Morality and Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is the theory that an action is moral only if it maximizes pleasure. For example, a classic example, if you were a train driver and your train spontaneously failed causing your breaks to stop working and people were on the two junction tracks. One person on the left and five people on the write. Which track do you take? Utilitarians will obviously say to take the left track with the one person on it sacrificing his life to save the five on the right track. This is because more people would be happy with the outcome as the quantity of people is greater in five than one. However, is it correct to be able to condone killing this way? Not to mention other moral dilemmas of which utilitarianism would perhaps favor the side that is not socially moral.
Your thoughts ...
Your thoughts ...
Comments (32)
Namely how do you devise such an awesome calculus to define what is moral? There are so many things to factor in that decisions made by such a calculus are hopelessly complex and impractical.
Maybe when computers become sufficiently complex to factor in all the possibilities of said calculus in the real world, then maybe we could have some impartial arbitration of decision making also.
I completely agree. But how do you feel about Kant's way of resolving this. Instead of having to base morals on a man made calculus, Kant uses a logical categorical imperative in which he claims that there are duties that we ought to do regardless of there consequences. It is near enough the exact opposite to Utilitarianism because it is not consequentialist. So Kant clearly destroys the calculus because he has put in place set rules that do not condone acts such as lying. Whereas Utilitarianism would.
Yes, but Kant's categorical imperative doesn't deal well with morally contextually bound decisions. So, utilitarianism has the upper hand here.
Yes, but utilitarianism is more practical or flexible than kantian imperatives. So, under such an assumption it seems like utilitarianism is superior to categorical imperative moral decision making.
Yes, but the decisions made by utilitarianism would be more flexible on the grounds that it cares solely on the consequences and disregards the actions. For example, If a woman discarded his last amount of food intending to litter but accidentally throws it into the lap of a hungry homeless man, is this woman moral? Utilitarianism would condone this action and call it moral even though there was no moral act. This disregards the theory overall because it no longer becomes a moral theory does it?
It would be considered as an accidental moral act. Good intent or the desire to obey or abide by the utilitarian calculus also matters in consequentialist moral theories as far as I'm aware...
If you treat the utilitarian calculus as a rulebook to abide by, then the differences between deontologists and consequentialists kind of gets blurry. A little.
Agreed, but morality is based on a 'rule book' it needs to be.
Pretty much. And that's why utilitarianism is in my view better than deontological ethical theories. Because the calculus can always be worked on collectively, where deontologists are bound by what 'feels' right or are trapped in the is/ought problem.
Yeah, but think about it from the perspective of an individual. They're hopelessly confounded to.their own feelings and biases. Utilitarianism overcomes these issues by being able to formalize ethical conduct into a calculus.
Do utilitarian theorists nowadays agree that pleasure maximization is the best or only criterion of utility?
I expect the evaluation of utility is an open question.
Quoting GreyScorpio
Is there another reasonable solution to the problem as it is defined? Flip a coin, perhaps, or just leave the train running down whichever line it happens to be on.... I won't say choosing the left track is worse than leaving the outcome to chance. For my scruples it seems like the best course of action, however we might seek to justify it with moral models.
Quoting GreyScorpio
I wouldn't call it "condoning killing" to choose the left track or to condone that choice, in the example as you've defined it.
It's a reasonable attempt to do the least harm in a terrible situation.
Quoting GreyScorpio
That's where things start getting sticky.
Vary your problem to put more pressure on the utilitarian and on ordinary moral intuitions: Suppose the person on the left is a brilliant heart surgeon who saves lives and improves quality of life of individuals, thus indirectly benefiting whole communities, and trains other experts to perform similar feats....
Flipping a coin then leaves it to something else rather than the rules of morals. I was speaking as if I were a Utilitarian. They would choose the left side (One person) because the pleasure is maximized this way in the sense that more people walk away happy with their lives.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
The choice that has been chosen is evidently taking another life. Perhaps that was a bad example. Take this one for thought: A burglar intends to rob a house where an old lady lives. One day he breaks open a window to break in, but sees the old lady on the floor. In shock, he flees. The old lady awakes, it turns out she was unconscious because her boiler broke and released carbon monoxide, the robber breaking the window allowed oxygen to come back into the room allowing her to regain consciousness. A Utilitarian would claim that this is a moral act. In this sense is Utilitarianism not condoning the robber's actions to break into someone else's home?
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
It would be, but the thoughts that arise at the time is how many people are being killed. I'm sure the train driver would much rather being blamed for one life being lost than five others as it maximizes the pleasure overall.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Utilitarianism has been evolved multiple times. There is Act, rule and preference utilitarianism that make attempts to rid of the very problems that I am proposing. But, we haven't quite yet got onto the issues of those particular theories.
In the Fucking Trolley set up, somebody is going to get killed, no matter what. The conductor of the trolley will run over 5 or 1, and you will or will not push the fat man off the bridge onto the switch. Ghastly. This doesn't represent any moral system, it's a conversation starter.
Better to choose real situations to illustrate moral systems. If you are even moderately alert, you will regularly encounter real opportunities to make difficult moral choices. For instance, the beggar problem: How do we judge his or her worthiness to receive our (usually) pitifully small gift? If there are several beggars nearby, which one do we choose -- or do we choose all of them -- or none? How much to give? Does it really matter to you whether they buy beer or buy vegetables? (If you were begging, would not a few beers at the end of another humiliating day be rather pleasant?) Do you have any knowledge of poverty's structure? Do you believe that anyone can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps--no matter their personal history?
How 'moral' are our assumptions about other people's visible misfortunes?
This is interesting. So, in a sense morality is different depending on the amount of people that it effects. In which sense the flexibility of Utilitarianism is useful for many people. In terms of maxims, don't you think that there are so many rules for a maxim to be appropriate that the inflexibility forces morality to be set rules?
Again, sorry. My point, anyway, is that Kantian ethics is way too objective and as a result of this, it becomes inflexible. He has put in place rules such as the First and Second Formulation of the Categorical Imperative that cannot be denied or disobeyed otherwise you are being immoral.
Quoting tim wood
There isn't any. That's my point. Moral dilemmas are situational and I don't think Kantian ethics can deal with them effectively.
This situation is not very good exemplification of controversies related to utilitarianism, because in this scenario, there is no way for the train driver to abstain from any killing, he has to choose the side. So it's not about killing one person or not, it's about killing one person or five people. Most people would agree instinctively that killing one person is lesser evil than killing five people in the situation when you literally cannot choose not to kill anyone, regardless of whether they are utilitarian or not. Perhaps the scenario in which the person can actively kill one person to save other five or abstain from action and let five people die would underline the issue better.
I think that question about correctness is always dependent on the set of criteria we choose. That is, we cannot know if any objective ethics exist independently of people developing ethics. We may only have some conceptions on what is "right" or "wrong", and judge the quality of those conceptions by their level of internal coherency. Hence, the question whether something is correct of not can be answered only within the frame of certain ethical conceptions. According to utilitarianism, yes, it would be correct. According to moral absolutist who lives under the "do not kill" rule it wouldn't be correct. Both attitudes can be internally coherent, and we can judge just that, what we cannot do is to tell which of those attitudes is closer to "objective moral truth".
Personally? I'm not sure if I condone killing the way that utilitarians do but as a biologist I think that condemning killing independently of context is hell of impractical and incoherent if we opt for the value of life at the same time. Life is based on killing and every life form has to kill in order to survive. Heterotrophic organism, such as humans need to kill other life forms in order to gain energy, but even autotrophic organisms kill others, for example during the immunological processes or through competing for the same resources and allelopathy. So the only coherent worldview that always ascribes negative moral value to killing would be the one that consequently ascribes negative moral value to life on itself. For people who consider life to be positive phenomenon on terms of morality, the question should not be "if it's correct to condone killing" but "under which circumstances should we condone killing?" since that's inevitable.
Define "socially moral".
How does the utilitarian thinker know that he will yield the greatest happiness in this situation solely by the numbers of lives he will save? What information does he possess, or not, about those on the train and their needs or desires for possible outcomes? Maybe every one of them is against any form of killing, but also feel that one life is not to be discounted against a greater number. What if the lone person we feel gets the train is potentially the next Einstein or President of the USA? What if that person is just about to release a formula that will cure diabetes?
Not very artfully, I'm stating that the utilitarian thinker must make choices based upon expectations, and sometimes using a paucity of valuable information that can confound his reasoning, if after the fact. This makes the orientation on outcomes necessary in the absence of something more 'rigorous', in my view. Something like Kantian reasoning that says the outcome could be purely accidental and unfortunate as long as the 'intentions' of the person performing the acts are borne of the "Good Will." Few mention this all-important quality of Kantian ethics. Utilitarian ethics places the burden of consequences, I think unreasonably, on the person acting. And that person could absolutely act with the best of intentions, also of the Good Will (wanting more people to live than to die). Problem is, it places dying at the summit of the Great Mountain of ethical and moral values as something to avoid.
Perhaps your discussion needs to be expanded to rate utilitarianism against pragmatism.
As a previous responder has made clear, Kantian ethics/morality (the latter incorporated into the greater former) is merely a prescription for acting that frees the individual acting in Good Will from any responsibility....OTHER THAN acting via universalizable maxims and never treating the person involved as a means to an end. The outcomes, 'good or bad', are entirely irrelevant. To me, there can be no greater nod to realism. For example, a man attempting to rescue a child being swept along in a raging torrent, and does so, cannot be held responsible for accidentally knocking the child's mother into the same current while flailing about. What calculus would our utilitarian realist guru use to evaluate the outcome...a life for a life? Would the child be happy it had lived when asked years later? Would the husband and her other children be happier or sadder when confronted with the awful tally at the end of the day?
Okay, but don't you think that Kant had in mind, when claiming that Maxims must be universalizeable, that we must all abide by this maxim or 'rule' in order for us to be moral or for our actions to hold moral value. Quoting tim wood
I agree, the flexibility of Kant's ethics is lacking incredibly. Especially against theories devised by Aristotle and other theories such as moral realist theories.
In a perfect world, a moral theory would suffice the preference of every individual. I was simply giving another side of the argument to Kant's ethics, clearly specifying that its most damaging problem is, in fact, its inflexibility. I do think that theories such as emotivism and prescriptivism are much more specific to the human itself, which raises the question on whether morals should be subjective or objective.
What do you think about that, and if they are subjective, how do we put this in place?
So, If it is true that these non-cognitivist theories are ineffective due to the fact that morals become egocentric and judged upon the person themselves, then it must be true that you believe that people must share moral judgement. If this is true then you must believe that ethical theories - such as Kant's ethics - must be a set of rules that must be followed objectively by everyone. If not, then you run into a contradiction. If you don't believe that moral judgments are a set of rules then you believe that people can both abide and not abide by these moral judgments. People that do not abide by these rules are are then taking on the non-cognitivist attitude and judging based upon their own moral judgments. But, you cannot not believe this and also claim that Kant's deontology is not a set of rules because you must believe that his moral statements apply to everyone, therefore preventing them from creating, and abiding by, their own moral judgement.
This is not an attack, just an argument that shows how you seem to have gone in a loop of which you must believe that either Kant's ethics are a set of rules or that Emotivism and Prescriptivism are applicable theories - which you have just expressed that you believe that they are not.
Quoting tim wood
I find them inflexible in the sense that you are essentially forced to complete a certain action in conflicting duties. For example, Imagine your friend was ill with cancer and the only way to save her would be to steal an antidote which is in the possession of your mother. You are conflicted between saving life and stealing. Kant's ethics would say that you shouldn't use others as a mean to your ends according to the second formulation - meaning that you shouldn't steal the antidote from your mother. Meaning that you would have to let your friend die. Is this a moral act? Therefore, shows the inflexibility of Kant's ethics.
Furthermore, consider the axeman case. (Your friend is at your home one day. You get a knock on your door. It is a man with a sharp axe in his hand looking angry, asking for your friend. If you lie and say he is not in the house, perhaps your friend hears the man asking for him, he panics and leaves through the back door only to encounter the man after he left because you lied to him. Had you told the truth, perhaps the axeman would have come in the house looking for your friend and doesn't find him because he has already left. Therefore you saved his life by following the categorical imperative.) This is a prime example of how Kant intends for you to follow the categorical imperative, implying that it is a rule. If you were to break the rule it would have resulted in your friend dying.
Also, the fact that you must rely on your friend overhearing the conversation and leaving the house would seem too remote from actual happenings and perhaps too much of a coincidence. The reason why I use this particular example is because this is a popular example to support Kant's deontology.
I hope I have been clear enough :) If there is anything you are having trouble with understanding, please let me know and I can clarify.