YES! I'm saving this to go in my folder of explanations for why utilitarianism is bad.
I'm not very good at explaining why I hate utilitarianism. I think you covered almost everything I dislike about it in one fell swoop.
Maybe this part gets me the most:
>In practice, people who hold this view, in their efforts to avoid bias, tend to embrace absurd views simply because they are absurd.
Right! If your logic causes you to think it's important to donate to shrimp charities, your logic is clearly busted and needs to be checked and re-checked until you find the obviously correct answer which you have known intuitively your entire life: shrimp are bugs and bug feelings don't matter. I'm clearly not a philosopher, but I should think that philosophy is more useful when it's unwrapping the reasons why obviously correct things are correct, and not so useful when it's constructing flimsy towers of nonsense about why obviously false things might actually be true.
Hera already said it, but I would go further: this comment is entirely 'philosophy is good when it confirms my beliefs', and reasoning backward from your conclusion.
It's so explicit. You say you are "not very good at explaining why you hate utilitarianism", but that you're saving this for a folder of explanations to use, because its conclusions are so "obviously fake" that you need to prove its proponents wrong. Does that not ring any epistemic alarm bells? You know you hate it, you don't know why, so you go looking for reasons- even making a literal collection of them to help you get to your chosen position.
You even explicitly recommend responding to weird or counterintuitive results by trying again "until you find the obviously correct answer". Does this seem like good intellectual practice? Would you recommend massaging your methodology until you get the result you want in the empirical sciences, or maths, or any other field of inquiry?
If rigorous, carefully reasoned argument gets you to a conclusion that seems counter-intuitive, then yeah, you should be sceptical. It's very reasonable, necessary even, to double and triple check your reasoning, and make absolutely sure, and consider the "outside view" argument that we shouldn't often expect to be right and everyone else wrong, so we should have a low prior probability of any such strange conclusion as "shrimp suffering matters a lot". Discovering that our moral theory produces that result should certainly lead us to investigate further, rather than simply auto-biting every bullet and revelling in our radicalism.
But eventually, the reasoning has to win over the intuition. If you reject every result that feels weird, you're not doing philosophy, or any kind of truth-seeking behaviour at all- you're in soldier mindset, looking for arguments to support what you already believe. You may as well abandon all pretence of moral argument, if you're just using it as a vehicle to get to your predetermined conclusion.
At least the author here tries to make an argument of his own- tries to reason towards the conclusion, instead of merely asserting it because it's so "obviously true", as you do.
He's still clearly working backwards from his conclusion. There's no other reason to posit an arbitrarily large value for "meaning", whatever exactly that means, such that it defeats all pain and thereby evades the obvious moral demands of the empirical reality that shrimp probably suffer significantly and on a mind-boggling scale. But at least he presents an argument, and therefore an opportunity for his reasoning to be examined and rebutted.
Whereas you are epistemically doomed if you dismiss, without argument, any claim that strikes you as especially counter-intuitive, and investigate further only to find arguments for what you've already decided you know.
Alright, I wouldn't normally respond to this because I don't find the whole topic interesting or worthwhile enough, but you put in a lot of effort, so I'll say some things.
From all my exposure to it, I generally think philosophy as a discipline is overrated, especially when it's divorced from the empirical and from intuition. Not useless, but overrated. You can be truth-seeking without it.
But of all the branches of philosophy, moral philosophy is probably the worst. I agree with Pascal, who wrote, "It is certain that the mortality or immortality of the soul should make an entire difference to morality. And yet the philosophers construct their ethics independent of this. They discuss to pass an hour."
In the end, I see all naturalistic moral philosophizing as an exercise in psychological self-management for a certain kind of person with a highly systematizing and somewhat neurotic personality. As an exercise, it's structurally incapable of even approaching truth.
Religious people (and I am one) understand ethics as being revealed by the divine and may regard intuition and reason as supplements to that, but supplements limited by the guardrails of revelation.
Normal secular people just go with their intuitions, informed by some combination of their genetic predisposition and their inculturation. This is inadequate, from the religious view, but adequate, given the constraint that this person has rejected religion.
It's only a certain type of secular person that has to convince himself that his moral intuitions are more sophisticated and therefore correct than the pleb who just goes with his gut on moral questions. And so he feels he must philosophize and construct towers of argumentation, all built on a foundation of sand, in order to self-manage his own moral psychology.
For me though, I don't need all that. It's all Pascal's "discussing to pass an hour."
I could just leave it at that, but there's still something uniquely annoying to me about utilitarianism, which is why I enjoy takedowns of it. I think it's captured in some of Laird's discussion. I firmly believe that people who conclude bug feelings matter WANT to conclude that bug feelings matter, just as much as I want to conclude they don't. There is an intellectual smugness to all of it, when, as I said, all of it is just psychological self-management in the end, no better than the guy who goes with his gut on all moral questions. And it's BAD self-management. If nothing really matters, I would advise self-managing by just getting over yourself and accepting that bugs are bugs instead of analyzing the micro-utils of pain they might or might not be experiencing.
I appreciate that Bentham’s Bulldog’s obsession with the Shrimp Welfare Society has driven people to come up with actual explanations of animal vs human welfare.
This is a very persuasive argument from the premise that we value meaning. One could nevertheless contend that it is not sufficient to ground a moral argument in the fact that we happen to value meaning; one must show that we ought to value meaning above all else. I would argue that this can be proven a priori. A persistent objector may contend further that valuing the welfare of shrimp is also evidently meaningful to some people, and that the present argument is begging the question in presuming that it is less meaningful than other pursuits. Some deeper principle must be appealed to in order to show that particular categories of human-oriented meaning are more meaningful and therefore more valuable than any animal-oriented meaning. This would now be much more difficult to prove. One could, for example, appeal to the idea that all meaning is intersubjectively sustained (Discourse Ethics) by reflexive relations with other rational beings in the same communication community, and so our highest value is conditional on interacting constructively and communicating in good faith with other rational beings, and the more rational the better. Alternatively, one could argue that since all meaning is conditional on making sense, and the capacity for making sense is synonymous with rationality (the capacity to comply with the laws of sense), then it is rational consciousness itself that ought to be regarded as our highest value, an we should cultivate it both in ourselves and in others.
I think your 4th premise equivocates on the sort of pain in question, namely one's own pain in moral decision making, and the pain of others in moral decision making.
Another concern I have is that this argument works just as well for individuals who cannot conceive of their lives as a whole (leaving some humans in the dust). That is, it's far wider than only applying to shrimp. Thus, unless you take the term human and person to be synonymous, I don't see how you've demonstrated that humans matter more–at best, it's only typical humans.
Not a utilitarian by the way, but I can't help thinking that if the lives of wild animals are quite terrible, that we should step in to help them / strive to make changes with this prominently in mind.
curious how you define "very little moral worth." and if you would consider a newborn of equal moral worth to a severe retard given both are less than fully conscious. and if ones potential for consciousness adds value (which would be true for a newborn and not for a severe retard), does the value placed on a severely retarded human (or newborn) by another human add value?
Both a newborn and an adult retard are fully conscious in the philosophical sense of the word "conscious" meaning capable of having qualia, capable of having a mental experience.
A newborn has more value than a severe adult retard because a newborn will grow up to be able to conceive of its life as a whole and the severe adult retard will not.
as a doctor, i would argue a newborn is less conscious than most family dogs by any metric one could use to ascertain consciousness. depends on how retarded the retard is but if talking about someone with significant cerebral palsy (cannot speak or communicate in any meaningful way, cannot care for himself in any way, etc.) definitely not meaningfully conscious. neither the newborn or the retard is capable of perceiving qualia nor do they have a mental life with any coherent animation or direction. dogs definitely do. one way we know is that they actively dream. if you have a dog youve seen her bark and growl while dreaming. its very obvious they are having an animated, choreographed, directional, story-telling mental life experience.
personally i believe the only way to make consistent sense of morality is deontological and morally objectivist which appeals to traditional morality as axioms of practical reason, sanctity of human life being one of these axioms. (having said that, it is also obvious to me that it is immoral to artificially keep alive many severely retarded people for whom suffering much outweighs any positive or even conscious life) its a longer discussion but it is one of several arguments that leave vanishingly few alternatives to god as an explanation. the other being a necessary, non-contingent being to explain contingent things. in my view naturalism not only fails to explain both morality and existence, it entails contradictions in both.
I would simply choose to pursue meaning in my own life by trying to help animals whose moral worth society values less than the fleeting benefit they derive from eating them.
YES! I'm saving this to go in my folder of explanations for why utilitarianism is bad.
I'm not very good at explaining why I hate utilitarianism. I think you covered almost everything I dislike about it in one fell swoop.
Maybe this part gets me the most:
>In practice, people who hold this view, in their efforts to avoid bias, tend to embrace absurd views simply because they are absurd.
Right! If your logic causes you to think it's important to donate to shrimp charities, your logic is clearly busted and needs to be checked and re-checked until you find the obviously correct answer which you have known intuitively your entire life: shrimp are bugs and bug feelings don't matter. I'm clearly not a philosopher, but I should think that philosophy is more useful when it's unwrapping the reasons why obviously correct things are correct, and not so useful when it's constructing flimsy towers of nonsense about why obviously false things might actually be true.
"Philosophy is good when it affirms my base intuitions!" Yeah I don't agree with that last part but I agree this was a good article against Utils.
To be sure, I adhere to the Twain quote: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
But I suppose I'm inclined to think that philosophy, as a discipline, is a bad way of discovering those things you know for sure that just ain't so.
Hera already said it, but I would go further: this comment is entirely 'philosophy is good when it confirms my beliefs', and reasoning backward from your conclusion.
It's so explicit. You say you are "not very good at explaining why you hate utilitarianism", but that you're saving this for a folder of explanations to use, because its conclusions are so "obviously fake" that you need to prove its proponents wrong. Does that not ring any epistemic alarm bells? You know you hate it, you don't know why, so you go looking for reasons- even making a literal collection of them to help you get to your chosen position.
You even explicitly recommend responding to weird or counterintuitive results by trying again "until you find the obviously correct answer". Does this seem like good intellectual practice? Would you recommend massaging your methodology until you get the result you want in the empirical sciences, or maths, or any other field of inquiry?
If rigorous, carefully reasoned argument gets you to a conclusion that seems counter-intuitive, then yeah, you should be sceptical. It's very reasonable, necessary even, to double and triple check your reasoning, and make absolutely sure, and consider the "outside view" argument that we shouldn't often expect to be right and everyone else wrong, so we should have a low prior probability of any such strange conclusion as "shrimp suffering matters a lot". Discovering that our moral theory produces that result should certainly lead us to investigate further, rather than simply auto-biting every bullet and revelling in our radicalism.
But eventually, the reasoning has to win over the intuition. If you reject every result that feels weird, you're not doing philosophy, or any kind of truth-seeking behaviour at all- you're in soldier mindset, looking for arguments to support what you already believe. You may as well abandon all pretence of moral argument, if you're just using it as a vehicle to get to your predetermined conclusion.
At least the author here tries to make an argument of his own- tries to reason towards the conclusion, instead of merely asserting it because it's so "obviously true", as you do.
He's still clearly working backwards from his conclusion. There's no other reason to posit an arbitrarily large value for "meaning", whatever exactly that means, such that it defeats all pain and thereby evades the obvious moral demands of the empirical reality that shrimp probably suffer significantly and on a mind-boggling scale. But at least he presents an argument, and therefore an opportunity for his reasoning to be examined and rebutted.
Whereas you are epistemically doomed if you dismiss, without argument, any claim that strikes you as especially counter-intuitive, and investigate further only to find arguments for what you've already decided you know.
Alright, I wouldn't normally respond to this because I don't find the whole topic interesting or worthwhile enough, but you put in a lot of effort, so I'll say some things.
From all my exposure to it, I generally think philosophy as a discipline is overrated, especially when it's divorced from the empirical and from intuition. Not useless, but overrated. You can be truth-seeking without it.
But of all the branches of philosophy, moral philosophy is probably the worst. I agree with Pascal, who wrote, "It is certain that the mortality or immortality of the soul should make an entire difference to morality. And yet the philosophers construct their ethics independent of this. They discuss to pass an hour."
In the end, I see all naturalistic moral philosophizing as an exercise in psychological self-management for a certain kind of person with a highly systematizing and somewhat neurotic personality. As an exercise, it's structurally incapable of even approaching truth.
Religious people (and I am one) understand ethics as being revealed by the divine and may regard intuition and reason as supplements to that, but supplements limited by the guardrails of revelation.
Normal secular people just go with their intuitions, informed by some combination of their genetic predisposition and their inculturation. This is inadequate, from the religious view, but adequate, given the constraint that this person has rejected religion.
It's only a certain type of secular person that has to convince himself that his moral intuitions are more sophisticated and therefore correct than the pleb who just goes with his gut on moral questions. And so he feels he must philosophize and construct towers of argumentation, all built on a foundation of sand, in order to self-manage his own moral psychology.
For me though, I don't need all that. It's all Pascal's "discussing to pass an hour."
I could just leave it at that, but there's still something uniquely annoying to me about utilitarianism, which is why I enjoy takedowns of it. I think it's captured in some of Laird's discussion. I firmly believe that people who conclude bug feelings matter WANT to conclude that bug feelings matter, just as much as I want to conclude they don't. There is an intellectual smugness to all of it, when, as I said, all of it is just psychological self-management in the end, no better than the guy who goes with his gut on all moral questions. And it's BAD self-management. If nothing really matters, I would advise self-managing by just getting over yourself and accepting that bugs are bugs instead of analyzing the micro-utils of pain they might or might not be experiencing.
I appreciate that Bentham’s Bulldog’s obsession with the Shrimp Welfare Society has driven people to come up with actual explanations of animal vs human welfare.
This is a very persuasive argument from the premise that we value meaning. One could nevertheless contend that it is not sufficient to ground a moral argument in the fact that we happen to value meaning; one must show that we ought to value meaning above all else. I would argue that this can be proven a priori. A persistent objector may contend further that valuing the welfare of shrimp is also evidently meaningful to some people, and that the present argument is begging the question in presuming that it is less meaningful than other pursuits. Some deeper principle must be appealed to in order to show that particular categories of human-oriented meaning are more meaningful and therefore more valuable than any animal-oriented meaning. This would now be much more difficult to prove. One could, for example, appeal to the idea that all meaning is intersubjectively sustained (Discourse Ethics) by reflexive relations with other rational beings in the same communication community, and so our highest value is conditional on interacting constructively and communicating in good faith with other rational beings, and the more rational the better. Alternatively, one could argue that since all meaning is conditional on making sense, and the capacity for making sense is synonymous with rationality (the capacity to comply with the laws of sense), then it is rational consciousness itself that ought to be regarded as our highest value, an we should cultivate it both in ourselves and in others.
I think your 4th premise equivocates on the sort of pain in question, namely one's own pain in moral decision making, and the pain of others in moral decision making.
Another concern I have is that this argument works just as well for individuals who cannot conceive of their lives as a whole (leaving some humans in the dust). That is, it's far wider than only applying to shrimp. Thus, unless you take the term human and person to be synonymous, I don't see how you've demonstrated that humans matter more–at best, it's only typical humans.
Not a utilitarian by the way, but I can't help thinking that if the lives of wild animals are quite terrible, that we should step in to help them / strive to make changes with this prominently in mind.
I don't think that humans and persons are synonymous. I have an article on the human/person distinction which I linked to in this post.
Yes, I think that severely retarded humans who cannot conceive of their lives as a whole have very little moral worth.
curious how you define "very little moral worth." and if you would consider a newborn of equal moral worth to a severe retard given both are less than fully conscious. and if ones potential for consciousness adds value (which would be true for a newborn and not for a severe retard), does the value placed on a severely retarded human (or newborn) by another human add value?
Both a newborn and an adult retard are fully conscious in the philosophical sense of the word "conscious" meaning capable of having qualia, capable of having a mental experience.
A newborn has more value than a severe adult retard because a newborn will grow up to be able to conceive of its life as a whole and the severe adult retard will not.
as a doctor, i would argue a newborn is less conscious than most family dogs by any metric one could use to ascertain consciousness. depends on how retarded the retard is but if talking about someone with significant cerebral palsy (cannot speak or communicate in any meaningful way, cannot care for himself in any way, etc.) definitely not meaningfully conscious. neither the newborn or the retard is capable of perceiving qualia nor do they have a mental life with any coherent animation or direction. dogs definitely do. one way we know is that they actively dream. if you have a dog youve seen her bark and growl while dreaming. its very obvious they are having an animated, choreographed, directional, story-telling mental life experience.
personally i believe the only way to make consistent sense of morality is deontological and morally objectivist which appeals to traditional morality as axioms of practical reason, sanctity of human life being one of these axioms. (having said that, it is also obvious to me that it is immoral to artificially keep alive many severely retarded people for whom suffering much outweighs any positive or even conscious life) its a longer discussion but it is one of several arguments that leave vanishingly few alternatives to god as an explanation. the other being a necessary, non-contingent being to explain contingent things. in my view naturalism not only fails to explain both morality and existence, it entails contradictions in both.
yikes
Hey, can you check your DMs? Sorry that I didn’t see yours; I didn’t even know that Substack had a DM feature
I would simply choose to pursue meaning in my own life by trying to help animals whose moral worth society values less than the fleeting benefit they derive from eating them.
This is a solid argument, but will undoubtedly succumb to different underlying meta-ethics between you and the util.