And here’s another hypothetical: raping the unconscious. Remember that French guy who drugged his wife and let other guys rape her? Most of us think this is abhorrent and that almost no punishment would be severe enough for him.
But to the utilitarian, it was just fine, at least until she found out. After all, she didn’t know and therefore suffered no distress. And all those guys got pleasure! So maybe he added utility to the world!
Now if he’d done something really evil, like eating shrimp, we could clamp down on him.
Several advanced civilizations from the middle east seem to have used the deductive reasoning gained from their philosophical golden age to work this one out
This was funny, but I always feel the urge to clarify that golden age Islamic philosophers had their most profound influence on Europe rather than the Islamic world, and mostly came from Spain and Central Asia.
Persia at this time continued into central asia. Al-Khwarizmi, Avicenna, Al-Farabi, Ferdowsi, and Omar Khayyam were all from the far eastern regions of Persia -- Chorasmia, Khorasan, and Transoxana. The closest parallel today would probably be Tadjiks. These regions were utterly devastated by the Mongol invasions, so today are mostly Turkic (with the exception of those parts of Khorasan which are in modern day Iran, which I think Ferdowsi hailed from)
Al-Khwarizmi means "From Chorasmia", i.e. the river delta directly south of the Aral Sea, and I have never heard anything to suggest he was anything but Iranic in origin.
Simon, you are again understating the power of your own argument. We don’t actually know the pleasure of criminals is less than the pain of victims. Take, say, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Both were convicted of sex offenses and served time before beginning their careers as serial killers. They both knew the penalties associated with getting caught were severe and unpleasant. Both did it anyway. Their revealed preferences suggest they liked serial killing and the associated assaults a lot. I’d like to think the pain they caused outweighs the pleasure they felt, but there’s no way to prove that.
And I’ll add another hypothetical: suppose a serial killer limits his victims to people who suffer chronic clinical depression? They get the pleasure, and it might even reduce total suffering. Plus, the families of the victims would feel bad for a while, but they wouldn’t blame themselves and have the anguish if the victims committed suicide instead. So according to these utilitarians, murder of depressed people should be ok, particularly if the killers get an intense sexual pleasure out of it.
I find it unconvincing that rape is actually beneficial for the one committing it. Short-term pleasure, (or even long term) is not the same as utility.
If you assume pleasure is the same as utility, you’d essentially be implying that masterbation is morally good. Clearly it’s destructive for the individual doing it though, so you’re wrong.
What?!? In that case defining “utility” to mean “maximizing pleasure” is a sneaky workaround to utilitarianism (as that that is just their prima facie). Utilitarianism just means an ethical theory that focuses on outcomes.
Based on this, I think ”utility” is doing what gets the best possible outcome even at the cost of rights. The “best possible outcome” is not people having casual and sex and masterbating. Those activities are high time preference and in general shatter communities and society as a whole.
This isn’t a “workaround”. I’m just not childish enough to believe that short term pleasure has utility. What matters is long term pleasure, fulfillment, and other stuff.
(also, I’m not a utilitarian. I just think that this article uses a strawman)
The pleasure of the men does not increase linearly though. Would you rather rape a girl alone, or have to share the sloppy seconds of several other men of ill repute? I think you can best think of it as a piecewise function where the first part is something logarithmic, and then after the point where there are so many men that there is no hope but to organize the gangbang into a sort of "brothel" experience, it continues as the linear tangent of the logarithmic curve at that point.
It would probably take a lot more than six men for the pleasure of the rape gang to outweigh the pain of the woman. There is probably a more ethical way of doing this in utilitarianism where the pleasure of the rape gang DOES outweigh the pain of the woman more rapidly, such as limiting sexual contact to something less damaging to the body and spirit.
All of that being said, the core issue of utilitarianism arises once more. That there is no actual way to rigorously quantify pleasure and pain, and there is barely any way to even estimate a quantitative standin. So what's stopping someone from believing that even a one-on-one rape is a positive tradeoff?
I’d rather have consensual sex with a woman who is into it. My psychology is such that I’m not sure I actually could rape a woman. However, maybe the sorts of guys who like to rape enjoy the gang bang aspect because of the greater degradation.
Utilitarianism attracts counterexamples of this kind mostly because of its proponents commitment to hedonism as a theory of good/welfare. However, utilitarianism itself is neutral regarding the definition of good/welfare. If one combines utilitarianism with, say, an objective list theory of welfare that assigns positive value to pleasure only insofar it is fitting (presumably, pleasure derived from dehumanizing others or causing them suffering is not fitting), your counterexample disappears. In that case, rape would >not< maximize the balance of good over evil. Incidentally, Bentham's Bulldog himself holds on to such a nonstandard varient of utilitarianism.
Seems arbitrary to include shrimp welfare on the list but exclude human sexual pleasure obtained through inappropriate means.
In practice, nearly everyone who calls themselves a Utilitarian is also a Hedonist. Even if they pay lip service to non-pleasure goods, the vast majority of their discussion revolves around creating pleasure and avoiding pain.
There are some post-AI scenarios which exploit a similar pleasure-maximising loophole. For instance, just clone human beings and then hook them up to heroin drips. They'll be maximally happy. If consent is the issue, just manufacture consent via various means - reprogram people to choose the drip. Utilitarianism ultimately ends up this way.
Recently had a typical argument over “it was a good thing that Europeans killed the native Americans and built America”.
And I admit that it’s a fundamentally utilitarian arguement. What we did clearly violated deontological ethics. It was “unchristian”.
And I just don’t care. I’m glad that being unchristian to the natives created America and creating America made the world a vastly better place. I much prefer America to some alternate North America where they are still living as they did before the conquest.
I somewhat agree but the idea that Americans killed the Amerindians in order to build America is not really even true. As hunter gatherers, the Amerindians had an extremely low population density, so the land was pretty much empty - if you went to pretty much any spot in North America in 1500 and looked around, you wouldn’t see any people.
It’s not the same as the Zionist settlement of Israel or the Azeri settlement of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The math on this doesn't necessarily add up. Something can have diminishing returns but (its integral, or discrete sum) still grow faster than a linear function. Suppose the pain experienced had the function f(n) = 1+e^(-n). More generally, something like f(n) = a+b*e^(-cn) for constants a, b, c.
Now suppose the pleasure has the function g(n) = 1. You can easily see that the discrete sum of f(n) is greater than the discrete sum of g(n), because f(n) > g(n) for all n.
To put this into familiar terms: the person being raped would gradually become more numb to each iteration of individual isolated experiences, but crucially their pain would approach some constant which is not zero. So the total suffering would always be greater than the pleasure the rapist experiences.
Somebody being repeatedly gang-raped might also suffer from something like extreme trauma/depression for the rest of their lives. Even after the rape has stopped, the very intensity of this depression per unit time is likely greater than the pleasure derived by the rapist.
This is silly. f(n) = 1+e^(-n) does not have diminishing returns. It’s second derivative is not negative and it is not a monotonically increasing function.
If my communication skills weren’t good enough there, try the following function:
h(n) = n - e^(-x) + 1.
This has second derivative which is negative, and it is always bigger than the linear function
g(n) = n.
Anyway, I think the generic point you are making about hedonistic utilitarianism is true, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a name for this problem. It is not hard to make the math work out, just say “assume there was a person for which their pain function is such and such…”
f(n) is the pain per individual event, not the total pain of all events. Diminishing returns just means that the function is decreasing per event.
This implies that the second derivative of the sum should be negative. If you sum f(n) and then take the second derivative it will be negative. Anyway, there is no need to take derivatives. Just plot f(n) and you will see that the returns do indeed “diminish”
(Rather than summing, you can just think of the integral. The second derivative of the integral is just the first derivative. You can verify that the first derivative is negative.)
You're not taking into consideration how victim's and the perpetrators' feelings span through time. A (non-hedonic) utilitarian can divide the types of pleasure into 2 categories: discrete - sensations infinitesimally small in time, like orgasms and eating good food -, and continuous - the feelings associated with more fulfilling long-term things, like having relationships and being productive for society. They could then posit that continuous pleasure is infinitely more valuable than discrete pleasure. Thus, the long-term trauma that the victim suffers will outweigh all the pleasure the rapists might feel, no matter how many of them are there. And don't try to bring the "long-term" pleasure the rapists will feel to the table; there's a reason fat people never stop eating garbage while rape victims end up traumatized for life
A good counter argument but it implicitly acknowledges that there is some threshold level of continuous-time pleasure gang rapists could feel that thusly outweighs the trauma and pain of the victim, which I think we would generally all agree is morally reprehensible. Rape isn’t, for example, less bad when the rapist is on MDMA.
Though I guess a utilitarian response could be that gangrape is bad because the sexually frustrated men have much better alternatives than that. They should just pay a prostitute to experience a lot of pleasure, make this ok for the prostitute because she gets some money and she consents to it
And here’s another hypothetical: raping the unconscious. Remember that French guy who drugged his wife and let other guys rape her? Most of us think this is abhorrent and that almost no punishment would be severe enough for him.
But to the utilitarian, it was just fine, at least until she found out. After all, she didn’t know and therefore suffered no distress. And all those guys got pleasure! So maybe he added utility to the world!
Now if he’d done something really evil, like eating shrimp, we could clamp down on him.
Great point
Several advanced civilizations from the middle east seem to have used the deductive reasoning gained from their philosophical golden age to work this one out
This was funny, but I always feel the urge to clarify that golden age Islamic philosophers had their most profound influence on Europe rather than the Islamic world, and mostly came from Spain and Central Asia.
Mostly Persia I think.
Persia at this time continued into central asia. Al-Khwarizmi, Avicenna, Al-Farabi, Ferdowsi, and Omar Khayyam were all from the far eastern regions of Persia -- Chorasmia, Khorasan, and Transoxana. The closest parallel today would probably be Tadjiks. These regions were utterly devastated by the Mongol invasions, so today are mostly Turkic (with the exception of those parts of Khorasan which are in modern day Iran, which I think Ferdowsi hailed from)
Al-khwarizmi was from the far North-Western part of Persia. He was an ethnic Azeri.
Al-Khwarizmi means "From Chorasmia", i.e. the river delta directly south of the Aral Sea, and I have never heard anything to suggest he was anything but Iranic in origin.
You’re right that he was from the Aral sea region. I was thinking of someone else.
Simon, you are again understating the power of your own argument. We don’t actually know the pleasure of criminals is less than the pain of victims. Take, say, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Both were convicted of sex offenses and served time before beginning their careers as serial killers. They both knew the penalties associated with getting caught were severe and unpleasant. Both did it anyway. Their revealed preferences suggest they liked serial killing and the associated assaults a lot. I’d like to think the pain they caused outweighs the pleasure they felt, but there’s no way to prove that.
And I’ll add another hypothetical: suppose a serial killer limits his victims to people who suffer chronic clinical depression? They get the pleasure, and it might even reduce total suffering. Plus, the families of the victims would feel bad for a while, but they wouldn’t blame themselves and have the anguish if the victims committed suicide instead. So according to these utilitarians, murder of depressed people should be ok, particularly if the killers get an intense sexual pleasure out of it.
I find it unconvincing that rape is actually beneficial for the one committing it. Short-term pleasure, (or even long term) is not the same as utility.
If you assume pleasure is the same as utility, you’d essentially be implying that masterbation is morally good. Clearly it’s destructive for the individual doing it though, so you’re wrong.
Defining the word “utility” to fit your prima facie conception of the good is just a sneaky workaround of utilitarianism…
What?!? In that case defining “utility” to mean “maximizing pleasure” is a sneaky workaround to utilitarianism (as that that is just their prima facie). Utilitarianism just means an ethical theory that focuses on outcomes.
Based on this, I think ”utility” is doing what gets the best possible outcome even at the cost of rights. The “best possible outcome” is not people having casual and sex and masterbating. Those activities are high time preference and in general shatter communities and society as a whole.
This isn’t a “workaround”. I’m just not childish enough to believe that short term pleasure has utility. What matters is long term pleasure, fulfillment, and other stuff.
(also, I’m not a utilitarian. I just think that this article uses a strawman)
The pleasure of the men does not increase linearly though. Would you rather rape a girl alone, or have to share the sloppy seconds of several other men of ill repute? I think you can best think of it as a piecewise function where the first part is something logarithmic, and then after the point where there are so many men that there is no hope but to organize the gangbang into a sort of "brothel" experience, it continues as the linear tangent of the logarithmic curve at that point.
It would probably take a lot more than six men for the pleasure of the rape gang to outweigh the pain of the woman. There is probably a more ethical way of doing this in utilitarianism where the pleasure of the rape gang DOES outweigh the pain of the woman more rapidly, such as limiting sexual contact to something less damaging to the body and spirit.
All of that being said, the core issue of utilitarianism arises once more. That there is no actual way to rigorously quantify pleasure and pain, and there is barely any way to even estimate a quantitative standin. So what's stopping someone from believing that even a one-on-one rape is a positive tradeoff?
I’d rather have consensual sex with a woman who is into it. My psychology is such that I’m not sure I actually could rape a woman. However, maybe the sorts of guys who like to rape enjoy the gang bang aspect because of the greater degradation.
Utilitarianism attracts counterexamples of this kind mostly because of its proponents commitment to hedonism as a theory of good/welfare. However, utilitarianism itself is neutral regarding the definition of good/welfare. If one combines utilitarianism with, say, an objective list theory of welfare that assigns positive value to pleasure only insofar it is fitting (presumably, pleasure derived from dehumanizing others or causing them suffering is not fitting), your counterexample disappears. In that case, rape would >not< maximize the balance of good over evil. Incidentally, Bentham's Bulldog himself holds on to such a nonstandard varient of utilitarianism.
Seems arbitrary to include shrimp welfare on the list but exclude human sexual pleasure obtained through inappropriate means.
In practice, nearly everyone who calls themselves a Utilitarian is also a Hedonist. Even if they pay lip service to non-pleasure goods, the vast majority of their discussion revolves around creating pleasure and avoiding pain.
Can I still endorse gang rape without endorsing utilitarianism?
This is why very few people are pure utilitarians.
The rationalists would never use this example.
There are some post-AI scenarios which exploit a similar pleasure-maximising loophole. For instance, just clone human beings and then hook them up to heroin drips. They'll be maximally happy. If consent is the issue, just manufacture consent via various means - reprogram people to choose the drip. Utilitarianism ultimately ends up this way.
Recently had a typical argument over “it was a good thing that Europeans killed the native Americans and built America”.
And I admit that it’s a fundamentally utilitarian arguement. What we did clearly violated deontological ethics. It was “unchristian”.
And I just don’t care. I’m glad that being unchristian to the natives created America and creating America made the world a vastly better place. I much prefer America to some alternate North America where they are still living as they did before the conquest.
I somewhat agree but the idea that Americans killed the Amerindians in order to build America is not really even true. As hunter gatherers, the Amerindians had an extremely low population density, so the land was pretty much empty - if you went to pretty much any spot in North America in 1500 and looked around, you wouldn’t see any people.
It’s not the same as the Zionist settlement of Israel or the Azeri settlement of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The math on this doesn't necessarily add up. Something can have diminishing returns but (its integral, or discrete sum) still grow faster than a linear function. Suppose the pain experienced had the function f(n) = 1+e^(-n). More generally, something like f(n) = a+b*e^(-cn) for constants a, b, c.
Now suppose the pleasure has the function g(n) = 1. You can easily see that the discrete sum of f(n) is greater than the discrete sum of g(n), because f(n) > g(n) for all n.
To put this into familiar terms: the person being raped would gradually become more numb to each iteration of individual isolated experiences, but crucially their pain would approach some constant which is not zero. So the total suffering would always be greater than the pleasure the rapist experiences.
Somebody being repeatedly gang-raped might also suffer from something like extreme trauma/depression for the rest of their lives. Even after the rape has stopped, the very intensity of this depression per unit time is likely greater than the pleasure derived by the rapist.
This is silly. f(n) = 1+e^(-n) does not have diminishing returns. It’s second derivative is not negative and it is not a monotonically increasing function.
If my communication skills weren’t good enough there, try the following function:
h(n) = n - e^(-x) + 1.
This has second derivative which is negative, and it is always bigger than the linear function
g(n) = n.
Anyway, I think the generic point you are making about hedonistic utilitarianism is true, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a name for this problem. It is not hard to make the math work out, just say “assume there was a person for which their pain function is such and such…”
f(n) is the pain per individual event, not the total pain of all events. Diminishing returns just means that the function is decreasing per event.
This implies that the second derivative of the sum should be negative. If you sum f(n) and then take the second derivative it will be negative. Anyway, there is no need to take derivatives. Just plot f(n) and you will see that the returns do indeed “diminish”
(Rather than summing, you can just think of the integral. The second derivative of the integral is just the first derivative. You can verify that the first derivative is negative.)
You're not taking into consideration how victim's and the perpetrators' feelings span through time. A (non-hedonic) utilitarian can divide the types of pleasure into 2 categories: discrete - sensations infinitesimally small in time, like orgasms and eating good food -, and continuous - the feelings associated with more fulfilling long-term things, like having relationships and being productive for society. They could then posit that continuous pleasure is infinitely more valuable than discrete pleasure. Thus, the long-term trauma that the victim suffers will outweigh all the pleasure the rapists might feel, no matter how many of them are there. And don't try to bring the "long-term" pleasure the rapists will feel to the table; there's a reason fat people never stop eating garbage while rape victims end up traumatized for life
A good counter argument but it implicitly acknowledges that there is some threshold level of continuous-time pleasure gang rapists could feel that thusly outweighs the trauma and pain of the victim, which I think we would generally all agree is morally reprehensible. Rape isn’t, for example, less bad when the rapist is on MDMA.
Though I guess a utilitarian response could be that gangrape is bad because the sexually frustrated men have much better alternatives than that. They should just pay a prostitute to experience a lot of pleasure, make this ok for the prostitute because she gets some money and she consents to it
There is an alien from Mars who will blow up the Earth if prostitution is legalized.