientific, but option 2. is too cruel and unhuman, so they pretend we can do ethics even in an only-atoms, no-rules world.
If anything, people should make it clear if they are talking about realist or antirealist ethics. If you are talking about realist ethics, saying something leads to bad decision-making, government overreach, people can't think about second-order consequences—all just aren't arguments. It would be like saying chemistry isn't real because it would allow people to make bombs.
However, if we are talking about anti-realist ethics, those might all be good arguments.
>being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives to protect the right to bear arms
Citation needed. So far as I know, there's no established causation of more guns among the populace -> more deaths. America is of course an obvious outlier in its death-by-gunshot rate, but it's not the only country where people have plenty of legal guns, and those others don't seem to have the same problem.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality
Well I read a whole lot of supposedly scientific papers that try to calculate the impact of "misinformation" and other ideological content using statistical models, so I'm not sure about that. COVID response was a disaster partly because it consisted of imposing authoritarian decisions using justifications based in pseudo-scientific calculations.
Now that wasn't utilitarianism, because any actual properly done calculations showed that the cost/benefit tradeoff of basically everything done back then was insanely awful. But it looked like utilitarianism and that seemed to reassure people. So I don't know.
Here's my indefensible take: Dostoyevsky said that if torturing a single child to death would give the entire world eternal health and happiness, it would still be wrong to do. I think he was saying that caring about the wellbeing of others only happens if your thinking is sort of the opposite of utilitarian reasoning -- when it is done out of that feeling of compassion and indignation that arises when you are deeply moved by someone's suffering.
Most of the time I am not paying much attention to people I do not know. I am a car and they are traffic. Go do your thing, other people. Whatever. I am not thinking about whether they are suffering, and if it the possibility does happen to cross my mind, I am not distressed and soon move on to thinking about other things. ( I doubt that I am terribly unusual in all this.). But now and then it's like a spark jumps from some stranger's situation into my imagination, and suddenly I care a lot about what's happening to them, and will put a lot of effort into helping. So my problem with utilitarianism is that it just is not very motivating. There are no sparks. Appeals to emotion are avoided, and that makes sense if you want people to give the most help where it will do the most good, rather than in the situation that happens to give them a great feeling of emotional involvement. I totally get it that it will not work to just broadcast information about people in trouble, and hope some random person is moved by the situation of the random person in trouble and coughs up some help. It's stupid as fuck. But I think people's objection to being logical and mathematical about how and where to help is not that it mixes the sacred, compassion, with the meaningless, numbers. I think the root objection is that it's hard to get enthusiastic about utilitarian-generated projects..
On the other hand, I found out recently that a high-rise apartment building with some rent-subsidized units may be put up in the pretty little neighborhood where my office is, and displace some pricey little boutiques and charming little coffee shops. Also it will reduce the property value of the lovely home of a colleague of mine who lives right next to the street of charming little thingies. She asked me to join in the effort to keep the high-rise out of "our" neighborhood, and plunk it in the one tiny ratty area in our upper middle class town, and I declined. Said I didn't know enough about the situation to judge whether it was fairer to trash our area than the other one, and I didn't want to protest out of simple self-interest.. So I guess I'm not impervious to considerations of fairness and maximizing benefit.
I find this post a bit baffling. Partly this is because I don't recognize the discourse it's criticizing. It's not ordinary back and forth about politics, because that discussion isn't at a level of moral generality where people are throwing accusations around "utilitarianism". It's not more academic or philosophical discussion about utilitarianism, because in those discussions skepticism about deception, restrictions on free speech, and so on are more closely associated with nonconsequentialist views than consequentialist ones, and it's just false that "the people worried about “utilitarianism” and “the greater good” never talk about them."
So regarding the core question:
"why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?"
I'm not sure "people" (which people? The hoi polloi? The people who argue about moral theories?) really do think that.
But suppose for the sake of argument I was such a person - someone who really is mad at utilitarians for doing evil for a greater good but accepted the reasoning in favor of the "normal" politics Scott mentions. Am I being inconsistent? No, because I think it can in most cases be plausibly denied either that the given policy genuinely violates the "usual moral rule" or that the "usual moral rule" provides strong genuine nonconsequentialist reasons. For example, if you independently think that shaming people for X is wrong, then of course it's going to look a lot like "bullying" and you're going to think it violates the "usual rule against bullying". But if you think people deserve to be shamed for X, then there's a relevant difference between shaming people for X and paradigmatic examples of bullying. And so people who support shaming people for X won't say that this is a case where bullying is justified by the consequences - they'll say it's not bullying. And if you force them to say that it's bullying, they'll say that the real moral rule is "no undeserved bullying" not "no bullying".
So there's nothing inconsistent about thinking that shaming people for X is justified by the consequences, but that other sorts of things the utilitarian is committed to sanctioning are genuine evils.
None of this is to say that the way actual people reason about this is rational. I think people will tend to latch on to basically whatever kind of reasoning available to them to justify their preexisting beliefs. So the people who antecedently like policy X will think it has good consequences and also, conveniently, that those policies won't interfere with any genuine nonconsequentialist constraints. And the people who antecedently don't like policy X will think that it is objectionably doing evil for a greater good and also, conveniently, that it's not really a greater good if you think about it. And libertarianish rationalist utilitarians who are predisposed to be against restrictions on free speech but can't appeal to nonconsequentialist constraints will of course find the math conveniently works out against those restrictions (or do some rule-y backflips).
You sound kind of like a libertarian, particularly back in the 90s and 2000s when they were more emphatically pro-gay rights. (Not that they're against them per se these days, just that it seems to be more of a peripheral 'red tribe' affiliation when it used to be more of a 'neither left not right' thing.) Which isn't really a bad thing IMHO, just pointing out your politics may be more about tribal affiliation (Gray Tribe?) and gravitating to the most comfortable laundry list of positions than you'd like to think. Like everyone else in the world, really. ;)
I'm not immune--I just never found a tribe I liked.
We ethical consequentialists are deeply aware of the large role played by status quo bias in many common objections. We're alleged to be monsters for believing that one electrocuted repairman is an acceptable tradeoff for the dispersed pleasure of a televised World Cup final, whilst our critics would accept increased rate of death and injury from traffic accidents, alcohol consumption, fights, coal burning for electricity, ad nauseam, as tradeoffs for holding that same event. The true opposition rarely ends up being to substantial tradeoffs, but to substantial tradeoffs being explicit. Or worse, weird and explicit. First rule of fungibility club: we don't think about fungibility club.
I'm glad somebody hasn't forgotten that, despite their moral grandstanding over covid, the American left were full blown covid deniers until reality forced them to tell the truth. And that this is an example of "anti-racist" ideology doing very obvious and undeniable harm.
I think you're pulling a bit of a fast one by lumping all 'non utilitarians' together. I've publicly opposed purely consequentialist ethics and agree with you on all your examples, for the very reasons you give (except for the point about state schools, but my disagreement there is not rooted in a consequentialist argument).
In truth, most people don't have an 'ethical theory', and if you quiz them (anecdata, UK) you will generally find them to be quasi-utilitarians. Here's why. What's often lost in these discussions is that Utilitarianism was originally intended to be a descriptive model of reality, NOT a decision making framework. The pitch by Bentham was that a 'hedonistic calculus' is a very simple model with a great deal of explanatory power for people's instinctive morals and traditional moral codes that arise from them - what *is* as much as what *ought* to be.
If it gives you the 'wrong' answer you aren't supposed to blindly say 'hedonistic calculus go brrrr' and change your mind! You're supposed to question how you've attempted to quantify 'good' and refer back to whichever moral principles you usually accept to figure out whether and where you've gone wrong.
Not to lump the opposition needlessly together, but it has, indeed, occurred to one that many a passionate derider of utilitarianism does seem to resort to intellectually dishonest or otherwise bullyish rhetoric.
One must only assume that these people think this sort of thing is, if not actually good, at least _just fine_ in general, because if they thought said dishonesty/bullying to be somehow _bad_, they'd have to somehow _justify_ it with some greater cause. Hmh.
I think another key distinction to be drawn is between:
(1) the abstract normative question of whether you ought to do what maximises utility (utilitarianism) vs other normative positions (deontology, justice etc.)
(2) ~ descriptive beliefs about whether breaking established norms in the service of other ends tends to work well
Beliefs about these two can diverge. You can be a utilitarian who believes, descriptively, that lying, cheating, stealing, suppressing/oppressing others in the service of the greater good tends to go badly and rarely serve the greater good. Or you can be non-utilitarian, pro-justice activist, who readily believes that all this and more should be readily employed in the service of greater pro-justice ends.
The first and last examples in the list are interesting to me, because the two sacred rules involved conflict with each other.
You can either have a rule of free speech, or a rule against bullying (etc). You can't have both.
I think this kind of explains a lot - the USA makes a big deal of free speech, and harassment is becoming increasingly acceptable.
Europe... isn't all going to the other extreme, and varies much more - but perhaps different countries are trying to strike different balances between the two. Perhaps even because it's more culturally diverse.
I don't think this post passes the ideological turning test. I'd argue it doesn't bother trying to.
Scott may find himself supporting the spread of misinformation if it resulted in actions that actually, really, physically threatened the people he cares about. He may well support protests that block traffic if he found himself with few enough other options. People who oppose mixing morality in math might be worried that this would lead to optimization for the wrong value. I could go on and so could Scott.
Put this way, it kinda looks like the "feels utilitarian" vs "I don't think ends justifies means BUT" discrepancy is at least in part people only engaging with utilitarianism when they really have to. (And maybe being mad that they have to.)
I think the thing is that dividing policies into means/ends or cost/benefit is already a utilitarian framing, and a less natural part of more virtue-based perspectives. So eg dissent-shaming isn't something that costs the evil of harassment for the benefit of good beliefs, but an indivisible moral action. It's a moral question either way, so deontologists and utilitarians each have relevant principles and can comfortably argue past each other without noticing.
The groupings here seem roughly sorted along immorality vs amorality. Immoral costs already have a moral valence and are already part of philosophies that stepped around cost-benefit consideration. Amoral costs are really weird in virtue ethics.
Things like calibrating regulations or moving disposable income are hard to morally assess without at least imagining a utilitarian mindset. To engage, you kinda need to either take on a utilitarian pov enough to make a content argument (h/t EA Forums) or make an abstract and kinda circuitous meta-argument about ethics that's liable to make you look like an ass or an outsider. Sometimes people would rather just trust that it's not trustworthy.
(I kind of sympathize*. When I see eg very religious thinkers, I'm comfortable enough with the things like beauty and charity that I can think about secularly, but once destiny or scripture comes up -- I'll still have opinions, but they'll be misfit for the framing, my ability to make a talmudic argument will be even worse than my ability to argue for or against the authority of clergy in general, and mostly I'll be mad I have to engage with religion.)
*((I mostly don't. Post-hoc justification of semi-legible visceral discomfort is a terrible basis for critique.))
> More focus on preventing existential risks that could kill billions of people
...
> So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math)...
In the context of existential / AI risk, I think of utilitarians as willing to do evil for the sake of greater good because they've said they're cool with evil for the sake of the greater good. I don't think this has anything to do with a innate repulsion for calculation.
Consider:
- Yudkowsky saying we should be willing to risk nuclear war to bomb GPUs in foreign countries to minimize x-risk (Times Op Ed)
- Nick Bostrom's "Black Ball" thought experiments, which explicitly justifies absolutely complete panopticon surveillance to avoid x-risk.
- You, saying that "So Google takes over the world? Fine," and how such dictatorship wasn't such a bad outcome because it avoided x-risk (In your old article in "Should AI be open?")
I don't want to litigate here if these are *justified* or *true* beliefs, or whether the trade-off makes sense. In all the above, I think that the proposed course of action will just makes the world worse, and probably *much* worse, because the trade-off is actually bad and utilitarians making these calls are making classic straw-utilitarian mistakes and not considering unintended effects. You might think that I'm wrong about this.
But -- whether or not these beliefs are are justified -- they do perfectly match the paradigm of "Let's let some great evil pass for the sake of greater good" and I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that utilitarians thus match the naive notion.
I think the easiest explanation for List 1 endorsements is that people don't actually see those rules as "sacred." A lot of people *talk* as if they do but are inconsistent enough that I don't really believe them. I've also interacted with more logically consistent people who openly reject them (e.g., free speech is a legal concept and freedom of expression isn't necessarily sacred without considering what's being expressed). So it's not clear to me that these folks view themselves as doing harm for the greater good.
I find myself reminded of this quote from Bryan Caplan:
"The key difference between a normal utilitarian and a Leninist: When a normal utilitarian concludes that mass murder would maximize social utility, he checks his work! He goes over his calculations with a fine-tooth comb, hoping to discover a way to implement beneficial policy changes without horrific atrocities. The Leninist, in contrast, reasons backwards from the atrocities that emotionally inspire him to the utilitarian argument that morally justifies his atrocities."
I think this is the difference between Scott's utilitarianism and the utilitarianism-like things he opposes. Scott checks his work, and he uses utilitarian logic for non-emotionally-inspiring causes, instead of only to justify emotionally-inspiring rule violations. That's what upsets people, not utilitarianism itself.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math). If you do this, sometimes people will look for a legible explanation for their discomfort, and they’ll seize on “doing an evil thing for the greater good”: even if the thing isn’t especially evil, trying to achieve a greater good at all seems like a near occasion of sin.
I'd like to propose an alternative way of framing the opposition that might bear a distinction. I think you've got the broad strokes right already. Here goes:
There's a deep-seated sense, an intuitive aversion, that most people share about formalizing morality because it's an inherently reductive process. Something ineffable is lost whenever we employ propositional logic to describe a moral issue. Then, based on an insufficient description, we proceed to metricize 'The Good' and apply optimization pressure to maximize moral utility. Goodhart's Law tells us what to expect at this point; an incontrovertible perversion of whatever measures of good were established.
In other words, there's a suspicion that you're inevitably gravitating towards disaster any time you try to formalize morality (which by this logic is properly holistic and irreducible) in such a way that accommodates optimization.
I dunno, the main thing going on here, it seems to me, is that you have both utilitarian and libertarian intuitions. There's nothing inherently contradictory in that; maybe a generally libertarian social order is conducive to the greatest overall happiness. Heck, John Stuart Mill himself is the author of both 'Utilitarianism' and 'On Liberty.'
I do think you're onto something in observing that people are put off by a "mathy" approach to ethics. (I also think people are mostly right to be put off by it, which is not to say it's *never* appropriate.) But the examples of your own views that you describe aren't even particularly mathy. If the utilitarian/libertarian alignment of views goes against expectations, I'd think it's just because the most common objection to utilitarianism is that it (potentially) sacrifices rights for the sake of the greater overall happiness. And I think the reason that is the most common objection to utilitarianism is that it is a good objection! Utilitarianism *might* be consistent with a commitment to rights, but that's contingent on whether rights are actually conducive to the greatest overall happiness. Which, maybe they are. But most people have an *absolute* commitment to rights, seeing it as a good irrespective of other goods like the greatest happiness principle. If "the math" turned out to show that large-scale infringement of rights actually did bring about the greatest happiness, a lot of people would still object to the large-scale infringement of rights - not because they were offended by the mathy calculation but because they hold rights as a fundamental good.
I.e. utilitarianism for me, deontology for thee. *Other* people should just follow the rules. But *me*? I'm smart and virtuous enough to responsibly weigh the trade-offs. When *other* people spin the facts? That's misinformation and evil. But when *I* spin the facts? Well, a little white lie never hurt anyone. Besides, my intentions were pure. No I'm not evil, stop being hyperbolic.
I believe you advocated for this before, Scott. In your post where you complain that nobody actually adheres to principles on the metalevel when doing so would be inconvenient to the issue on the object level. E.g. whether the right/left advocates for gay marriage being decided on the state level or federal level depends on who has the upper-hand culturally. Maybe i'll find the link later.
>”Supporting people who want to earn more money (ethically and legally) and donate it to charity.”
I agree with you on all of the other things on that list, which is why this one sticks out like a sore thumb. I guess I don’t really disagree with it per se, but it’s circular. You can’t use the word “ethically” as an undefined qualifier when defining your own ethical positions. All of the interesting information about what your position might be is hidden in the phrase “ethically and legally”. If a company that donates lots of money to charity is late to file a licensing renewal, does that invalidate them from consideration of support? Probably not. Where is the line?
> "Sometimes utilitarianism is conceptualized as “being willing to do bad things for the greater good”, so it always surprises me how much less willing I am to do this than most people."
I think this is common: a major theme in the utilitarian tradition (since at least Mill) is how damaging *naive instrumentalist* beliefs are. Due to better appreciating the harms of censorship, etc., utilitarians are disproportionately likely to be principled defenders of free speech compared to non-consequentialist academics (who often seem much more open to naive instrumentalism in pursuit of their non-utilitarian moral goals).
I think there are two different concerns at play here, one justified the other not.
The justified concern is that a utilitarian is in some sense more unpredictable or untrustworthy. What they're going to decide to do in a situation depends on many relatively obscure factors you might not be aware of so it's harder to know if you can trust them. Will they actually take the company's deposits to the bank or will they skim off 10% for the needy?
Sure in practice most utilitarians don't (and shouldn't) do most of those things but the very fact they claim to follow that kind of rule does increase the worry.
The unjustified one is simply that it more effectively obscures your tribal/values affiliation. Maybe I care about the poor or maybe I'm using utilitarinism as an excuse to reach results that claim to have that goal but actually serve some other interest.
For the most part people don't actually decide what to do by consulting moral theory and seeing what it suggests. Mostly we decide what to do based on emotional/intuitive thoughts and then use our intelligence to justify it post hoc. Maybe Peter Singer is an exception but quite likey not.
If that's your model than a utilitarian looks like someone whose bullet biting demonstrates that they are morally unconstrained. If they emotionally want to build/stop AI, steal money from their company or run horrific experiments they'll manage to justify it because it's only emotions not cognitive theories that do practical work constraining our actions.
I even think this is pretty true. It's just irrelevant to whether utilitarianism is true. I believe in it because I think it's true not because I believe that it does much to make me a better person.
My guess is that your fundamental violation is *thinking about it* rather than following the social consensus of the people around you on an issue-by-issue basis. That social consensus is created/maintained/modified by a complicated "organic" process that I've never seen analyzed. (We sometimes have "ethics experts" but we rarely follow their advice.) In the long run, what controls a culture's mores is going to be the various features of Darwinian inter-culture competition, not whether it conforms to some logical/philosophical framework.
Reading this, I get the feeling that Scott is a closeted virtue ethicist. Don't worry Scott, it gets better! There are millions of people just like you who won't condone immoral acts for some "greater" good!
*Copypasta South Park*
Okay, less sarky explanation of why virtue ethics not consequentialism:
1. Knowability. You cannot know in advance all the consequences of a given action; your actions echo in eternity. But you can, really easily, understand the nature of a given action, if it is honest or dishonest, just or unjust. And, over time, good actions will have good consequences.
2. Effect on Actor. The problem with being okay with bad actions for a good purpose is they affect the actor. If you are willing to do shitty things for a greater good, it will make you a shitty person, and what good, greater or otherwise, can a shitty person achieve?
Okay, but what about carefully looking up whether bednets save more lives than political donations? I'd say that falls under the virtue of Honesty. If you honestly are determined to do good, rather than appear good, you will do research, think through options etc.
So, yeah. It's okay, Scott, you can come out now. No one will think less of you 🙂
Regarding organ donation, there is absolutely a bright line being crossed: the principle that a doctor is, at any given time, serving the interests of a single patient. Organ donation is voluntary, and you as the donor are allowed to back out until the very last minute, without negative consequences to you. If we are to maintain these nice principles, then people cannot make credible commitments to selling their organs.
That's on top of the social slippery slope, where eventually people who haven't donated a kidney yet get disqualified from food stamps or whatever, because they're sitting on $20k of "assets" that they're refusing to sell.
As usual whenever this topic comes up, I highly recommend "Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets" by economist Al Roth. I know that it's slightly rude to ask someone to do background reading before deigning to engage with them. But in this case it's a short, compelling read.
How good must one be at decoupling what's good for me from the greater good in order for utilitarianism to be a good principle to put into practice?
How confident in one's calculations must one be in order to responsibly take on the responsibility to calculate for others the best course of action?
It's one thing to kill 1 to save 5. That's net +4. But what about killing 1 to save 10 with 50% probability? Or killing 1 to save 10 with 5-95% probability? Or killing 1 now to save 5 in the distant future?
It seems to me that utilitarians are loathe to actually put their principle into practice. Who wants to argue that it's right to steal from degenerate gamblers to fund AI safety? Who would advocate for assassination campaigns against agribusiness execs and investors?
Now, you can always retreat to the claim that such moves are negative EV once nth order effects get accounted for. But to actually account for these things is to have perfect predictive ability, which none of us do.
So in the end, we are left with heuristics, and the real meat of utilitarianism is the confidence that one can estimate consequences better than the average member of their society, better than simply following societal norms.
In many cases this confidence may be correct, but what is the moral valence of the elitism that undergirds it? Is it good to believe oneself to be a superior decision-maker?
Arguably, the naive utilitarian protester who stops traffic would be better served by ceasing belief that they are morally superior to society.
One paradoxical outcome of true utilitarianism is to discourage the masses from practicing it.
Time and time again we've seen child labor bans just get circumvented and result in kids doing illegal jobs without workplace protections like wage laws.
Compulsory Education however does abolish child labor because no parent can use "I can't afford to send him to school" as an excuse to have a child not in school, and an impoverished child not in school "might as well pitch in", which is how they end up getting factory jobs.
If you abolish compulsory education there will be children working in Amazon warehouses. We've already seen in states in the deep South that have poor enforcement of homeschooling quality or have defunded and allowed their public schools to wither, and don't enforce education, that poor kids get pulled out of school to spend their time someplace more productive for their parents: a Hyundai plant.
I hated school as a kid too. Fortunately new and avant garde forms of school are trying to break the shackles of Foucault's Prison if your kid can't handle it but no harm done to a kid in school is worse than the harm done to that kid on the factory floor. Organic childhood is a modern imaginary phenomenon and a utopian ideal invented by Jean Jacques Rousseau.
In the nature of things anyone with two or more moral principles is going to find them coming into conflict occasionally. Each moral principle, according to itself, should take precedence. So there is no rational way to choose which principle to give priority to. If there was, you wouldn't have multiple moral principles after all.
So you can be irrational with several moral principles, or a monomaniac with only one.
> So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?
Because you are arguing against the weakest strawman of what a "non-utilitarian" looks like and then giving yourself points for being better than it.
A non-utilitarian who is a good person hates all of your examples also.
"Being pro-gun-control sacrifices the right to bear arms for the greater good of fewer deaths; being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives to protect the right to bear arms."
I do get what you're saying (maybe?). But in terms of details, I don't think it's fair that you compare a means with an end, here. Being pro-gun-control seeks to prevent some suicides and accidental gun deaths. Rhetorically, gun control advocates seek primarily to prevent mass shootings, but from a utilitarian standpoint, mass shootings are a very small effect relative to others being discussed. Gun control potentially denies innocent people a means to defend themselves against aggression, both from their neighbors and from the government. If "a right to bear arms" was the sacred thing on one side then "a right for the government to control its citizenry" would be the thing it was balanced against or, perhaps, 'the need to prevent school shootings at the expense of all other harms.' If "reducing accidental gun deaths, mass shootings, and suicides" was the profane thing on one side then "self defense, hunting for sport and food, and a long-term hedge against tyranny" would be the profane thing on the other side.
I agree entirely that these disagreements involve trade offs, which was your point. But I'm skeptical that the people making the arguments are willing to acknowledge them as such, for rhetorical reasons. 2nd Amendment supporters are likely to disbelieve studies supporting gun control as biased, because they are engaged in a conflict. And I'm not sure how to categorize such low-key bad faith arguments. As you've mentioned in other writing, to try and steelman such self-delusional conflict-based arguments potentially distorts their nature. The Second Amendment seems basically like a Schelling Point for the pro-gun-ownership side.
I think most people who ick at Utilitarianism or Consequentialism as a general category are operating on the approximate moral principle of "anything that decreases the predictability of my environment is bad". This fits with all of the examples in the article, and also explains why in general people find deontologists more trustworthy than utilitarians.
That is to say, it's not so much that people expect utilitarians will do bad things, it's that figuring out the specific thing utilitarians will do is much harder than just assuming they will follow predetermined rules you can readily anticipate and account for.
Worse still, it is much less legible whether or not the things a purported utilitarian is doing are in fact intended for the greater good. A nefarious agent purporting to be a utilitarian has a lot more leeway for excusable behavior than one purporting to be a deontologist who has committed to a broadly agreed upon set of rules in advance.
How is it even possible to type the words "usual moral rule against inconveniencing people" without the words "this may be a reach" popping into your head?
Most if not all of the things in your first list of things you oppose have very plausible utilitarian objections, though. And in fact I hear the utilitarian objections way more frequently than the pure principal objections.
Like for censorship, yes I'm sure there are still some classical liberals or what have you who oppose censorship purely out of their commitment to a free society. But the more common objection is lack of trust in the people who would be doing the censoring, a fear that censorship will be used against them and people they care about in the future should it become normalized, and a strong historical track record of censorship being used to target legitimate dissent. All of which is entirely utilitarian-compatible.
Likewise when I hear people complaining about disruptive protests they're usually focused on the very concrete and direct harm that such protests do to people, up to and including causing deaths due to the delay of emergency services. They're not concerned with some abstract principal that prohibits inconveniencing people.
Utilitarianism has a bad reputation because utilitarianism defenders tend to really insist running around saying that "yes, you should be willing to kill someone to use their organs to save 5 people".
As for increasing the supply of organs, why not institute a policy of only people who check the organ donor box on their licenses are eligible to receive donated organs? For children who aren't yet old enough to drive, their parents checking the organ donor box would be enough.
I don't know what the "normal people" think, but I personally have two objections to actual real life utilitarians.
One is Moldbugian/Libertarian conviction that people who value the wellbeing of people far removed from them the same as their own children's (or the wellbeing of animals, or rocks), are extremely prone to doing harm. We are much better off when everyone cares for themselves and their own first and foremost but tries to not step on others' toes. This is just an observation but of course anyone could make up all sorts of explanations for it.
Second is that IRL utilitarians are prone to violating deontological norms for the thrill of it, in a reverse logic of "if what I'm doing is important then I should violate the norm", by violating the norm they affirm that they are important. See Eliezer Yudkowsky's suppression of Roko's Basilisk. Also, if Eliezer is in charge of building a Friendly AI, why wouldn't he make it a Basilisk? Why haven't you ever seen it discussed?
I can tell you what it looks like when compulsory education laws are not enforced and it's not exactly a thousand pro-social, productive flowers blooming. It's pretty much just loitering, assault, and the occasional carjacking for some kid and factory work for other kids.
Is some of this due to the fact that it's still illegal to not go to school, so you only get kids with not very in-control or invested parents (including migrants living with non-parents) doing it? Sure, but the in-control and invested parents already have the option of homeschooling, which is now easier than ever with online curricula, including that allow a lot of going at your own pace.
So, what kids are served well by ending compulsory schooling who are not served now by homeschooling/alternative school options? It's not the kid with parents who aren't on board with their non-public-school options, because even if the state isn't making you attend school, your parents still can. Kids who don't want to go to school with parents who don't really care one way or the other? I'll buy that some of those are kids who legitimately could create fine educational experiences for themselves. But really, how many?
I understand and basically agree. But unless your *reasons* for agreeing with Scott are not the same reasons that a consequentialist would use to be against them, then even if you have ancillary beliefs that are non-utilitarian, if those beliefs do not play a predominant role for why you agree with Scott, then they don't matter. Of course, you do say you have orthogonal reasons, but given the list I have a hard time seeing what an orthogonal reasons would look like for those cases that are not identical or nearly so to utilitarian ones (I'm on my phone, and it won't let me see the post while writing this). I would like to see such orthogonal reasons outlined for those specific cases!
I also feel like there is a trick being pulled, one very common among non-utilitarians: reductionism of utilitarianism. When I read JSMill, I don't see some mandate that utilitarianism ignore norms, or intergenerational bonds, or character as meaningful and important categories, quite the opposite.
I'm a syncretist about these things, I suppose, and so think that people spend too much effort finding as little common ground as possible. Since anti-utilitarianism is popular again, I feel prone to defend it a bit more.
Hm, I'm not utilitarian, and frequently argue against utilitarianism, but I agree with you on all of list 1 (there are plenty of non-utilitarian reasons for being against that), and most of list 2.
My position is a _little_ about the "ends justify the means" thing, but I can state it more clearly. For me, and I think most people (subconsciously or consciously), emotions and instincts are a more reliable source of identifying "good" than cognition, so we are (rightly) suspicious of anyone who seems to be trying to assign the job of being "good" primarily to cognition. Cognition can easily rationalize. It's too easy to make a set of assumptions and a reasonable-looking argument to justify virtually anything, and people do this all the time. Politicians have made a bad name for cognition. Morality is something much more obvious and more ancient than this. Good people are generous, kind, forgiving, curious, and honest/reliable. Not as descriptive of behaviors, but as personality traits and internal experiences. These things come first.
Many "ends justify the means" utilitarian arguments are very suspicious because they do not take into account the internal state and humanness of the actor. Someone might say "I'm going to get rich to donate to the poor". Frankly, I don't really believe someone who says this. Becoming rich and powerful is incredibly corrupting. Even if you are kind and generous now, I don't believe that you're very likely to become rich and powerful and stay kind and generous. Especially when becoming rich might require suspending giving stuff away in the immediate term. How I prefer to say "the ends don't justify the means" is "you can't burn your soul for fuel and expect to keep your heading".
See also "The Power Paradox" by Dacher Keltner. Machiavellians are not good at becoming powerful. Being powerful makes you Machiavellian.
Whether I'm anti-utilitarianism in _theory_, or I simply don't trust utilitarian thinking to encourage people to be good on average is both less clear, and a moot point.
> Shaming, insulting, and doxxing people on the “wrong side” of an issue. This violates the usual moral rule against bullying, to serve the supposed greater good of discouraging people from taking the “wrong side” of an issue.
There's something weird going on here. The usual moral rule is, very clearly, that you should shame and insult people who are on the wrong side of moral issues.
But I think you're right that modern American culture states a rule against bullying, or other analogous rules. You just aren't expected to believe in those rules; the cultural avowal of them is the equivalent of someone asking "How are you?" when they meet you, or of North Korea avowing that it is a Democratic People's Republic.
I remember reading a tvtropes page about Alfred Hitchcock famously having said that the audience [of a movie] has no morals, elaborating that you can easily get the audience to sympathize with a murderer.
And I think this is a confusion that it's important to avoid. The reason you can easily get movie audiences to sympathize with murderers is that murder, as depicted in the movie, doesn't violate their morals. You can't make the audience sympathize with whatever you want; you have to appeal to their morals.
But you also can't confuse what the audience says their morals are with what their morals actually are.
If you're wondering why so many people characterize utilitarianism as "being willing to do bad things for the greater good", and often with the "bad things" part in boldface all caps, then I think you have to consider the part where when utilitarians are asked to explain their moral philosophy, the go-to examples are various thought experiments where it is shown to be morally righteous to deliberately kill an innocent person. Or sometimes just to torture them, and then there's the one where rape is just fine if you do it perfectly. But hey, we're the hot new moral philosophy that tells you why it's OK to rape and torture and kill, whereas all the old and busted moral philosophies just tell people not to do that stuff.
I can see a utilitarian being willing to own the "correct" solution to the Trolley Problem and say that, yep, they're definitely going to kill that innocent fat guy because he is fat and in the right place at the right time for killing fat guys. But if you don't want people to look at you funny, maybe save those examples for the advanced class and come up with something less bloodthirsty for the 101 version or the initial pitch.
My beef with utilitarianism is that the objective function is plain wrong. Too many organisms are stuck too low on Maslow's pyramid to make interpersonal comparison of utility a good idea.
The benthamite objective is so crude that E/Acc counter-proposal against utilitiarian E/A to switch from maximizing pleasure to maximizing free energy looks like an improvement. One does not build a civilization by maximizing welfare in shrimp farms.
We know that there is so much we don't know that the objective needs to include heavy penalties (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penalty_method) on any coercion or distortion to incentives.
>repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality
Calculating things about morality is wrong not as in "morally wrong" but as in "2+2=5 is wrong", incorrect. It's not about repulsion but about no, it doesn't work.
A non-utilitarian position: let's solve issues on a concrete case by case basis.
Utilitarian: it won't do, making generalizations and calculations on a grander scale yields greater benefits.
A non-utilitarian: but oversimplified calculations on complex systems replete with self-reference is not easy, bound to be incorrect in the long term.
U: we can still give it our best.
NU: it's not not easy as in damn we need to write steps down, but as in three body problem.
Strawman-but-commited-utilitarian: now, let me tell you about those three bodies, see we draw some lines like this, and there ya go, tomorrow they'll be in roughly these positions.
U: we can still do good with this reasoning in some concrete generalized cases.
NU: yes, mosquito nets are likely fine.
SBCU: but seeing those benefits, can't we stick to the same principles in general and hope for the equally nice results?
Of course not.
Humans are in general not not reducible to numbers because they're sacred divine sparks* or whatever, but because they're self-aware, conscious, they have memory and agency. And when there's more then one involved, well, that's where we veer off into pure chaos theory, linear equations just won't do. Which precludes most of utilitarianism espoused online.
• - albeit plenty of those who do hold them as "sacred divine sparks" do so as a poetic shorthand for the self-aware, conscious etc etc stuff.
After reading many great posts here on utilitarism, I think deep utilitarism considering nth order effects is a good moral framework - but due to the uncertainty of said nth order effects, it seems that this leads to simpler heuristics - something close to virtue ethics, most of the time.
However, I think naïve, 1st order utilitarism is often used as argumentation in the real world. Consider the EA argument that charity money is most efficiently used where the marginal dollar saves most lives, leading to the investment i malaria bednets. This seems, at least superficially, to be a 1st order argument. Considering nth order effects, one might intuitively suspect that investing in infrastructure, energy production or education may look better.
These 1st order utilitarian calculations may be what people intuitivly react to when they oppose utilitarism, maybe rightly so.
You are not supporting things from the first list on utilitarian grounds, are you? Or do you literally turn off your utilitarinism while thinking about these questions?
вот результат моего опыта ковида, до и после его прихода меня совершенно не вдохновляет страна где я проживаю, мое сознание будто не вписывается ,такое ощущение ,что вокруг меня не та цивилизация
I think the biggest error here is the assumption that the Utility Function can be computed from some arbitrary "I know it all" belief...
A Utilitarian should use the scientific method to discern wether most of these policies are good or bad.
For example "Letting people get paid to donate their organs" has a myriad of possible ramifications...
Let some countries do it (or states, or counties, for example by restricting to only those domiciled there before the legislation passed) and make statistics about the life of donors and who received the organs.
The belief that we can a priori understand all the possible ramifications of such a policy is not warranted.
Personally I think overall such a policy would be bad for society but I would love to be proven wrong...
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality
Maybe, but it also might be because utilitarians are pretty bad at calculating things about morality. They tend to focus on the positives, and ignore the negatives. To use a recent example, cryptocurrency was supposed to usher in a new era of economic prosperity unconstrained by the old power structures, but in reality it just produced a new currency speculation market plus a whole bunch of new and exciting scams. But in fact utilitarians have a long history of mediocre successes and predictable failures, and on that basis trusting someone with your future just because he says "it's ok, I can multiply numbers" appears to be a bit reckless.
It's also possible that people are mathematicians who think your and philosophy's use of math is *extremely* dubious and there's little to no evidence of moral optimization having value beyond a certain satisficing threshold. Probably these people agree with a lot of your views from both lists, but question your methods, and think we should *all* admit high levels of back justified gut instinct.
But sure, focus on the easy critics who haven't examined their moral systems with regard to some questions you picked.
I let this message pass through two of Rumi's gates.
Edit: And I'm glad you're roundly and soundly being taken to task in the comments by a bunch of people who dislike or question the *quality of the utilitarian method*. Please, please take this as a learning and go back to *investigating* strong positions instead of *fighting against* weak ones. I miss 2015 Scott.
I love your writing, Scott, but this essay strikes me as underbaked. I also have strong utilitarian leanings, and I think you're a very insightful guy, a wonderful writer, and a terrific person, but I don't think this essay accomplishes much.
First, I think you're straw-manning the people who are uncomfortable with utilitarians. Yes, some people who don't like utilitarians think dumb things. So what? So do some utilitarians! You're smarter and more thoughtful than 9,999 people out of 10,000, so if you were a rules-based moralist, you would also reach good results, as many have. I'd be much more interested in seeing you steelman criticism of utilitarians first, then respond to that.
Second, there are whole books on these questions. I have so many objections, I don't even know where to start.
- Do people really think kids should go to school because they are following rules based morality instead of utilitarianism? I mean, if you said "I think the kids involved and society as a whole are worse off as a result of requiring kids to go to school," you think their answer would be "I agree, but let's make them go to school anyway because I have a moral belief that kids should go to school even if it harms them and leaves us all worse off?"
- I don't see anything in your essay that addresses how you factor the Omelas function into your moral schema. If someone has a different upper bound on the suffering that can be imposed on the losers for the sake of the winners, or acceptable distributions of suffering that result in overall gains, why are you right and they are wrong? What's your Omelas function and does it make you not a utilitarian?
- Does utilitarianism require that we obey the best mathematicians in determining what's right and wrong? If not, aren't we going to end up in some case where almost everyone argues that their moral structure is overall best for the world, but then we all argue that everyone else is reaching their conclusion wrong? You can accuse them of motivated reasoning (probably correctly), but my take is most moral rules people believe that the risk of harmful error from Peter Singer-esque reasoning outweighs the possible gains.
Yes, these are big questions, but that's why I don't think your essay gets very far. (Unless I don't get it, but I'm looking forward to "Best of the Comments on Less Utilitarian than Thou" for more detail.)
I agree that you are a lovely person and you identify as a utilitarian. But if that's the argument, then this could have been a tweet, and if there's more to it than that, I don't get it.
I ask because my perception of blocking traffic (often done by *getting a parade permit for your protest*) is that it's an inconvenience that does not damage to people or property, and if you cross off all protests where somebody can legitimately say "this inconveniences me as much as having to take an alternate route to work" then you're not left with, well, any that have ever accomplished anything.
Thanks Scott. I think it's key to clarify whether you apply calculate utility for specific cases, or for the rules. I'm sure there's some good terminology for this which I don't know. When you are against protestors blocking roads I'm guessing you don't calculate the utility of furthering their specific cause vs. the negative utility of blocking that specific road. Rather you weigh up the utility of allowing all kinds of protestors to block roads vs. the utility of having a law banning this.
I agree with the fact that Anti-Utilitarians tend to strawman Utilitarianism as "do evil for the greater good". But I think Scott sets up his own strawman for Anti-Utilitarians with the "math is taboo" assertion. I'm generally pro-Utilitarian, but there are good reasons to be skeptical of the mathematization of morality.
Internet pseuds love utilitarianism because it's easy to understand and seems to solve a problem while actually just kicking the can down the road. They reveal how little they actually know about the history of philosophy when they are completely unaware of things like the open question argument.
"Holding protests that block traffic, damage property, or harass people. These violate the usual moral rule against inconveniencing people, to serve the supposed greater good of raising awareness of a cause."
I'd have to strongly disagree on this one, some causes are simply too important to follow traffic laws. What possible alternative can you suggest for the powerless masses to effectively protest?
There is no meaningful alternative and with stupid laws protecting drivers rights to be workers and shoppers were designed and written, like anti-BDS laws for Israel only in American state governments, to curb protests and social change. It is inevitable those laws or 'norms' will be broken.
The purpose of the protest is to break them and disrupt commerce as that's one of the few things the elites care about. It is also very strange to combine property damage and harassment of regular people with the very different things of blocking traffic or protesting leaders who have chosen to be in public positions. Politicians promoting and enacting genocide should be shouted down and harassed in public and they should be put on trial and thrown in prison where they are guilty. Or in the case of the French revolution when starving crowd is told to eat cake when they do not have bread, they simply cut her head off. Since then the French have had zero problems from their 'royal' family. Now with an endless revolving door of endless psychopaths, there is no purpose in such a thing, so disrupting commerce is the new guillotine in our supposed democratic governments which routinely ignore 80% plus of the people's views for a ceasefire now. Or any of another hundred vital issues to the common people with 70% plus support which are 'politically impossible'.
When we look at the sit-ins and other mass protests from the Civil Rights Movement in the USA South and elsewhere against segregation, when we look at the stop work protests in the Indian liberation movement, when we look at the protests which led to the end of apartheid South Africa or the Vietnam 'war' protests. Nearly every effective mass movement has used this tactic to block traffic and to 'harass' public officials and other leaders in order to push their cause along with causing all sorts of other disruptions. Are you telling them not to have done these things? To go back in time and say 'yea yea, segregation bad, but seriously, get off the bridge and get out of that restaurant which will not server you for being black?' It sounds like you're saying that.
While angry mobs are real and can turn into destructive riots or block emergency vehicles at times (more often at an English football game than a peaceful protest), there are also agent provocateurs and other government and intelligence intervention in recent decades where a lot of the risk of violence and property damage comes from these kinds of incitement or small incidents of less than 0.5% of people at a protest which the corporate propagandist media fixate on. How many times was that mkultra asset, test subject, and cult leader let off of criminal charges before they put in him prison? Why was it on the day of Malcom X's assassination that the usually ubiquitous police presence at every single on of his events was absent? Such as the tiny handful of a few hundred people who largely peacefully spilled into the capital building on Jan 6 out of well over 500,000 people there that day. All while FBI and other agents or assets are on camera shouting to incite people to go into the building, you can watch the footage. All of whom somehow don't get charged or walk away with zero prison time, while dumb rubes who stumbled into the lobby have gone to prison. Piles of expensive bricks left out unattended in New York just before a protest while normally you'd never see any construction material left out, locked up behind high fences.
Regardless, this doesn't seem like a viable position to be against all disruptive protests all the time for all causes.. No justice, no peace. Shut it down, and other similar sentiments have been one of the only tools common people have had and have effectively used to bring about change. The simple fact that enough people disagree with something strongly enough to put their bodies and time into such a protest in a free society means they should be able to do so. I know of many environmental protest which only succeeded due to such protest of people chaining themselves to trees or up on 3-pole death platforms where removing one poll causes the person to fall to their death. It worked and many forests still stand due to such protests. Such anti-protest laws only benefit the elite to pursue more crimes and war crimes against commoners and our collective environment.
If you feel this way about traffic laws, then I'd wonder how you feel about unions stopping work for safer conditions or fair wages?
Not that it matters and people will simply not listen to or look to you for leadership on this issue of effective protest movements both historically and now. Those who march against the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank because they live, suffer, and die under a brutal expansionist apartheid Israeli military law and bombardment are not particularly interested in such anti-protest laws to muzzle them. All while the elite profit from arms sales for bombs dropped on women and children who live in a concentration camp turned death camp.
But if someone were to listen to your love of western traffic laws, what alternatives would you suggest people take to stop what they perceive as a genocide and new holocaust? What is the correct response to a holocaust as we watch things like the Flour Massacre gunning down intentionally starving people trying to get food from a limited entry aid truck? While psychopaths run a festival to block the aid trucks with bouncy castles and cotton candy? Not that the IOF was letting aid trucks of food in before that insane genocide festival. Should we be meekly and quietly marching on a weekend and being ignored by the media who love to lie about the numbers of protesters present and what they are saying and doing? What more effective altruistic action would you propose to stop or at least protest a genocide?
What should we do when there is a new Mai Lai massacre, or more than one, happening every single day in Gaza for 150 days now? We can't all have Aaron Bushnell's moral conviction to set ourselves on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in DC. Or Thich Quang Duc who did so against the genocide in Vietnam where the USA relentlessly blew up hospitals, villages, and killed civilians on purpose with horrific war crime napalm and land mines which are still a danger 50 years later. Such enlightened moral capacity is exceptionally rare to self immolate. Sadly the war criminals seem to rise up in abundance.
If we are to care about the free flow of traffic or emergency services, what until I tell you about the 650 internal checkpoints in the West Bank which are an illegal occupation under international law. They routinely block and slow emergency vehicle son purpose so that people will die. Or about all the ambulances in Gaza which were blown up, along with their associated hospitals. Talk about a problem of a protest causing disruptions.
Those protest happen to be from the Israeli military, but I'm betting there are all sorts of principles of traffic law which you'd be upset about. I look forward to your essay on this problem of military disruption of traffic in occupied Palestine. Their military leader said no food, no fuel, no water...but he also has a no traffic issue and blocks thousands of aid trucks from getting in.
I'm curious where the "guns cause deaths" association came from. I've haven't seen that the number of gun owners is correlated with the number of murders.
If you're talking about gun-related accidents, I acknowledge that they exist-- but should we ban everything that has the potential to kill?
hey scott — looks like your link on “repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality” is broken.
Yeah funny. I’ve written about a hundred articles defending utilitarianism and yet I find myself less willing to support those things than is typical. Weird.
I'm one of the critics who strongly rejects utilitarianism and consequentialism –– and I'm also pretty strongly against the list of things you list as things you're against. I think they're bad ideas for reasons mostly orthogonal to utilitarianism, so I don't think this list really gets at anything about utilitarianism.
You are mostly like me, except I do not agree that giving kids the choice whether or not to go to school is any better than giving them the choice to run out into traffic, play with sharp objects, or not brush their teeth. The fact that the harm of not going to school is distant doesn’t factor.
The distinction between “moral rule” and “greater good” seems quite arbitrary here.
One could say that the “moral rule” is that lies are bad, and that free speech is merely a utilitarian justification for allowing lies.
I don’t know if there’s a “moral rule” against removing people from places for 7 hours a day. “Forcible separation” sounds like a bit of a stretch—the connotation of forced separation implies significantly longer separation.
One could have a moral rule that says “don’t knowingly incite mobs to kill Asians”—but view wipe spread dissemination of truth about COVID a necessary measure to advance society.
One could believe that there is a moral obligation to protest through the most visible means—irrespective of effectiveness—but decide not to annoy some people for fear of consequences.
I think you may be rather more charitable here than necessary or perhaps defensible. People largely like in-group causes and dislike out-group causes. Thinking seriously about the pros and cons weakens the sense of innate rightness on our side. Scott we're clearly facing inhuman barbarians here, we don't need any bean-counting to dtermine our rectitude in the face of such evil.
When this guy: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs-dust-specks
Is one your movement’s most recognizable spokesmen, it’s hardly surprising people are repulsed.
Man I just don’t get the thing about school.
What about killing everyone who wants to do the things you consider bad? How utilitarian can one really be if one is not willing to drown this world in blood to create a better one?
"These all seem like bright-line cases of violating a sacred principle for the greater good, but for some reason the people worried about “utilitarianism” and “the greater good” never talk about them."
What? People who worry about utilitarianism do talk about those exact things, all the time. They're all incredibly common libertarian/classical liberal talking points, and often espoused by deontological libertarians and classical liberals whose opposition to the state is rooted in an opposition to utilitarianism in general.
Non-consequentialists don't see "utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good". That's a utilitarian framing of the issue. The very concept of a "greater" good, as if you could measure or compare or do math with goodness, is the problem to begin with.
When the people you don't like want to censor speech or cancel people or whatever, they don't frame that mentally as performing a lesser evil in service of a greater good, unless they have consequentialist leanings to begin with. The censoring or cancelling are acts that are good in themselves. Or they evince certain personal virtues that are good in themselves. There is no justification in terms of future good that might result from present evil, as if we could predict future consequences or that they are even relevant to moral choices! The act in itself, or the personal qualities that lead to the act in themselves, should be judged by itself.
So when you look at people that accuse utilitarians of thinking as if you can perform lesser evils in service of greater good, and then respond by thinking of the lesser evils they do in service of greater goods, you're not refuting them. You're doing exactly what they are accusing you of, what they find problematic.
Side question. I'm curious as to whether your opposition to mandatory public schooling is entirely because it's mandatory or in part due to you thinking it's actively bad for kids or a waste of time at best?
Why are so many otherwise intelligent people so hung up about ideological consistency? Why do they put themselves in a box, stressing over whether there is something wrong if they or someone else believes that some policy or action or thought doesn't conform to a construct of belief that results in the best outcome for the most people or results in a bad outcome for some people or doesn't lead to equality or helps some at the expense of others or reflects conservative values (whatever they are this day, "am I supposed to for free trade or protectionism) or progressive ones (are Jews the oppressors or the oppressed). It seems to me that this preoccupation with ideology, is just a way to be intellectually lazy and avoid having to struggle with the reality that in the end the world is messy, there is no one compass you can rely upon, you just have to fight your way through conflicting values and make the best judgment you can, understanding that actions have consequences, that someone comes out ahead and someone does not and that no matter what we decide now, we may never know or only know in hindsight whether it was the right thing to do.
I don't think restricting free speech is actually a "bad thing" in the relevant sense. If you punish a mob boss for ordering his subordinates to commit a robbery, is that "doing a bad thing for the greater good"? What's innately evil is violently suppressing the truth. (Actually, even this is probably insufficiently nuanced -- I think it's fine to punish someone for leaking classified information to a wartime enemy, for example -- but trying to develop a fully-worked-out model of the moral principle that free speech proxies would probably take too long to fit in a blog comment.) So, in theory, enforcing laws against misinformation doesn't require doing any evil. In practice, we shouldn't do this because the risks of trusting the state to judge what is misinformation are too high to be worth it, but that's not a deontological argument.
I'd suggest it's because the small scale individualist utilitarianism you describe invariably ends up eroding the laws and regulations put in place to protect "ordinary people" from the invasive governmental strong-arm do-as-your-told form of utilitarianism.
I think people are ok with doing bad things to achieve greater good, as long as it is done as part of a rule they know to be a predictable part of social contract. Conversely, people oppose to the meta-rule which would let individuals make on the spot, subjective, utilitarian judgements, because that's unpredictable and might lead to constant fear. I'd be afraid to get into a taxi in a society in which it would be ok for the driver to make a decision to sacrifice me for a greater good based on their view of values.
I think normative and consequential approach converge once you start taking second (third, nth) orders into account. An action is only achieving a greater good, if a society which adopted it as a rule would be nicer.
But this is difficult, as it requires careful consideration of all pros and cons by various members of society, some precomitment, enforcement, and becomes undistinguishable from democratic process of establishing norms.
On the other hand I'm generally anti-utilitarianism but it's hard to find actual real-world scenarios in which I'd actively _disagree_ with utilitarianism. My disagreements with utilitarianism are either pretty abstract (utility can't be computed in practice and therefore can't be maximised in practice) or only occur in hypothetical philosophical situations, not real ones.
I think most anti-utilitarians have this in common; you won't often find someone who explicitly says "it's right to do X, even though doing Y would make the world a better place". Non-utilitarians will usually have an argument why the thing that they propose doing for un-utilitarian reasons also just happens to be the utilitarianally optimal thing anyway.
My guess? This is less about you (Scott) than your comments section, but in the space here, the general vibe often seems to be "ethics as sport," ie "let's play out any argument no matter how many common taboos we are contemplating violating because we understand this is all part of a game we are playing to arrive at some kind of deeper consensus or understanding of principals or common notions or whatever." Which yes, gives people the vibe that this is a space where people think anything is at least theoretically permittable. To most people, ethics is more like war, you don't suggest arguments unless you are laying the groundwork for an attack. So the sentence "the most cogent argument I can think of for eating babies" will make most people think you are trying to legitimately justify the eating of babies, not that you are conducting rationality katas or whatever the fuck people think they are doing around here.
This, btw, is why in most spaces if people discuss morality at all, they spend half the time virtue signaling, when everybody knows what tribe you belong to, it allows you to make hypothetical arguments without anyone thinking you are trying to secretly incept outcomes that run counter to the groups common moral code. But with utilitarians (or at least, internet rationalist-utilitarians), the highest common goal of the tribe is "let's discuss anything and everything in the most rational light possible, no matter how uncomfortable," and thus the only virtue signaling you get is people racing to show how adept they are at justifying absolute horror that they don't even really believe in, just to prove they are capable of the exercise.
I think the anti-utilitarians come in various flavors.
1. The Nate Silver flavor: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1742636333624107121 of doing-bad-things-has-good-result-and-don't-worry-about-indirect-consequences. This is, by far, the most common. This is attacking a very naive utilitarianism that doesn't exist in a serious way.
2. The I-need-a-philosophy-job flavor. I have a friend who is a philosophy professor; I don't want to degrade the entire profession. But the absolutely awful critiques I've been reading for decades persist. (Some critiques require work and there are hard problems. But man, so many are just bad. In college, I read a textbook that explained that utilitarianism was wrong because if you ate Corn Chex instead of Wheat Chex and you would have liked the Wheat Chex better you had acted immorally and obviously that defeated utilitarianism. I made up the names of the cereals, but not the argument.)
3. As you observe, the math-is-bad flavor. These folks seem to be wrong, and uninterestingly so.
I would note - as I think our host has - that deontologists seem to do better at utilitarianism than utilitarians, primarily because rule-following generally works well. I do think in practice given our human limitations, rule-following is a good default heuristic. And maybe I'm wrong about all of this.
But I don't think I am.
Utilitarianism and Consequentialism are not the same things. You can be a non-Utilitarian and a Consequentialist, and you can be a Utilitarian without being a Consequentialist, despite what professional moron and evil person, Peter Singer, might say in a cited paper.
You are a Utilitarian because you're a Utilitarian. You've self described this way, you've wrote about how you think this is the only theory of ethics that even tries to "solve the problem", you've strenuously defended the position in the past, and you frequently talk about other moral theories in such ways as to suggest you are incapable of understanding alternate positions in the first place. This isn't an insult, you've admitted this in previous blogs, including ones specifically about things missing from one's awareness.
This post is itself is an example, since I have no idea who these people are who are pro the first list, but against the second. Don't worry, I'm against both lists, because the first list is obviously bad, and for the second list, I'm forced to fill in the blanks of what you actually mean by your own personal actions, to which I am against.
"So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?"
I think utilitarians are uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and also utilitarians are very likely to accept everything in that first list. To be sure, it's completely possible to be a utilitarian and reject the first list, but I notice most self described utilitarians have no understanding of anything, whether they be blog authors or Peter Singer, so I would be really surprised to see an example that I believed. We might point to Peter Singer especially as the most obviously willing-to-do-evil Utilitarian, somebody who clearly doesn't understand anything, and, due to prominence, a large chunk of why Utilitarianism gets a bad rap from normal people who are just into politics and not philosophy.
But ignoring the reason from mere prominent individual, I think your confusion is based on, once again, an inability to understand the alternatives.
In itself, "calculating lives" is not utilitarianism, nor consequentialist. Nobody cares about that. What is utilitarianism is the part where you say that the calculation is the crux of the "science" of ethics, and the consequentilist part is where you say the nature of the outcome-as-outcome is the most important and/or primary factor in determining what to do.
Somebody like great hero Achilles might take both the calculation of lives, and the consequences of the action as important in a moral judgement, for example "we must kill as many of the enemy as possible." But great hero Achilles is a virtue ethicist, and so the consequences-in-themselves are not the marker, but rather how they conform to the virtues necessary for heroism, such as bravery, piety, martial prowess, leadership, and so on, is the marker. The calculation of lives or their maximisation is not the primary motive, but rather, these are the extension of what it means to create victory, which in this case is heroic.
But IF Achilles was a utilitarian consequentialist in the mould of most internet utilitarians, or Peter Singer, we might decide to maximise the deaths of our enemies and lives of our friends. But we need to realise that all animals are equal and infanticide is fine, also we need to be long thinkers and consider future enemies and friends. In conclusion, utilitarianism is a mathematical attractor for the annihilation of all life in the universe. Absolutely perfect for people obsessed with AI, people who think everything can and should be put under the label of "science", and other such Moloch worshippers.
As a non-utilitarian, I too am against the things you are against in your first list.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math). If you do this, sometimes people will look for a legible explanation for their discomfort, and they’ll seize on “doing an evil thing for the greater good” - even if the thing isn’t especially evil, trying to achieve a greater good at all seems like a near occasion of sin.
I get your point. But my problem with utilitarianism isn’t about mixing human lives with math, but rather that utilitarianism ignores natural rights of individuals, in favor of third party (often the government or its “experts”) calculations for large group of people. These third parties do not know how their calculations or policies are going to affect people they meant to affect, they can never calculate it with the perfect information, information only individuals themselves possess. Me knowing what I know about myself, can use math all I want to calculate what’s good for me and test them out in the real world, but I would not think I can/should do it for other people. There are two problems with “Doing an evil thing for the greater good”: 1) the “evil things” sometimes violates individual’s natural rights. 2) there is no such thing as the greater good. What’s good for me might not be good for you. Everyone’s so different in terms of believes, personality, individual circumstances at any given time. The best one to decide what’s good for a person is a person himself. Not an outside calculation with imperfect information and the goal to maximize group interest.
I think most greater good arguments are slippery slopes. And yet I am comfortable with the caveat you have, even though I am a deontologist. Man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing animal, which is what scares me about the whole consequentialist attitude.
I have a pet theory that humans evolved a distrust of anyone relying heavily on system 2 for their decisions because system 2 is better at deception than system 1. (Not everyone using system 2 is an evil mastermind, but every evil mastermind is using system 2.)
Honestly, it doesn't seem like you're a utilitarian or a consequentialist. You don't seem to have any coherent moral philosophy at all. Which is fine, because no one does. Everyone just does what makes them feel good. It's not any more complicated than that.
I think most people are deontologists, even if they don't realize it, even if they're atheists. They have specific commandments that demand specific actions, and also a (sometimes quite crude) framework for dealing with conflicts between commandments. Sometimes the framework involves utilitarianism, but other times it involves a hierarchy. And they view it as a hostile and profane act for someone else to come in and start homogenizing their sacred commandments with math.
Just as people don't like putting prices on sacred things (such as a mother's love, or clean air), because that transforms them into secular things which can be traded in the market. Money is market is economics is math, and once you start denominating your virtue in numbers, you've lost touch with the Source.
Now anyone more clever than you can throw some numbers at you and make you do whatever they want.
(Who argues for utilitarianism? Clever people.)
I suggest set her free.
It seems we really like punishing self-awareness.
"I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality" -- Yes, this.
Utilitarians, and people who are against utilitarianism, may both say "the ends justify the means," but they mean it differently. A utilitarian would mean that the action has expected positive net utility. An anti-utilitarian would typically mean that the ends are /permanent/, while the means are /temporary/.
I'm only slightly over-generalizing when I say that there are two types of people: people who think of reality as a state, and change as discrete transitions between states; and people who think of reality as a continuous dynamic system. People who model change in the world with state transitions don't count the cost of the path from here to there, because there is no path. The in-between part literally doesn't exist for them; it doesn't count in their (subconscious) utility function. And people who model the world with state transitions, believe that states are stable, and actions are initiated only by agents; so if you achieve a new state, you'll remain in that state until someone instigates some other revolutionary state transition. The new, more-perfect state will be permanent, unless you failed to eliminate all the evil people who would try to change it. So it's the only thing that counts.
The state-based model of reality is part of a larger system of metaphysics and ethics, that found in Plato, Christianity, Marxism, and the Social Justice Movement, which believes that the morality of actions can be certain, and forbids the use of numeric calculations in ethics in order to guarantee certainty. Where there are measurements, there are errors; where values of different goods are compared, there are disagreements. So for instance Marx didn't adopt the labor theory of value because it makes sense--it doesn't--but because it provides an objective measure of value that everyone can agree on. Modeling reality as a continuous dynamic system would require measuring all sorts of things, including how long an incentive must be applied before society reaches its new, more-perfect state. This kind of ethical system refuses to measure, so it just ignores that part of the calculation.
Ethical systems of this type usually avoid using numeric values at all by making ethical valuations ordinal (position in a sequence), not cardinal (an independent numeric measure). An ethical rule of lower ordinality (coming earlier in the sequence) always takes precedence over a rule of higher ordinality (later in the sequence). This is why SJWs think it makes sense to say "first we will eliminate all racism; next we will eliminate global warming; next we will eliminate homelessness." It is immoral under these systems to give anyone a tax break while one person is still homeless. In fact, these systems simply provide no way to think ethically about taxation--taxation is numeric, and can't be integrated with or connected to their system of ethics.
These systems still come into irreconcilable conflicts when they must rank a high-priority rule applied to a low-priority object (eg "do not hurt chickens") against a low-priority rule applied to a high-priority objects (eg "feed humans enough protein").
Scott, I'm curious how you as a utilitarian make up your mind on issues like the above.
When faced with a particular disruptive protest, do you sit down and calculate all possible outcomes, their relative probability, assign a utility value to each, and make up your mind based on that?
Or do you fall back on some general sorts of principles like "it's wrong to inconvenience people even if you think it's for a good cause" and "this sort of thing is generally counterproductive anyway"?
I suspect it's closer to the latter than to the former, in which case are you _really_ being a utilitarian, or are you just following the same sort of heuristic-based morality that a non-utilitarian would?
"trying to play down concerns about COVID because that might incite mobs to attack Chinese people. This violates the usual moral rule against deception to serve the supposed greater good of preventing the panic."
Not quite a fair description-- individuals really were attacking Chinese people randomly.
I tend to agree with your positions here, but I think what people are getting at when they describe your positions as more utilitarian is that they exhibit certain tendencies common in utilitarianism, namely focusing on legible, quantifiable, localized, easy-to-calculate/predict harms/benefits over illegible, unquantifiable, diffuse, difficult-to-calculate/predict harms/benefits. Now, I'm not entirely against that tendency, but I think it is a genuine hurdle to deal with when trying to reason consequentially, and I think the list of issues you posted on each side very clearly falls into this dichotomy, with the first list generally involving a localized harm for a diffuse benefit, and the latter list involving a localized benefit for (perhaps) a diffuse harm
I’m confused by what statements like “forcably separating children from their families” are meant to imply. It seems like some real concerns about schooling have been turned into abstract principles that don’t make a lot of sense once I think about them more.
For one thing, it sounds like something done without parents’ consent. That seems rare? It seems like parents, at least, have choices, since private and home-schooling exist? In practice, this “family separation” is typically parents making their children go to school.
If parents decide that, all things considered, their local public school is pretty good, characterizing it as an unusual form of coercion seems wrong. It doesn’t seem different from parents making many other decisions they make for their kids. Is sending the kids off to summer camp wrong too?
It seems like the answer is always going to be “it depends,” but typically parents are given pretty wide latitude when deciding what’s best for their kids.
Also, most parents work and need someone else to take care of the kids while they work, because many jobs are incompatible with babysitting. So isn’t this “forceable separation” really due to the necessity of working to make a living?
And as to “confining them in a space that they’re not allowed to leave” - isn’t that the state of all children? At young ages there are physical limits (playpen, barriers). Later, parents will watch over their kids or make rules that they need to follow. It’s not like they can live where they wish and go where they please.
Maybe there’s some better way of describing what’s wrong and what needs to change.
I am also from time to time described as a utilitarian. The relevant entry in the index of my first book is "Utilitarian, why I am not a."
I think this footnote is a bit disingenuous to the pro-gun side:
> being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives to protect the right to bear arms.
I think a more correct description of their position would be:
> being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives today to protect against tyranny in the future.
This is definitely a utilitarian argument (lives today for lives in the future), but it isn't just sacrificing lives for the sake of being able to own a gun.
This part did catch my attention:
> Shaming, insulting, and doxxing people on the “wrong side” of an issue. This violates the usual moral rule against bullying to serve the supposed greater good of discouraging people from taking the “wrong side” of an issue.
...That is not a "usual" moral rule. As far as I can see, very few people have any issue with telling others that their opinions are bad and that they should feel bad. This is just a case of your values being non-standard.
All the things you list as reasons people call you utilitarian just seem like very normal political views lots of people have. I guess I find it unlikely this is really why people consider you a utilitarian? Isn't it more likely you get called a utilitarian for beliefs you have that are rare among non-utilitarian, like (just to take a random example I remember) that the math shows eating beef is morally better than eating chicken?
Somehow I just know selling organs is going to lead to the same outcome as we currently have with home mortgages. Where older people already own all the land you need to exist, and many young people will be pressured into selling their health to let an elderly citizen live a bit longer, just so that they can get a rung into the property ladder to have a stable roof over their head. Then the ones that make it to old age, will repeat the cycle, harvesting young peoples' organs to live another few years.
Hi, Scott. Congrats on your (relatively recent) paternity.
Myself, I have a deep-seated dislike for Utilitarianism, and I'd attribute it to a pendulum swing - I was a committed Marxist when young, and I've grown to loathe any discourse of ends-justify-means EVER. That, indeed, is my greatest gripe.
I don't think I have an aversion to 'calculating things', but I frame things like paid organ-donation as the starting/facilitating step to a Greater Evil that will plausibly follow, meaning I would fight from getting started in the first place. I also have a Kantian dislike for lying that makes me extremely prone to a similar unwillingness to any trade-offs in this regard.
Another thing that irks me about Utilitarianism (just one more, as I could go on forever) is its disregard for individuals as such. Natural and inviolable rights might be a social construction, but building them as axioms that should never be broken is less prone to the typical bad tampering of "Benevolent" others.
comply with how some would have them live. Respect personal choice as a “universal” for all. To site just two examples, instead of the majical “sacred rule” nonsense try the fundamental right to defend oneself, or the right to use and dispose of one’s own body as personally chosen. There are good counter arguments for every position you’ve selected where coercion is chosen as a means to some end.
1) People with more deontological intuitions and preferences are seen as more trustworthy and preferable than consequentialists (even by people who report having consequentialist intuitions!), and this seems attributable to their being perceived to be more reliable and thus predictable - the preference swaps when you frame the consequentialists as more behaviourally consistent. Though consequentialists reliably do whatever produces the best consequences, since what counts as best varies with context, this makes them seem unreliable (Everett et al., 2016; Turpin et al., 2021). Is this just an evolutionary hang up, or something that's still relevant? I think the latter, because...
2) It seems conspicuous that the first group of things Scott endorses are 'norms that are already largely operative in society' (don't ban speech, don't harass, don't lie, don't shame) while the second are proposed changes to the current status quo with mostly untested consequences (New drugs, new gene editing, sell your organs. Note the main exception to the first category, getting rid of traditonal schooling, seems like more of a break from what's come before). Although utilitarians care about 'the greater good' they also really care about stable cooperation and coordination, which relies on people internalising norms and upholding them mostly unquestioningly. I'm nowhere near the first to say this, but there's a very plausible case to be made that once we're at the level of deciding which norms we want people to internalise for the long haul, the first category are the ones utilitarians would want people to land on (rather than 'attempt to maximise utility'), and this is going to require being disposed towards not breaking them even when it really seems like doing so would produce better consequences.
Let me try this again. I have a better approach that doesn’t pretend to know best as to how others should live, nor fails to mention other arguments for positions than those you’ve mentioned. Try thinking about morality in terms of not using force to have others comply with how some would have them live. Respect personal choice as a “universal” for all. To site just two examples, instead of the magical “sacred rule” nonsense, try the fundamental right to defend oneself, or the right to use and dispose of one’s own body as personally chosen. There are good counter arguments for every position you’ve selected where coercion is chosen as a means to some end.
This post sounds a bit 'Less Normal People Than Thou '?
This is a great post. Thanks for writing. Are parents actually legally prohibited from home schooling their kids in the US??
I don't really follow the argument here. You agree that you are utilitarian (or at least that that is a "fair descriptor"). I'm confident that you believe the utilitarian calculus supports your favoured policy in each of the examples you give (and I mostly agree with you). Therefore somebody who supported the opposed policies on utilitarian grounds would simply be empirically mistaken. But since you've given them as examples of "things many non-utilitarians believe are okay", they presumably support them on non-utilitarian grounds.
Supporting, on non-utilitarian grounds, policies which offend against the utilitarian calculus doesn't make someone a stealth utilitarian.
Scott,
The simplest explanation for why people do not see the items you listed as true exceptions to the usual morals, is that they do not really believe in rules like (I will use the verbiage they might adopt) freedom of platform use for Nazi recruitment drives, letting weirdos make their children as crazy as they are, telling people the truth when you think they'll do something stupid as a response to it, never interrupting the complacency of the public even when they are ignoring something awful, or setting aside a practice that has defined who is "in" and who is "out" for most of their childhood, right when it looks like the wrong people have managed to get "in."
In fact, I think it's been rather broadly advertised that, among a certain milieu, freedom of speech in particular is no longer a sacred principle. The question on their minds: would you violate their ("the") principles for the greater good? Conversationally, "your" principles are a stand-in for their principles.
When people here are talking about utilitarianism or ethics in general, I am never sure if they are talking about utilitarianism just being true or false, or about it being the nicest system for our civilization to use.
If you are a serious moral realist, you just think a certain morality is true. This could mean a moral rule really exists somewhere in the universe, or, as I find more plausible, people in different states of the world are somehow comparable. So one can say that Pete is objectively better off in World A as compared to World B. All else being equal, world A is better than world B.
If one believes utilitarianism is true in this sense, it really just doesn't matter what our intuitions are or whether people often abuse utilitarianism for governmental overreach that causes greater harm. Utilitarianism would just literally be the correct framework in which one can decide whether a person, or a group of people, is better or worse off in World A or B. A moral system would just be true, like the laws of nature.
The other common viewpoint is that it doesn't make sense for the universe to contain ethics, which is an extremely good counterargument. But in that world, why are we even talking about ethics? Clearly, we all want to be happy, and most of us also want civilization to be well off, not oppressive, and so on, but why? If ethics is just made up by evolution to improve cooperation, why care about it?
I remember one Less Wrong comment about which open philosophical questions one has strong opinions on that went something like this:
"1. Clearly, moral realism is false and antirealism is correct.
2. Clearly, utilitarianism is the best moral system."
To me, this sounds like saying, "Clearly, physics isn't actually real and an illusion; also, clearly, Einstein was right about everything."
I think there are only 2 options:
1. either we live in a universe that somehow contains moral rules (probably utilitarian ones), or
2. there are no rules, and the world is just nihilistic.
Either it is actually bad if random people you don't know suffer, because suffering is just objectively bad. Or it just doesn't matter if people suffer; it's just atoms behaving in a certain way.
I suspect people find option 1. to be too woo and unscientific, but option 2. is too cruel and unhuman, so they pretend we can do ethics even in an only-atoms, no-rules world.
If anything, people should make it clear if they are talking about realist or antirealist ethics. If you are talking about realist ethics, saying something leads to bad decision-making, government overreach, people can't think about second-order consequences—all just aren't arguments. It would be like saying chemistry isn't real because it would allow people to make bombs.
However, if we are talking about anti-realist ethics, those might all be good arguments.
>being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives to protect the right to bear arms
Citation needed. So far as I know, there's no established causation of more guns among the populace -> more deaths. America is of course an obvious outlier in its death-by-gunshot rate, but it's not the only country where people have plenty of legal guns, and those others don't seem to have the same problem.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality
Well I read a whole lot of supposedly scientific papers that try to calculate the impact of "misinformation" and other ideological content using statistical models, so I'm not sure about that. COVID response was a disaster partly because it consisted of imposing authoritarian decisions using justifications based in pseudo-scientific calculations.
Now that wasn't utilitarianism, because any actual properly done calculations showed that the cost/benefit tradeoff of basically everything done back then was insanely awful. But it looked like utilitarianism and that seemed to reassure people. So I don't know.
Here's my indefensible take: Dostoyevsky said that if torturing a single child to death would give the entire world eternal health and happiness, it would still be wrong to do. I think he was saying that caring about the wellbeing of others only happens if your thinking is sort of the opposite of utilitarian reasoning -- when it is done out of that feeling of compassion and indignation that arises when you are deeply moved by someone's suffering.
Most of the time I am not paying much attention to people I do not know. I am a car and they are traffic. Go do your thing, other people. Whatever. I am not thinking about whether they are suffering, and if it the possibility does happen to cross my mind, I am not distressed and soon move on to thinking about other things. ( I doubt that I am terribly unusual in all this.). But now and then it's like a spark jumps from some stranger's situation into my imagination, and suddenly I care a lot about what's happening to them, and will put a lot of effort into helping. So my problem with utilitarianism is that it just is not very motivating. There are no sparks. Appeals to emotion are avoided, and that makes sense if you want people to give the most help where it will do the most good, rather than in the situation that happens to give them a great feeling of emotional involvement. I totally get it that it will not work to just broadcast information about people in trouble, and hope some random person is moved by the situation of the random person in trouble and coughs up some help. It's stupid as fuck. But I think people's objection to being logical and mathematical about how and where to help is not that it mixes the sacred, compassion, with the meaningless, numbers. I think the root objection is that it's hard to get enthusiastic about utilitarian-generated projects..
On the other hand, I found out recently that a high-rise apartment building with some rent-subsidized units may be put up in the pretty little neighborhood where my office is, and displace some pricey little boutiques and charming little coffee shops. Also it will reduce the property value of the lovely home of a colleague of mine who lives right next to the street of charming little thingies. She asked me to join in the effort to keep the high-rise out of "our" neighborhood, and plunk it in the one tiny ratty area in our upper middle class town, and I declined. Said I didn't know enough about the situation to judge whether it was fairer to trash our area than the other one, and I didn't want to protest out of simple self-interest.. So I guess I'm not impervious to considerations of fairness and maximizing benefit.
I find this post a bit baffling. Partly this is because I don't recognize the discourse it's criticizing. It's not ordinary back and forth about politics, because that discussion isn't at a level of moral generality where people are throwing accusations around "utilitarianism". It's not more academic or philosophical discussion about utilitarianism, because in those discussions skepticism about deception, restrictions on free speech, and so on are more closely associated with nonconsequentialist views than consequentialist ones, and it's just false that "the people worried about “utilitarianism” and “the greater good” never talk about them."
So regarding the core question:
"why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?"
I'm not sure "people" (which people? The hoi polloi? The people who argue about moral theories?) really do think that.
But suppose for the sake of argument I was such a person - someone who really is mad at utilitarians for doing evil for a greater good but accepted the reasoning in favor of the "normal" politics Scott mentions. Am I being inconsistent? No, because I think it can in most cases be plausibly denied either that the given policy genuinely violates the "usual moral rule" or that the "usual moral rule" provides strong genuine nonconsequentialist reasons. For example, if you independently think that shaming people for X is wrong, then of course it's going to look a lot like "bullying" and you're going to think it violates the "usual rule against bullying". But if you think people deserve to be shamed for X, then there's a relevant difference between shaming people for X and paradigmatic examples of bullying. And so people who support shaming people for X won't say that this is a case where bullying is justified by the consequences - they'll say it's not bullying. And if you force them to say that it's bullying, they'll say that the real moral rule is "no undeserved bullying" not "no bullying".
So there's nothing inconsistent about thinking that shaming people for X is justified by the consequences, but that other sorts of things the utilitarian is committed to sanctioning are genuine evils.
None of this is to say that the way actual people reason about this is rational. I think people will tend to latch on to basically whatever kind of reasoning available to them to justify their preexisting beliefs. So the people who antecedently like policy X will think it has good consequences and also, conveniently, that those policies won't interfere with any genuine nonconsequentialist constraints. And the people who antecedently don't like policy X will think that it is objectionably doing evil for a greater good and also, conveniently, that it's not really a greater good if you think about it. And libertarianish rationalist utilitarians who are predisposed to be against restrictions on free speech but can't appeal to nonconsequentialist constraints will of course find the math conveniently works out against those restrictions (or do some rule-y backflips).
You sound kind of like a libertarian, particularly back in the 90s and 2000s when they were more emphatically pro-gay rights. (Not that they're against them per se these days, just that it seems to be more of a peripheral 'red tribe' affiliation when it used to be more of a 'neither left not right' thing.) Which isn't really a bad thing IMHO, just pointing out your politics may be more about tribal affiliation (Gray Tribe?) and gravitating to the most comfortable laundry list of positions than you'd like to think. Like everyone else in the world, really. ;)
I'm not immune--I just never found a tribe I liked.
We ethical consequentialists are deeply aware of the large role played by status quo bias in many common objections. We're alleged to be monsters for believing that one electrocuted repairman is an acceptable tradeoff for the dispersed pleasure of a televised World Cup final, whilst our critics would accept increased rate of death and injury from traffic accidents, alcohol consumption, fights, coal burning for electricity, ad nauseam, as tradeoffs for holding that same event. The true opposition rarely ends up being to substantial tradeoffs, but to substantial tradeoffs being explicit. Or worse, weird and explicit. First rule of fungibility club: we don't think about fungibility club.
I'm glad somebody hasn't forgotten that, despite their moral grandstanding over covid, the American left were full blown covid deniers until reality forced them to tell the truth. And that this is an example of "anti-racist" ideology doing very obvious and undeniable harm.
I think you're pulling a bit of a fast one by lumping all 'non utilitarians' together. I've publicly opposed purely consequentialist ethics and agree with you on all your examples, for the very reasons you give (except for the point about state schools, but my disagreement there is not rooted in a consequentialist argument).
In truth, most people don't have an 'ethical theory', and if you quiz them (anecdata, UK) you will generally find them to be quasi-utilitarians. Here's why. What's often lost in these discussions is that Utilitarianism was originally intended to be a descriptive model of reality, NOT a decision making framework. The pitch by Bentham was that a 'hedonistic calculus' is a very simple model with a great deal of explanatory power for people's instinctive morals and traditional moral codes that arise from them - what *is* as much as what *ought* to be.
If it gives you the 'wrong' answer you aren't supposed to blindly say 'hedonistic calculus go brrrr' and change your mind! You're supposed to question how you've attempted to quantify 'good' and refer back to whichever moral principles you usually accept to figure out whether and where you've gone wrong.
Not to lump the opposition needlessly together, but it has, indeed, occurred to one that many a passionate derider of utilitarianism does seem to resort to intellectually dishonest or otherwise bullyish rhetoric.
One must only assume that these people think this sort of thing is, if not actually good, at least _just fine_ in general, because if they thought said dishonesty/bullying to be somehow _bad_, they'd have to somehow _justify_ it with some greater cause. Hmh.
I think another key distinction to be drawn is between:
(1) the abstract normative question of whether you ought to do what maximises utility (utilitarianism) vs other normative positions (deontology, justice etc.)
(2) ~ descriptive beliefs about whether breaking established norms in the service of other ends tends to work well
Beliefs about these two can diverge. You can be a utilitarian who believes, descriptively, that lying, cheating, stealing, suppressing/oppressing others in the service of the greater good tends to go badly and rarely serve the greater good. Or you can be non-utilitarian, pro-justice activist, who readily believes that all this and more should be readily employed in the service of greater pro-justice ends.
The first and last examples in the list are interesting to me, because the two sacred rules involved conflict with each other.
You can either have a rule of free speech, or a rule against bullying (etc). You can't have both.
I think this kind of explains a lot - the USA makes a big deal of free speech, and harassment is becoming increasingly acceptable.
Europe... isn't all going to the other extreme, and varies much more - but perhaps different countries are trying to strike different balances between the two. Perhaps even because it's more culturally diverse.
"nobody previously decided that (eg) the right to bear arms was sacred but wanting fewer deaths wasn’t"
I seem to recall that the people who founded my country did in fact decide that, to the extent of putting it in writing in our founding documents.
I don't think this post passes the ideological turning test. I'd argue it doesn't bother trying to.
Scott may find himself supporting the spread of misinformation if it resulted in actions that actually, really, physically threatened the people he cares about. He may well support protests that block traffic if he found himself with few enough other options. People who oppose mixing morality in math might be worried that this would lead to optimization for the wrong value. I could go on and so could Scott.
Put this way, it kinda looks like the "feels utilitarian" vs "I don't think ends justifies means BUT" discrepancy is at least in part people only engaging with utilitarianism when they really have to. (And maybe being mad that they have to.)
I think the thing is that dividing policies into means/ends or cost/benefit is already a utilitarian framing, and a less natural part of more virtue-based perspectives. So eg dissent-shaming isn't something that costs the evil of harassment for the benefit of good beliefs, but an indivisible moral action. It's a moral question either way, so deontologists and utilitarians each have relevant principles and can comfortably argue past each other without noticing.
The groupings here seem roughly sorted along immorality vs amorality. Immoral costs already have a moral valence and are already part of philosophies that stepped around cost-benefit consideration. Amoral costs are really weird in virtue ethics.
Things like calibrating regulations or moving disposable income are hard to morally assess without at least imagining a utilitarian mindset. To engage, you kinda need to either take on a utilitarian pov enough to make a content argument (h/t EA Forums) or make an abstract and kinda circuitous meta-argument about ethics that's liable to make you look like an ass or an outsider. Sometimes people would rather just trust that it's not trustworthy.
(I kind of sympathize*. When I see eg very religious thinkers, I'm comfortable enough with the things like beauty and charity that I can think about secularly, but once destiny or scripture comes up -- I'll still have opinions, but they'll be misfit for the framing, my ability to make a talmudic argument will be even worse than my ability to argue for or against the authority of clergy in general, and mostly I'll be mad I have to engage with religion.)
*((I mostly don't. Post-hoc justification of semi-legible visceral discomfort is a terrible basis for critique.))
> More focus on preventing existential risks that could kill billions of people
...
> So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math)...
In the context of existential / AI risk, I think of utilitarians as willing to do evil for the sake of greater good because they've said they're cool with evil for the sake of the greater good. I don't think this has anything to do with a innate repulsion for calculation.
Consider:
- Yudkowsky saying we should be willing to risk nuclear war to bomb GPUs in foreign countries to minimize x-risk (Times Op Ed)
- Nick Bostrom's "Black Ball" thought experiments, which explicitly justifies absolutely complete panopticon surveillance to avoid x-risk.
- You, saying that "So Google takes over the world? Fine," and how such dictatorship wasn't such a bad outcome because it avoided x-risk (In your old article in "Should AI be open?")
I don't want to litigate here if these are *justified* or *true* beliefs, or whether the trade-off makes sense. In all the above, I think that the proposed course of action will just makes the world worse, and probably *much* worse, because the trade-off is actually bad and utilitarians making these calls are making classic straw-utilitarian mistakes and not considering unintended effects. You might think that I'm wrong about this.
But -- whether or not these beliefs are are justified -- they do perfectly match the paradigm of "Let's let some great evil pass for the sake of greater good" and I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that utilitarians thus match the naive notion.
I think the easiest explanation for List 1 endorsements is that people don't actually see those rules as "sacred." A lot of people *talk* as if they do but are inconsistent enough that I don't really believe them. I've also interacted with more logically consistent people who openly reject them (e.g., free speech is a legal concept and freedom of expression isn't necessarily sacred without considering what's being expressed). So it's not clear to me that these folks view themselves as doing harm for the greater good.
I find myself reminded of this quote from Bryan Caplan:
"The key difference between a normal utilitarian and a Leninist: When a normal utilitarian concludes that mass murder would maximize social utility, he checks his work! He goes over his calculations with a fine-tooth comb, hoping to discover a way to implement beneficial policy changes without horrific atrocities. The Leninist, in contrast, reasons backwards from the atrocities that emotionally inspire him to the utilitarian argument that morally justifies his atrocities."
I think this is the difference between Scott's utilitarianism and the utilitarianism-like things he opposes. Scott checks his work, and he uses utilitarian logic for non-emotionally-inspiring causes, instead of only to justify emotionally-inspiring rule violations. That's what upsets people, not utilitarianism itself.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math). If you do this, sometimes people will look for a legible explanation for their discomfort, and they’ll seize on “doing an evil thing for the greater good”: even if the thing isn’t especially evil, trying to achieve a greater good at all seems like a near occasion of sin.
I'd like to propose an alternative way of framing the opposition that might bear a distinction. I think you've got the broad strokes right already. Here goes:
There's a deep-seated sense, an intuitive aversion, that most people share about formalizing morality because it's an inherently reductive process. Something ineffable is lost whenever we employ propositional logic to describe a moral issue. Then, based on an insufficient description, we proceed to metricize 'The Good' and apply optimization pressure to maximize moral utility. Goodhart's Law tells us what to expect at this point; an incontrovertible perversion of whatever measures of good were established.
In other words, there's a suspicion that you're inevitably gravitating towards disaster any time you try to formalize morality (which by this logic is properly holistic and irreducible) in such a way that accommodates optimization.
I dunno, the main thing going on here, it seems to me, is that you have both utilitarian and libertarian intuitions. There's nothing inherently contradictory in that; maybe a generally libertarian social order is conducive to the greatest overall happiness. Heck, John Stuart Mill himself is the author of both 'Utilitarianism' and 'On Liberty.'
I do think you're onto something in observing that people are put off by a "mathy" approach to ethics. (I also think people are mostly right to be put off by it, which is not to say it's *never* appropriate.) But the examples of your own views that you describe aren't even particularly mathy. If the utilitarian/libertarian alignment of views goes against expectations, I'd think it's just because the most common objection to utilitarianism is that it (potentially) sacrifices rights for the sake of the greater overall happiness. And I think the reason that is the most common objection to utilitarianism is that it is a good objection! Utilitarianism *might* be consistent with a commitment to rights, but that's contingent on whether rights are actually conducive to the greatest overall happiness. Which, maybe they are. But most people have an *absolute* commitment to rights, seeing it as a good irrespective of other goods like the greatest happiness principle. If "the math" turned out to show that large-scale infringement of rights actually did bring about the greatest happiness, a lot of people would still object to the large-scale infringement of rights - not because they were offended by the mathy calculation but because they hold rights as a fundamental good.
alternative hypothesis: hypocrisy.
I.e. utilitarianism for me, deontology for thee. *Other* people should just follow the rules. But *me*? I'm smart and virtuous enough to responsibly weigh the trade-offs. When *other* people spin the facts? That's misinformation and evil. But when *I* spin the facts? Well, a little white lie never hurt anyone. Besides, my intentions were pure. No I'm not evil, stop being hyperbolic.
I believe you advocated for this before, Scott. In your post where you complain that nobody actually adheres to principles on the metalevel when doing so would be inconvenient to the issue on the object level. E.g. whether the right/left advocates for gay marriage being decided on the state level or federal level depends on who has the upper-hand culturally. Maybe i'll find the link later.
>”Supporting people who want to earn more money (ethically and legally) and donate it to charity.”
I agree with you on all of the other things on that list, which is why this one sticks out like a sore thumb. I guess I don’t really disagree with it per se, but it’s circular. You can’t use the word “ethically” as an undefined qualifier when defining your own ethical positions. All of the interesting information about what your position might be is hidden in the phrase “ethically and legally”. If a company that donates lots of money to charity is late to file a licensing renewal, does that invalidate them from consideration of support? Probably not. Where is the line?
> "Sometimes utilitarianism is conceptualized as “being willing to do bad things for the greater good”, so it always surprises me how much less willing I am to do this than most people."
I think this is common: a major theme in the utilitarian tradition (since at least Mill) is how damaging *naive instrumentalist* beliefs are. Due to better appreciating the harms of censorship, etc., utilitarians are disproportionately likely to be principled defenders of free speech compared to non-consequentialist academics (who often seem much more open to naive instrumentalism in pursuit of their non-utilitarian moral goals).
I think there are two different concerns at play here, one justified the other not.
The justified concern is that a utilitarian is in some sense more unpredictable or untrustworthy. What they're going to decide to do in a situation depends on many relatively obscure factors you might not be aware of so it's harder to know if you can trust them. Will they actually take the company's deposits to the bank or will they skim off 10% for the needy?
Sure in practice most utilitarians don't (and shouldn't) do most of those things but the very fact they claim to follow that kind of rule does increase the worry.
The unjustified one is simply that it more effectively obscures your tribal/values affiliation. Maybe I care about the poor or maybe I'm using utilitarinism as an excuse to reach results that claim to have that goal but actually serve some other interest.
Let me try steelmaning a concern here.
For the most part people don't actually decide what to do by consulting moral theory and seeing what it suggests. Mostly we decide what to do based on emotional/intuitive thoughts and then use our intelligence to justify it post hoc. Maybe Peter Singer is an exception but quite likey not.
If that's your model than a utilitarian looks like someone whose bullet biting demonstrates that they are morally unconstrained. If they emotionally want to build/stop AI, steal money from their company or run horrific experiments they'll manage to justify it because it's only emotions not cognitive theories that do practical work constraining our actions.
I even think this is pretty true. It's just irrelevant to whether utilitarianism is true. I believe in it because I think it's true not because I believe that it does much to make me a better person.
My guess is that your fundamental violation is *thinking about it* rather than following the social consensus of the people around you on an issue-by-issue basis. That social consensus is created/maintained/modified by a complicated "organic" process that I've never seen analyzed. (We sometimes have "ethics experts" but we rarely follow their advice.) In the long run, what controls a culture's mores is going to be the various features of Darwinian inter-culture competition, not whether it conforms to some logical/philosophical framework.
It seems like the first list is what the far left does, and the second list (except perhaps the last item) is what libertarians do.
So instead of a utilitarian you sound like a soft libertarian.
Reading this, I get the feeling that Scott is a closeted virtue ethicist. Don't worry Scott, it gets better! There are millions of people just like you who won't condone immoral acts for some "greater" good!
*Copypasta South Park*
Okay, less sarky explanation of why virtue ethics not consequentialism:
1. Knowability. You cannot know in advance all the consequences of a given action; your actions echo in eternity. But you can, really easily, understand the nature of a given action, if it is honest or dishonest, just or unjust. And, over time, good actions will have good consequences.
2. Effect on Actor. The problem with being okay with bad actions for a good purpose is they affect the actor. If you are willing to do shitty things for a greater good, it will make you a shitty person, and what good, greater or otherwise, can a shitty person achieve?
Okay, but what about carefully looking up whether bednets save more lives than political donations? I'd say that falls under the virtue of Honesty. If you honestly are determined to do good, rather than appear good, you will do research, think through options etc.
So, yeah. It's okay, Scott, you can come out now. No one will think less of you 🙂
Regarding organ donation, there is absolutely a bright line being crossed: the principle that a doctor is, at any given time, serving the interests of a single patient. Organ donation is voluntary, and you as the donor are allowed to back out until the very last minute, without negative consequences to you. If we are to maintain these nice principles, then people cannot make credible commitments to selling their organs.
That's on top of the social slippery slope, where eventually people who haven't donated a kidney yet get disqualified from food stamps or whatever, because they're sitting on $20k of "assets" that they're refusing to sell.
As usual whenever this topic comes up, I highly recommend "Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets" by economist Al Roth. I know that it's slightly rude to ask someone to do background reading before deigning to engage with them. But in this case it's a short, compelling read.
How good must one be at decoupling what's good for me from the greater good in order for utilitarianism to be a good principle to put into practice?
How confident in one's calculations must one be in order to responsibly take on the responsibility to calculate for others the best course of action?
It's one thing to kill 1 to save 5. That's net +4. But what about killing 1 to save 10 with 50% probability? Or killing 1 to save 10 with 5-95% probability? Or killing 1 now to save 5 in the distant future?
It seems to me that utilitarians are loathe to actually put their principle into practice. Who wants to argue that it's right to steal from degenerate gamblers to fund AI safety? Who would advocate for assassination campaigns against agribusiness execs and investors?
Now, you can always retreat to the claim that such moves are negative EV once nth order effects get accounted for. But to actually account for these things is to have perfect predictive ability, which none of us do.
So in the end, we are left with heuristics, and the real meat of utilitarianism is the confidence that one can estimate consequences better than the average member of their society, better than simply following societal norms.
In many cases this confidence may be correct, but what is the moral valence of the elitism that undergirds it? Is it good to believe oneself to be a superior decision-maker?
Arguably, the naive utilitarian protester who stops traffic would be better served by ceasing belief that they are morally superior to society.
One paradoxical outcome of true utilitarianism is to discourage the masses from practicing it.
Compulsory Education prevents child labor.
Time and time again we've seen child labor bans just get circumvented and result in kids doing illegal jobs without workplace protections like wage laws.
Compulsory Education however does abolish child labor because no parent can use "I can't afford to send him to school" as an excuse to have a child not in school, and an impoverished child not in school "might as well pitch in", which is how they end up getting factory jobs.
If you abolish compulsory education there will be children working in Amazon warehouses. We've already seen in states in the deep South that have poor enforcement of homeschooling quality or have defunded and allowed their public schools to wither, and don't enforce education, that poor kids get pulled out of school to spend their time someplace more productive for their parents: a Hyundai plant.
I hated school as a kid too. Fortunately new and avant garde forms of school are trying to break the shackles of Foucault's Prison if your kid can't handle it but no harm done to a kid in school is worse than the harm done to that kid on the factory floor. Organic childhood is a modern imaginary phenomenon and a utopian ideal invented by Jean Jacques Rousseau.
In the nature of things anyone with two or more moral principles is going to find them coming into conflict occasionally. Each moral principle, according to itself, should take precedence. So there is no rational way to choose which principle to give priority to. If there was, you wouldn't have multiple moral principles after all.
So you can be irrational with several moral principles, or a monomaniac with only one.
> So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?
Because you are arguing against the weakest strawman of what a "non-utilitarian" looks like and then giving yourself points for being better than it.
A non-utilitarian who is a good person hates all of your examples also.
"Being pro-gun-control sacrifices the right to bear arms for the greater good of fewer deaths; being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives to protect the right to bear arms."
I do get what you're saying (maybe?). But in terms of details, I don't think it's fair that you compare a means with an end, here. Being pro-gun-control seeks to prevent some suicides and accidental gun deaths. Rhetorically, gun control advocates seek primarily to prevent mass shootings, but from a utilitarian standpoint, mass shootings are a very small effect relative to others being discussed. Gun control potentially denies innocent people a means to defend themselves against aggression, both from their neighbors and from the government. If "a right to bear arms" was the sacred thing on one side then "a right for the government to control its citizenry" would be the thing it was balanced against or, perhaps, 'the need to prevent school shootings at the expense of all other harms.' If "reducing accidental gun deaths, mass shootings, and suicides" was the profane thing on one side then "self defense, hunting for sport and food, and a long-term hedge against tyranny" would be the profane thing on the other side.
I agree entirely that these disagreements involve trade offs, which was your point. But I'm skeptical that the people making the arguments are willing to acknowledge them as such, for rhetorical reasons. 2nd Amendment supporters are likely to disbelieve studies supporting gun control as biased, because they are engaged in a conflict. And I'm not sure how to categorize such low-key bad faith arguments. As you've mentioned in other writing, to try and steelman such self-delusional conflict-based arguments potentially distorts their nature. The Second Amendment seems basically like a Schelling Point for the pro-gun-ownership side.
I think most people who ick at Utilitarianism or Consequentialism as a general category are operating on the approximate moral principle of "anything that decreases the predictability of my environment is bad". This fits with all of the examples in the article, and also explains why in general people find deontologists more trustworthy than utilitarians.
That is to say, it's not so much that people expect utilitarians will do bad things, it's that figuring out the specific thing utilitarians will do is much harder than just assuming they will follow predetermined rules you can readily anticipate and account for.
Worse still, it is much less legible whether or not the things a purported utilitarian is doing are in fact intended for the greater good. A nefarious agent purporting to be a utilitarian has a lot more leeway for excusable behavior than one purporting to be a deontologist who has committed to a broadly agreed upon set of rules in advance.
>Shaming, insulting, and doxxing people on the “wrong side” of an issue.
I refer to this as "Proof by Intimidation". In addition to the bullying issue, it's also a sin against epistemology.
How is it even possible to type the words "usual moral rule against inconveniencing people" without the words "this may be a reach" popping into your head?
Most if not all of the things in your first list of things you oppose have very plausible utilitarian objections, though. And in fact I hear the utilitarian objections way more frequently than the pure principal objections.
Like for censorship, yes I'm sure there are still some classical liberals or what have you who oppose censorship purely out of their commitment to a free society. But the more common objection is lack of trust in the people who would be doing the censoring, a fear that censorship will be used against them and people they care about in the future should it become normalized, and a strong historical track record of censorship being used to target legitimate dissent. All of which is entirely utilitarian-compatible.
Likewise when I hear people complaining about disruptive protests they're usually focused on the very concrete and direct harm that such protests do to people, up to and including causing deaths due to the delay of emergency services. They're not concerned with some abstract principal that prohibits inconveniencing people.
Utilitarianism has a bad reputation because utilitarianism defenders tend to really insist running around saying that "yes, you should be willing to kill someone to use their organs to save 5 people".
As for increasing the supply of organs, why not institute a policy of only people who check the organ donor box on their licenses are eligible to receive donated organs? For children who aren't yet old enough to drive, their parents checking the organ donor box would be enough.
I don't know what the "normal people" think, but I personally have two objections to actual real life utilitarians.
One is Moldbugian/Libertarian conviction that people who value the wellbeing of people far removed from them the same as their own children's (or the wellbeing of animals, or rocks), are extremely prone to doing harm. We are much better off when everyone cares for themselves and their own first and foremost but tries to not step on others' toes. This is just an observation but of course anyone could make up all sorts of explanations for it.
Second is that IRL utilitarians are prone to violating deontological norms for the thrill of it, in a reverse logic of "if what I'm doing is important then I should violate the norm", by violating the norm they affirm that they are important. See Eliezer Yudkowsky's suppression of Roko's Basilisk. Also, if Eliezer is in charge of building a Friendly AI, why wouldn't he make it a Basilisk? Why haven't you ever seen it discussed?
I can tell you what it looks like when compulsory education laws are not enforced and it's not exactly a thousand pro-social, productive flowers blooming. It's pretty much just loitering, assault, and the occasional carjacking for some kid and factory work for other kids.
Is some of this due to the fact that it's still illegal to not go to school, so you only get kids with not very in-control or invested parents (including migrants living with non-parents) doing it? Sure, but the in-control and invested parents already have the option of homeschooling, which is now easier than ever with online curricula, including that allow a lot of going at your own pace.
So, what kids are served well by ending compulsory schooling who are not served now by homeschooling/alternative school options? It's not the kid with parents who aren't on board with their non-public-school options, because even if the state isn't making you attend school, your parents still can. Kids who don't want to go to school with parents who don't really care one way or the other? I'll buy that some of those are kids who legitimately could create fine educational experiences for themselves. But really, how many?
I understand and basically agree. But unless your *reasons* for agreeing with Scott are not the same reasons that a consequentialist would use to be against them, then even if you have ancillary beliefs that are non-utilitarian, if those beliefs do not play a predominant role for why you agree with Scott, then they don't matter. Of course, you do say you have orthogonal reasons, but given the list I have a hard time seeing what an orthogonal reasons would look like for those cases that are not identical or nearly so to utilitarian ones (I'm on my phone, and it won't let me see the post while writing this). I would like to see such orthogonal reasons outlined for those specific cases!
I also feel like there is a trick being pulled, one very common among non-utilitarians: reductionism of utilitarianism. When I read JSMill, I don't see some mandate that utilitarianism ignore norms, or intergenerational bonds, or character as meaningful and important categories, quite the opposite.
I'm a syncretist about these things, I suppose, and so think that people spend too much effort finding as little common ground as possible. Since anti-utilitarianism is popular again, I feel prone to defend it a bit more.
Hm, I'm not utilitarian, and frequently argue against utilitarianism, but I agree with you on all of list 1 (there are plenty of non-utilitarian reasons for being against that), and most of list 2.
My position is a _little_ about the "ends justify the means" thing, but I can state it more clearly. For me, and I think most people (subconsciously or consciously), emotions and instincts are a more reliable source of identifying "good" than cognition, so we are (rightly) suspicious of anyone who seems to be trying to assign the job of being "good" primarily to cognition. Cognition can easily rationalize. It's too easy to make a set of assumptions and a reasonable-looking argument to justify virtually anything, and people do this all the time. Politicians have made a bad name for cognition. Morality is something much more obvious and more ancient than this. Good people are generous, kind, forgiving, curious, and honest/reliable. Not as descriptive of behaviors, but as personality traits and internal experiences. These things come first.
Many "ends justify the means" utilitarian arguments are very suspicious because they do not take into account the internal state and humanness of the actor. Someone might say "I'm going to get rich to donate to the poor". Frankly, I don't really believe someone who says this. Becoming rich and powerful is incredibly corrupting. Even if you are kind and generous now, I don't believe that you're very likely to become rich and powerful and stay kind and generous. Especially when becoming rich might require suspending giving stuff away in the immediate term. How I prefer to say "the ends don't justify the means" is "you can't burn your soul for fuel and expect to keep your heading".
See also "The Power Paradox" by Dacher Keltner. Machiavellians are not good at becoming powerful. Being powerful makes you Machiavellian.
Whether I'm anti-utilitarianism in _theory_, or I simply don't trust utilitarian thinking to encourage people to be good on average is both less clear, and a moot point.
> Shaming, insulting, and doxxing people on the “wrong side” of an issue. This violates the usual moral rule against bullying, to serve the supposed greater good of discouraging people from taking the “wrong side” of an issue.
There's something weird going on here. The usual moral rule is, very clearly, that you should shame and insult people who are on the wrong side of moral issues.
But I think you're right that modern American culture states a rule against bullying, or other analogous rules. You just aren't expected to believe in those rules; the cultural avowal of them is the equivalent of someone asking "How are you?" when they meet you, or of North Korea avowing that it is a Democratic People's Republic.
I remember reading a tvtropes page about Alfred Hitchcock famously having said that the audience [of a movie] has no morals, elaborating that you can easily get the audience to sympathize with a murderer.
And I think this is a confusion that it's important to avoid. The reason you can easily get movie audiences to sympathize with murderers is that murder, as depicted in the movie, doesn't violate their morals. You can't make the audience sympathize with whatever you want; you have to appeal to their morals.
But you also can't confuse what the audience says their morals are with what their morals actually are.
If you're wondering why so many people characterize utilitarianism as "being willing to do bad things for the greater good", and often with the "bad things" part in boldface all caps, then I think you have to consider the part where when utilitarians are asked to explain their moral philosophy, the go-to examples are various thought experiments where it is shown to be morally righteous to deliberately kill an innocent person. Or sometimes just to torture them, and then there's the one where rape is just fine if you do it perfectly. But hey, we're the hot new moral philosophy that tells you why it's OK to rape and torture and kill, whereas all the old and busted moral philosophies just tell people not to do that stuff.
I can see a utilitarian being willing to own the "correct" solution to the Trolley Problem and say that, yep, they're definitely going to kill that innocent fat guy because he is fat and in the right place at the right time for killing fat guys. But if you don't want people to look at you funny, maybe save those examples for the advanced class and come up with something less bloodthirsty for the 101 version or the initial pitch.
My beef with utilitarianism is that the objective function is plain wrong. Too many organisms are stuck too low on Maslow's pyramid to make interpersonal comparison of utility a good idea.
The benthamite objective is so crude that E/Acc counter-proposal against utilitiarian E/A to switch from maximizing pleasure to maximizing free energy looks like an improvement. One does not build a civilization by maximizing welfare in shrimp farms.
We know that there is so much we don't know that the objective needs to include heavy penalties (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penalty_method) on any coercion or distortion to incentives.
Utilitarianism with deontological characteristics is the way.
>repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality
Calculating things about morality is wrong not as in "morally wrong" but as in "2+2=5 is wrong", incorrect. It's not about repulsion but about no, it doesn't work.
A non-utilitarian position: let's solve issues on a concrete case by case basis.
Utilitarian: it won't do, making generalizations and calculations on a grander scale yields greater benefits.
A non-utilitarian: but oversimplified calculations on complex systems replete with self-reference is not easy, bound to be incorrect in the long term.
U: we can still give it our best.
NU: it's not not easy as in damn we need to write steps down, but as in three body problem.
Strawman-but-commited-utilitarian: now, let me tell you about those three bodies, see we draw some lines like this, and there ya go, tomorrow they'll be in roughly these positions.
U: we can still do good with this reasoning in some concrete generalized cases.
NU: yes, mosquito nets are likely fine.
SBCU: but seeing those benefits, can't we stick to the same principles in general and hope for the equally nice results?
Of course not.
Humans are in general not not reducible to numbers because they're sacred divine sparks* or whatever, but because they're self-aware, conscious, they have memory and agency. And when there's more then one involved, well, that's where we veer off into pure chaos theory, linear equations just won't do. Which precludes most of utilitarianism espoused online.
• - albeit plenty of those who do hold them as "sacred divine sparks" do so as a poetic shorthand for the self-aware, conscious etc etc stuff.
After reading many great posts here on utilitarism, I think deep utilitarism considering nth order effects is a good moral framework - but due to the uncertainty of said nth order effects, it seems that this leads to simpler heuristics - something close to virtue ethics, most of the time.
However, I think naïve, 1st order utilitarism is often used as argumentation in the real world. Consider the EA argument that charity money is most efficiently used where the marginal dollar saves most lives, leading to the investment i malaria bednets. This seems, at least superficially, to be a 1st order argument. Considering nth order effects, one might intuitively suspect that investing in infrastructure, energy production or education may look better.
These 1st order utilitarian calculations may be what people intuitivly react to when they oppose utilitarism, maybe rightly so.
I'm probably just confused by the title.
You are not supporting things from the first list on utilitarian grounds, are you? Or do you literally turn off your utilitarinism while thinking about these questions?
Привет Скотт ,как ты там) что там с волшебным джином ))
вот результат моего опыта ковида, до и после его прихода меня совершенно не вдохновляет страна где я проживаю, мое сознание будто не вписывается ,такое ощущение ,что вокруг меня не та цивилизация
I think the biggest error here is the assumption that the Utility Function can be computed from some arbitrary "I know it all" belief...
A Utilitarian should use the scientific method to discern wether most of these policies are good or bad.
For example "Letting people get paid to donate their organs" has a myriad of possible ramifications...
Let some countries do it (or states, or counties, for example by restricting to only those domiciled there before the legislation passed) and make statistics about the life of donors and who received the organs.
The belief that we can a priori understand all the possible ramifications of such a policy is not warranted.
Personally I think overall such a policy would be bad for society but I would love to be proven wrong...
Sure, but you still have a moral duty to let the hospital employee rape the coma patients, yes?
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality
Maybe, but it also might be because utilitarians are pretty bad at calculating things about morality. They tend to focus on the positives, and ignore the negatives. To use a recent example, cryptocurrency was supposed to usher in a new era of economic prosperity unconstrained by the old power structures, but in reality it just produced a new currency speculation market plus a whole bunch of new and exciting scams. But in fact utilitarians have a long history of mediocre successes and predictable failures, and on that basis trusting someone with your future just because he says "it's ok, I can multiply numbers" appears to be a bit reckless.
It's also possible that people are mathematicians who think your and philosophy's use of math is *extremely* dubious and there's little to no evidence of moral optimization having value beyond a certain satisficing threshold. Probably these people agree with a lot of your views from both lists, but question your methods, and think we should *all* admit high levels of back justified gut instinct.
But sure, focus on the easy critics who haven't examined their moral systems with regard to some questions you picked.
I let this message pass through two of Rumi's gates.
Edit: And I'm glad you're roundly and soundly being taken to task in the comments by a bunch of people who dislike or question the *quality of the utilitarian method*. Please, please take this as a learning and go back to *investigating* strong positions instead of *fighting against* weak ones. I miss 2015 Scott.
I love your writing, Scott, but this essay strikes me as underbaked. I also have strong utilitarian leanings, and I think you're a very insightful guy, a wonderful writer, and a terrific person, but I don't think this essay accomplishes much.
First, I think you're straw-manning the people who are uncomfortable with utilitarians. Yes, some people who don't like utilitarians think dumb things. So what? So do some utilitarians! You're smarter and more thoughtful than 9,999 people out of 10,000, so if you were a rules-based moralist, you would also reach good results, as many have. I'd be much more interested in seeing you steelman criticism of utilitarians first, then respond to that.
Second, there are whole books on these questions. I have so many objections, I don't even know where to start.
- Do people really think kids should go to school because they are following rules based morality instead of utilitarianism? I mean, if you said "I think the kids involved and society as a whole are worse off as a result of requiring kids to go to school," you think their answer would be "I agree, but let's make them go to school anyway because I have a moral belief that kids should go to school even if it harms them and leaves us all worse off?"
- I don't see anything in your essay that addresses how you factor the Omelas function into your moral schema. If someone has a different upper bound on the suffering that can be imposed on the losers for the sake of the winners, or acceptable distributions of suffering that result in overall gains, why are you right and they are wrong? What's your Omelas function and does it make you not a utilitarian?
- Does utilitarianism require that we obey the best mathematicians in determining what's right and wrong? If not, aren't we going to end up in some case where almost everyone argues that their moral structure is overall best for the world, but then we all argue that everyone else is reaching their conclusion wrong? You can accuse them of motivated reasoning (probably correctly), but my take is most moral rules people believe that the risk of harmful error from Peter Singer-esque reasoning outweighs the possible gains.
Yes, these are big questions, but that's why I don't think your essay gets very far. (Unless I don't get it, but I'm looking forward to "Best of the Comments on Less Utilitarian than Thou" for more detail.)
I agree that you are a lovely person and you identify as a utilitarian. But if that's the argument, then this could have been a tweet, and if there's more to it than that, I don't get it.
What kind of protests do you like?
I ask because my perception of blocking traffic (often done by *getting a parade permit for your protest*) is that it's an inconvenience that does not damage to people or property, and if you cross off all protests where somebody can legitimately say "this inconveniences me as much as having to take an alternate route to work" then you're not left with, well, any that have ever accomplished anything.
Thanks Scott. I think it's key to clarify whether you apply calculate utility for specific cases, or for the rules. I'm sure there's some good terminology for this which I don't know. When you are against protestors blocking roads I'm guessing you don't calculate the utility of furthering their specific cause vs. the negative utility of blocking that specific road. Rather you weigh up the utility of allowing all kinds of protestors to block roads vs. the utility of having a law banning this.
I agree with the fact that Anti-Utilitarians tend to strawman Utilitarianism as "do evil for the greater good". But I think Scott sets up his own strawman for Anti-Utilitarians with the "math is taboo" assertion. I'm generally pro-Utilitarian, but there are good reasons to be skeptical of the mathematization of morality.
I wrote a detailed rebuttal here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/steelmanning-anti-utilitarianism
Utilitarianism lacks a good answer to G.E. Moore's open question argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-question_argument
Internet pseuds love utilitarianism because it's easy to understand and seems to solve a problem while actually just kicking the can down the road. They reveal how little they actually know about the history of philosophy when they are completely unaware of things like the open question argument.
"Holding protests that block traffic, damage property, or harass people. These violate the usual moral rule against inconveniencing people, to serve the supposed greater good of raising awareness of a cause."
I'd have to strongly disagree on this one, some causes are simply too important to follow traffic laws. What possible alternative can you suggest for the powerless masses to effectively protest?
There is no meaningful alternative and with stupid laws protecting drivers rights to be workers and shoppers were designed and written, like anti-BDS laws for Israel only in American state governments, to curb protests and social change. It is inevitable those laws or 'norms' will be broken.
The purpose of the protest is to break them and disrupt commerce as that's one of the few things the elites care about. It is also very strange to combine property damage and harassment of regular people with the very different things of blocking traffic or protesting leaders who have chosen to be in public positions. Politicians promoting and enacting genocide should be shouted down and harassed in public and they should be put on trial and thrown in prison where they are guilty. Or in the case of the French revolution when starving crowd is told to eat cake when they do not have bread, they simply cut her head off. Since then the French have had zero problems from their 'royal' family. Now with an endless revolving door of endless psychopaths, there is no purpose in such a thing, so disrupting commerce is the new guillotine in our supposed democratic governments which routinely ignore 80% plus of the people's views for a ceasefire now. Or any of another hundred vital issues to the common people with 70% plus support which are 'politically impossible'.
When we look at the sit-ins and other mass protests from the Civil Rights Movement in the USA South and elsewhere against segregation, when we look at the stop work protests in the Indian liberation movement, when we look at the protests which led to the end of apartheid South Africa or the Vietnam 'war' protests. Nearly every effective mass movement has used this tactic to block traffic and to 'harass' public officials and other leaders in order to push their cause along with causing all sorts of other disruptions. Are you telling them not to have done these things? To go back in time and say 'yea yea, segregation bad, but seriously, get off the bridge and get out of that restaurant which will not server you for being black?' It sounds like you're saying that.
While angry mobs are real and can turn into destructive riots or block emergency vehicles at times (more often at an English football game than a peaceful protest), there are also agent provocateurs and other government and intelligence intervention in recent decades where a lot of the risk of violence and property damage comes from these kinds of incitement or small incidents of less than 0.5% of people at a protest which the corporate propagandist media fixate on. How many times was that mkultra asset, test subject, and cult leader let off of criminal charges before they put in him prison? Why was it on the day of Malcom X's assassination that the usually ubiquitous police presence at every single on of his events was absent? Such as the tiny handful of a few hundred people who largely peacefully spilled into the capital building on Jan 6 out of well over 500,000 people there that day. All while FBI and other agents or assets are on camera shouting to incite people to go into the building, you can watch the footage. All of whom somehow don't get charged or walk away with zero prison time, while dumb rubes who stumbled into the lobby have gone to prison. Piles of expensive bricks left out unattended in New York just before a protest while normally you'd never see any construction material left out, locked up behind high fences.
Regardless, this doesn't seem like a viable position to be against all disruptive protests all the time for all causes.. No justice, no peace. Shut it down, and other similar sentiments have been one of the only tools common people have had and have effectively used to bring about change. The simple fact that enough people disagree with something strongly enough to put their bodies and time into such a protest in a free society means they should be able to do so. I know of many environmental protest which only succeeded due to such protest of people chaining themselves to trees or up on 3-pole death platforms where removing one poll causes the person to fall to their death. It worked and many forests still stand due to such protests. Such anti-protest laws only benefit the elite to pursue more crimes and war crimes against commoners and our collective environment.
If you feel this way about traffic laws, then I'd wonder how you feel about unions stopping work for safer conditions or fair wages?
Not that it matters and people will simply not listen to or look to you for leadership on this issue of effective protest movements both historically and now. Those who march against the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank because they live, suffer, and die under a brutal expansionist apartheid Israeli military law and bombardment are not particularly interested in such anti-protest laws to muzzle them. All while the elite profit from arms sales for bombs dropped on women and children who live in a concentration camp turned death camp.
But if someone were to listen to your love of western traffic laws, what alternatives would you suggest people take to stop what they perceive as a genocide and new holocaust? What is the correct response to a holocaust as we watch things like the Flour Massacre gunning down intentionally starving people trying to get food from a limited entry aid truck? While psychopaths run a festival to block the aid trucks with bouncy castles and cotton candy? Not that the IOF was letting aid trucks of food in before that insane genocide festival. Should we be meekly and quietly marching on a weekend and being ignored by the media who love to lie about the numbers of protesters present and what they are saying and doing? What more effective altruistic action would you propose to stop or at least protest a genocide?
What should we do when there is a new Mai Lai massacre, or more than one, happening every single day in Gaza for 150 days now? We can't all have Aaron Bushnell's moral conviction to set ourselves on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in DC. Or Thich Quang Duc who did so against the genocide in Vietnam where the USA relentlessly blew up hospitals, villages, and killed civilians on purpose with horrific war crime napalm and land mines which are still a danger 50 years later. Such enlightened moral capacity is exceptionally rare to self immolate. Sadly the war criminals seem to rise up in abundance.
If we are to care about the free flow of traffic or emergency services, what until I tell you about the 650 internal checkpoints in the West Bank which are an illegal occupation under international law. They routinely block and slow emergency vehicle son purpose so that people will die. Or about all the ambulances in Gaza which were blown up, along with their associated hospitals. Talk about a problem of a protest causing disruptions.
Those protest happen to be from the Israeli military, but I'm betting there are all sorts of principles of traffic law which you'd be upset about. I look forward to your essay on this problem of military disruption of traffic in occupied Palestine. Their military leader said no food, no fuel, no water...but he also has a no traffic issue and blocks thousands of aid trucks from getting in.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math).
Also, most people don’t like math.
I'm curious where the "guns cause deaths" association came from. I've haven't seen that the number of gun owners is correlated with the number of murders.
If you're talking about gun-related accidents, I acknowledge that they exist-- but should we ban everything that has the potential to kill?