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/// What follows is a peice which presents a series of examinations of utilitarianism from Harwood’s seminal essay, “Eleven Objections to Utilitarianism”, along with my demonstrations of how these objections are unsound. It is continued from here. ///

2. The hero objection. The second objection is that utilitarianism removes the possibility of supererogation — that is, acts which are far beyond the call of duty. Harwood’s example is of a retreating soldier who risks his own life to save that of another man. Because utilitarianism is an optimizing doctrine, which demands that we act to achieve the maximum amount of happiness expected, then noble self-sacrifice is our duty. There is nothing “beyond” it, because it demands the best in the first place.

Harwood’s reply to this objection is that sometimes the choice to do an altruistic act will produce the same amount of happiness as choosing not to, and so utilitarianism has nothing to say about which ought to be chosen over the other. This may be a fruitful line of defence, I think, but it demands explanation and qualification. In some cases it may work, but it is not obvious how it would work in the soldier case. It would seem that there is no tie between the altruistic act (saving the friend) and the egoistic one (both are killed): for it seems obvious that the former produces more happiness than the latter. So we are left with a puzzle of interpretation. How could Harwood’s remarks be true?

Two things are important to observe before a reply can be made. First: there is a difference between subjective and objective utilitarianisms. The former says that you ought to act in order to achieve the maximum amount of expected happiness; the latter says that you ought to act in order to achieve the maximum amount of actual happiness. Second, this objection is almost identical to the first objection — it is a question of whether or not actors have a choice in their behavior. So we need to revisit the treatments given in the former section.

We cannot apply the Enjoyment proviso here, since the soldier case has nothing to do with enjoyment (a luxury) and everything to do with emergency action. We may, however, apply the epistemic doctrine, and say that the outcomes are uncertain. Any of three options may have been brought about: the death of both men, the saving of one and not the other, and the continued living of both soldiers. The actual objective outcomes are far from a tie, but the possible outcomes have, on the face of it, equal risk of happening: the bullets are flying, etc. When a person takes a risk in favor of utility, where there is subjectively equal probability of occurrence among options, and where the outcome is successful, we may call that a weak kind of “supererogation”, because all subjective utilitarianism asks you to do is maximize what you predict to be the best outcome, while you’ve gone further and maximized an outcome beyond what you could have known.

Thus, in a way, subjective and objective utilitarianisms cohabitate. Acting for subjective utility is your duty; but acting for objective utility can be virtuous.

In this perhaps disquieting sense, supererogation is a matter of luck. This itself may show a kind of insensitivity to character which the contemporary virtue theorist would find wanting. But a defence of virtue need not cash in solely on supererogation: it may, simply, look to essential virtues. For example, the creative striving towards achievement of preventative and agentic duties would be other examples of virtuous (though not supererogatory) acts and abilities.

[Edit: The above comments may read as though they were a concession. If superergogation were merely a matter of luck, then it would not seem to be supererogation at all. I am prepared to agree with this outcome, though still, I think it perfectly feasible to find stand-ins for the concept of supererogation in the apparatus that has already been laid out. Virtue provides many of the same intuitions we’re looking for, without forcing us to be committed to the absurd idea of going beyond the optimal.

As I indicated, we may speak of virtue as skill with respect to agentic duties, and suppose that those who have developed social and moral knowledge and reasoning are those who seem to satisfy the description of “going beyond the call of duty”. One important agentic duty, worth heavy consideration, is the obligation to grow with respect to one’s socio-moral skills and knowledge when they have the opportunity to do so. A person cannot possibly be held accountable as an agent for those things which are beyond their skills to infer, though in general we may reasonably expect and demand gradual moral growth when all other things are left equal.]

3. The justice objection. But some would say that the maximization of happiness is not, at a fundamental level, just. This accusation can be made in a few ways: a) by appeal to retributive justice; b) by appeal to distributive justice.

Harwood sums up the retributive justice objection succinctly: “Utilitarianism is often criticized for failing to treat retributive justice (giving the guilty and only the guilty the punishment they deserve…) as having intrinsic moral importance.” For the distributive justice objection, we may imagine a case where a substantial minority of persons is treated with disrespect, must live in squalor, and so on, so that the greater majority may live in wealth and peace.

Both of these worries can be replied to with a single argument, because they are both based upon the failure to treat long-term consequences and social consequences seriously. For purposes of completeness, though, I will reply first on the basis of philosophical clarity, and then substantively.

To be clear: utilitarianism treats happiness, and only happiness, as being that which has intrinsic value. However, it doesn’t necessarily say anything, so far as I know, about “intrinsic moral value”. The very name - “utilitarianism” — is meant to suggest that morality is instrumentally conceived, and that there’s nothing intrinsic about the moral values it endorses. Indeed, from what I understand, there is no such thing as an ‘intrinsic moral value’ at all, by the utility standard. Thus, the objection’s aim is true. But it is hardly motivating; this portion of the argument, when taken alone, succeeds only at making us aware of an explicit fact about the doctrine, and doesn’t give us a reason to pause, especially when this part of the doctrine seems docile. Moreover, if one wanted to say, for example, that family, or life, is of intrinsic moral value, then we have the ability to rejoin by saying: “These things are not of intrinsic moral value, but incorrigible moral value”.

Substantively, utilitarianism has been accused of getting on the wrong side of morality. Take the case, for instance, where a doctor is left to decide whether or not to harvest the organs of a living, perfectly healthy hobo, in order to save the lives of five other dying men. According to the detractors, utilitarianism requires us to slaughter the hobo to save the five men. This is just one example. Many cases of this kind have been formulated in order to show that utilitarianism gives no regard for the innocence of the man to be slaughtered.

I think it’s obvious that, all other things equal, the hobo cannot be morally slaughtered to save five dying men. Any utilitarian who would affirm that the hobo ought to be killed would be pathological.

Luckily, though, as we have seen, agency is an incorrigible value; the life choices of the hobo is thus of pressing relevance to us. This is brought home if we again consider the social consequences of murder for short-term gain. Any social system which tolerated such a kind of act, would be a social system which in the long-term would fail to maximize utility, in the sense that it would be a Hobbesian hell to live in. Thus, the distinction between long-term and short-term consequences answers this objection.

The objection from distributive justice fails for the same general reason: it fails to take into account remoter effects. The enslaved minority is suppressed, and the value of agency is muted, thus reducing utility.

Moreover, the objector stipulates that this is the best condition that there ever could be; essentially, that a condition of slavery is the best of all possible worlds, and there is no improving upon it. Thus, the objection is based upon what we know to be an absurdity. Their case is based upon a grossly distorted world, and presupposes facts that I believe to be just plain false, given the nature of social systems, etc.

Let’s pretend, though, that it really were the case that a condition of slavery were the best of all possible worlds. Would that be a moral world? By our standards, no; in fact, utilitarianism would seem to be just plain false in such a universe. But let those other universes have their own doctrines. Ethics cares only for guidance towards proper action, thought, and life in our universe.

This is not to accuse all theorists of constructing fantastic cases. I am not one of those people who will belittle a dubious thought-experiment just for the sake of polemical stridency. I only wished to show in the last two paragraphs that, often, there are cases which are based on the hellishness of the world involved, and our intuitions have been soaked with anxiety that arises, not from utilitarianism, but from absurd counterfactual preconditions.

But Harwood rightly notes that, while this sort of reply may be cogent when dealing with philosophical flights of the imagination, similar cases may be found in the real world which are both analogous and conceivable. So what about real-world cases which demand seemingly unjust acts? Take the case of sailors who are adrift at sea, and whose food supply has run short. In order to have a hope of survival, they must eat one of their crewmates. What does utilitarianism have to say in such a situation? First, I must point out the difference between an emergency situation and a non-emergency one; the first cases we saw (the hobo case, the slavery case) are not emergencies, but the cannibalism case is an emergency. Moreover, it is not just an emergency case, but a no-win scenario: no matter what choices are made, they will create misery (at best); the only available options are to reduce misery, and happiness is scarcely in sight.

With those two things in mind, it is my sad duty to say that cannibalism at sea is in line with utilitarianism. This is a case where the demands of fundamental justice (utility) run up against the standard deontic demands of justice (do not murder). Utilitarianism must advise the sailors to do what is necessary to survive.

Indeed, this seems to be the strongest blow against utilitarianism that I have so far surveyed. However, it is far from decisive, for two reasons. First, as noted by Grotius, in law and practice, courts of justice have agreed with the decisions of the sailors, and have allowed mitigating circumstances to relieve them of guilt. But this is a weak defence: what may be said about law and justice, is not necessarily anything to do with virtue and morality; and there are no virtues in killing and eating a dying comrade.

My second reply may not be very convincing, but it is, for the moment, all I can think of. Because of the argument in reply to objection #2, we still have latitude to say that someone who was in a cannibalistic situation, and did not know whether or not they would survive without resorting to cannibalism, and decided not to engage in it, but was lucky enough to actually be in a situation where they would in fact be saved in time, then they may be rightfully called virtuous. In a case where the person is not so lucky, however, they have sacrificed virtue, duty, and life. In this sense, to be supererogatively virtuous is to be a high-stakes gambler.

4. Utilitarianism against promises. Utilitarianism, according to some critics, does not take promise-keeping seriously enough. Thus, for example, if I promise my dying mother to leave flowers upon her grave after her death, and fail to do so, I’m not breaking a moral duty, since she will never know.

The greater objection is befuddling to me. There are clear cases where you should not, morally, engage in felicity. Let’s take another case: a woman is dying in her bed. You are this woman’s daughter. You have previously promised her that you will always tell her the truth. She asks you, “How is Dave?”, your brother and her beloved son. You have just found out that Dave died in a car accident, but the mother doesn’t know it yet. Do you tell her the truth, and let her spend her last moments on Earth in misery?

Of course not.

The “flowers” case is also unconvincing because it misunderstands human relationships. People can be understood either as personalities, or as bodies and minds in space. A personality is a meaningful entity which soaks into others through interaction, and gives us a sense of the affinities of others, their preferences, delights, mannerisms, beliefs, etc. A body (and mind) is the physical thing which creates the personality. When the body and mind die, the personality may live on in the people who have grown accustomed to it. Moreover, we never really know any bodies or minds besides our own in the way that we know of personalities. Finally, my personality may be minorly altered by my loved ones; their personality soaks into mine, in some way. My duty to my dead mother lives on because her personality lives in me, and because I have a duty to my own happiness.

I have treated here some of the extreme forms of this point, but the moderate forms seem so easily explainable by a utilitarian standard that it is neither worth my time to belabor the argument nor your time to read it. In short: promises are important; they foster trust; happy human life is social; social life depends on trust.

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