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In Sterling Harwood’s essay, “Eleven Objections to Utilitarianism”, he surveys a number of critiques to utilitarianism, and then examines them for cogency. Over the next month, I will summarize all of those objections, along with his answers. I will then evaluate both. During the final week, I will examine any other miscellanious objections which I have encountered and feel like addressing.

Since this is a blog, each post after this one will be in bite-sized packets of three. To anticipate: classical utilitarianism is riddled with absurdity, but utilitarianism in general - as in the body of theories which center around the principle of utility - must be a permanent feature of moral and/or meta-ethical analysis.

I. The aretaic objection: “Utilitarianism is overly demanding.” Because the principle of utility requires us to treat people impartially, it alienates us from our integrity, and forces us to examine a situation from some third-person standpoint. This a) makes duties to our friends (associational duties) impossible, and b) forces us to into the squalor of excessive altruism, where we must give away anything and everything we own (for instance) so long as doing so does not reduce our happiness to low levels.

Harwood’s treatment is fourfold.

i) The “penny saved” rebuttal. He argues that the anticipation of future horrors (i.e., of overpopulation) is reason to amass one’s wealth wisely, so that it accumulates, and so future charity will be more significant.

This seems like a very poor defence. For generally speaking, misery accumulates: protection now will reduce burdens later. The maxim, “Prevention is the cure” seems wise enough in many cases.

ii) The “suck it up” rebuttal. Harwood explains that this objection is simply a reflection of the difficulty of morality. It is simply a fact of the matter that it is hard to be a moral person. We complain about the impartiality requirement, but in fact, being moral is tough. Our resistence arises out of a weakness of will.

And indeed, there is often a time where the moralist must say, “Oh, suck it up already”, to someone who suffers without reasonable cause (i.e., in modest - but not extreme - psychosomatic cases). However, the desire to protect oneself, one’s friends, and one’s family from harm is hardly as trite as the bruising of a kneecap. Harwood is hardly taking the objection as seriously as it deserves here. Personal projects and associations seem to have a genuine moral weight.

This objection from integrity has been offered as a decisive objection against utilitarianism by famous icons in contemporary ethical theory. Bernard Williams (and to a lesser extent, Samuel Scheffler) are theorists who believe that, in some manner or other, utilitarianism as usually conceived must alienate the moral actor from their integrity. Their greivances, as far as I can make out, are that: a) personal integrity must be treated as a value, and does not play a more fundamental role at the level of producing the right; b) utilitarianism alienates the person from the option to do otherwise and still be considered moral.

I would affirm the correctness of a), but find nothing compelling in the objection. Integrity, insofar as it is morally significant, is one of those values which produces happiness. Thus, we have a means of including integrity (and associational duties) as items with moral weight. There can be no fundamental alienation from integrity if it may be included in the theory at least some of the time, so this objection fails.

(b), however, is more interesting. Take a case where an actor evidently has a very clear utilitarian duty to optimize happiness. Let’s say that Jim would increase the happiness of Sally if he bought her iced cream by amount x. Let’s also say that Jim was thinking of buying a model airplane in order to receive happiness y. The two cost the same amount of money. Let’s also say that Sally has had a bad day and that iced cream would give her twice the pleasure as that which Jim would get from buying a model airplane: x = 2y. The question is: if he bought the model plane, would that be moral?

Utilitarianism seems to say, it is better for you to buy the iced cream. Integrity theorists (esp. Schefflerians) say, you have the option to do whatever you want and still be moral; after all, we’re dealing with really small quantities of happiness, here. For them, you can make the non-utilitarian choice, and still be moral. Integrity theorists want to say that utilitarianism can provide no options in the matter, but would also insist that there really ought to be the more egoistic moral alternative (within some bounds).

The accusation is subtle. It is not that utilitarianism cannot ever tell a person to do an altruistic act; for that would be a just plain goofy reading of utilitarianism, and unintuitive no matter what ethical point of view you’re coming from. Equally (I think), they’re not saying that, strictly speaking, utilitarianism is anti-egoistic. Rather, they aim for a modest claim — they think that utilitarianism destroys the idea of moral choice, or of merely permissible behavior, especially (for Scheffler) where there are low levels of happiness involved.

We can find an excellent rejoinder in another defence which Harwood covers.

iii) The epistemic rebuttal. He invokes Kurt Baier (and, it turns out, Henry Sidgwick), in arguing that people are simply better judges of their own desires, which makes some degree of egoism acceptable.

Ultimately, this is the lynchpin which secures the defence of utilitarianism. The thought-experiment presented in (ii b) is predicated on knowledge that we don’t normally have. It should not be a surprise that a scenario which effectively postulates omniscience will produce unintuitive results.

Indeed, beyond the fulfillment of basic needs, what we know about human happiness is limited to those with whom we are most intimately familiar; and our knowledge makes any of our duties far more clear. On this view, we do have options. They arise out of uncertainty about the best means of achieving the utiliarian goal. Strike out the uncertainty, and one’s moral choices are far more limited. (This is not to suggest that having moral choice is a blessing, incidentally. Social psychology has made clear that our minds derive less satisfaction from a state of affairs when we are given more choice of alternatives.) In other words: knowledge of preferences demands familiarity.

But this is likely not enough to convince a non-believer in utilitarianism. So here is another argument that is not mentioned by Harwood. There is a difference between happiness and enjoyment. Enjoyment is the reflection upon happiness, the meditation upon it such that it produces more happiness. To enjoy one’s own personal projects is to amplify one’s happiness beyond the levels one would ordinarily have. Enjoyment is, at some level, an ad hoc choice.

Two conclusions arise: one, all other things equal, to produce happiness in others without choosing to do so, is to tacitly subscribe to a rule which says, “No enjoyment”. This will eventually, after precedent etc., fail to optimize utility. Here, of course, I am invoking rules. But I should clarify that I’m still within the sphere of act-utilitarianism. Properly understood, a rule is merely a cognitive device that governs a certain exceptional kind of act. The act is the thing we care about; rules just help us get there. In this sense, enjoyment propels happiness.

Two, in principle, an ad hoc choice is not knowable to an outsider, it is only known to the agent themselves. In this sense, it is both unpredictable and, for all intents and purposes, secret.

iv) The pride rebuttal. He argues that there is significant value to not simply feeling like a charity case.

This is true in Western cultures. But the real question is, “WHY might this be true, consistent with utilitarianism?”. It may be explained, I think, by the fact that agency is an incorrigible value - that is to say, one’s sense of self and of personal powers inevitably tends to provoke a primordial respect for agency in the abstract. In certain cultural climates, and in people whose senses of self are appropriately developed, this respect for agency may lead to a sense of dignity, and to the demand to be the power which sustains their own life. Thus, agency is incorrigible. Utility must be organized around it, because of the kind of beings that we are.

[Edit: In some cultures, such as ours, this rightly leads to a division between positive and negative responsibility. Doing a bad action seems as though it is somewhat worse than allowing a bad action. Utilitarianism has been accused of favoring a strong thesis of negative responsibility: where the bad consequences that arise out of your creative striving are equally bad as those you allow to happen. But if we take agency to be incorrigible, it will modify our moral calculations along the lines of the “enjoyment” thesis, in such a way that the wrongs associated with agency will seem more wrong, and the rights associated will seem more right.

It is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the consequences of an action are agent-external, or merely situational. But the actions of persons affect the behaviors of other persons: these are social consequences. Still, if consequentialist considerations of actor-internal factors seem ad hoc or unconvincing to the reader, I should note that the same principle applies to non-intentional behaviors as well: namely, our habits. Later on, we’ll understand more about the role of rules in utilitarianism. But suffice it to say right now that the bad consequences which arise out of rule violation center in large part around our habits. If we accept this latter thesis, then it is only a short step before we accept the thesis about intentions. For both habits and intentions are agent-internal.]

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