Doing the Right Thing (Part II): Challenges to Utilitarianism

Paul Sheehy

1. Introduction

In Part I I considered the motivations and structure of utilitarianism. In simple terms this is the thesis that actions be evaluated morally in terms of their outcomes. The utilitarian analyses the right thing to do by considering whether executing that particular action or following some rule will promote overall happiness more than engaging in some alternative. Act utilitarianism focuses on the actions we take while rule utilitarianism shifts the moral attention from our individual actions to the rules we ought to follow. The task of this second part is to examine some important challenges to the utilitarian thesis. Utilitarians maintain that this consequentialist approach expresses a moral commitment to the fundamental equality of individuals and the demand that judgements be made impartially with each individual counting equally. Moreover, it captures the intuition that human well-being is fundamentally important and that moral judgements must be constrained by the consequences of our actions on well-being.[1]

The criticisms I shall address cover three facets of utilitarianism. First, I shall discuss what we might call the mathematics of utilitarianism and the impossibility of anyone ever being able to undertake the necessary calculations. Second, the appeal to rule utilitarianism as a plausible way of articulating the compelling consequentialism of sane moral theory is challenged by the claim that the rule version collapses into act utilitarianism. Third, perhaps the most serious set of objections to utilitarianism is raised. This is the challenge that very structure of utilitarian thinking means that those features which seem central in our practical and evaluative deliberations cannot be properly acknowledged. In particular, the role of a person's character and intentions and the relationships in which one stands seem to be relegated to a merely instrumental role in promoting overall utility. Moreover, the importance of one's own projects and the significance of the integrity of the individual cannot be properly acknowledged or accommodated in our moral judgements.

2. Doing the maths and following the rules

Act utilitarianism imposes on itself an unsustainable burden. It is beyond the epistemic grasp of an individual or body of legislators to work out the full effects of an act or set of acts and so to determine its optimality or otherwise. If act utilitarianism is meant to prescribe the basis on which we are meant to actually deliberate and be moved to act, then it simply misrepresents the considerations which figure in our moral thinking and motivation. However, it may be the case that the utilitarian commitment to maximising happiness and treating everyone equally and impartially can be realised through rule utilitarianism. The problem with this strategy is that rule utilitarianism is held to face a dilemma. Either it collapses into a practical equivalence with act utilitarianism or it is incoherent.

Imagine that there is a moral rule, R. For example, rewarding students on the basis of their marks. Suppose you are in a situation, S, in which not-R'ing would produce the best overall outcome. This situation suggests that R should be modified to allow for this exception, so there is now a new rule of R'ing unless in S. Now, it looks like the rule utilitarian rules will be just the same set of situationally embedded considerations that the act utilitarian must employ. If I am permitted to modify the requirement to follow the rule so that outcomes are maximised, then this just looks to be act utilitarianism. The one principle I ultimately follow is that of maximising the greatest happiness.[2]

On the other hand, if I stick to the rules even though I know acting against them now will maximise the overall outcome, then I am forced to act against the basic utilitarian principle. This amounts to a kind of irrationality or incoherence. Rule utilitarianism leads to the incoherence of grounding morality on the principle that we should maximise overall happiness while requiring acts which fail to do so. Or, equivalently it allows us to judge acts as morally wrong even though they would maximise the overall, long term level of utility.

Impaled on the horns of this dilemma we turn our attention from rule to act utilitarianism. The worry about measurement remains. There is also the issue of the metric of utility. In its hedonic, Benthamite formulation utility is just the sensation of pleasure, which becomes a more sophisticated and complex notion as Mill, Sidgwick and Moore introduce intrinsic goods which are not themselves reducible to sensation. As utilitarianism developed in the twentieth century the language of utility has given way to that of '(informed) preferences' and their satisfaction or to that of well-being and its realisation. The fundamental structure, though, remains unchanged. The right thing to do is that which maximises the outcome - whatever measure of utility is employed. The problem of measurement is real. Yet, perhaps if the principle of utility gives best expression to the equal moral standing of individuals and the demand that as such they be treated impartially and by the same standard, then the problem is just one we have to live with.

3. The integrity of the individual

However, the difficulties of specifying the currency of utility or its measurement are secondary to a range of considerations concerning the way in which utilitarianism treats the individual. As we have noted the intuitively compelling basis for utilitarianism is its commitment to equality and impartiality and to the view that it is a good thing to maximise happiness. Indeed, given that happiness is intrinsically valuable, it is rational to aim to have more rather than less of it. The family of challenges to which we now turn maintain that utilitarianism fails to respect persons. In particular utilitarianism allows, or even requires, obviously morally vile acts; it fails to recognise the separateness of individuals or the moral significance of their commitments, projects or integrity.

Consider a society in which there is an unpopular minority, which notwithstanding its unpopularity represents no threat to any other group and contributes positively to the economy and culture of the society. Grant that the systematic discrimination of that group clearly increases the overall level of utility (be it measured in terms of happiness or the satisfaction of preferences) with each individual being counted equally. Or, imagine a situation in which an angry mob has gathered outside the town hall to protest that the man who they are certain is guilty of a terrible crime remains at liberty. Indeed, so heinous is the crime of which he stands that the mob demands his immediate execution. Regardless of his innocence, the state of the mob and the consequences of leaving their demand unmet present a powerful utilitarian case for his swift hanging. For the bad consequences of subsequently discovering that an innocent has been executed may not outweigh the overall good brought about by his execution (or may not be worse than the disutility arising from the failure to execute him).

Such examples are common in the literature and in introductory lecture courses. Their aim is to show that utilitarianism allows individuals to be sacrificed for the sake of the greater good of overall happiness. Each individual is counted as one on an equal basis with everyone else, but their treatment is a function not of their moral status as an individual, but as a function of how their treatment contributes to the sum total of goodness. The moral claims one has just by dint of being an individual person are subsumed into an aggregative approach that simply fails to recognise the intrinsic worth and significance of the individual as such. In this respect taking into equal consideration the happiness or preference satisfaction of each individual does not respect the separateness of persons. This is the thought that persons are to be considered as having their own lives to lead in their own way and that this is a morally salient consideration in its own right.

Utilitarianism is a theory that cannot treat the commitments and relationships of an individual in the right way. It ultimately fails to respect the fundamental integrity of a person. Or, so argues, Bernard Williams in his highly influential critique of utilitarianism.[3]

You may have commitments and relationships which are important to you in a profound way. They shape who you are and frame the way in which you engage with the world. You may have a philosophical, religious, political or career based commitment and stand in relationships of love and special obligations to certain others. Now, while our commitments can be more or less enduring and the web of our relations complex and shifting, they constitute through time important strands of one's character. A life is in part formed by the articulation and pursuit of one's projects. Again, these may be more or less enduring and to varying degrees aimed at satisfying goals for oneself or to promote the goals and needs of others. These commitments, relationships and projects belong to the individual. When someone says this is 'my project' this has some prima facie moral force in the sense that a regard for the individual entails an acknowledgement of the significance of his project. Some of our commitments and projects can be so significant as to be the core around or through whose development one authors or builds his own life. One's identity and moral sense is enmeshed in the living of a life framed by such commitments and in the furtherance of certain projects. The integrity of the self is woven into a life with commitments, relations and projects. If the individual is to abandon or reject what had been so important this is itself a profound and important part of the development of the person. Such a change surely must come as a result of his reflection and attitudes to those commitments.

That utilitarianism cannot accommodate the importance of commitments nor respect the integrity tied to them is illustrated by Williams in two famous examples.[4]

In the first we are introduced to George, a rather sickly young scientist who has just completed his Ph.D. in chemistry. Married and with children George's health means it is difficult for him to get a job. His wife must work to support the whole family, which creates a great strain, particularly with respect to looking after the children who George knows to be suffering as a result. George is offered a well paid job in a laboratory researching into chemical and biological warfare. George is strongly opposed to chemical and biological warfare and does not think he could accept the job. He is informed by the chemist offering the post that if George does not take the job it will certainly go to a contemporary of George's who will approach the research with enthusiasm and zeal. George's wife has no particular objection to chemical or biological warfare research and they clearly need the money. What should George do?

In the second case we meet Jim, a member of a botanical expedition in South America, who accidentally arrives in a small town square. He finds that twenty Indians are about to be shot by a group of soldiers. The captain explains to Jim that they are a randomly selected group who, after recent protests against the government, are being executed to warn the inhabitants of the risks of opposition. The captain decides that Jim should be treated as an honoured guest from another country and the captain offers him the guest's privilege of shooting one of the Indians himself. If he accepts, then to mark the occasion the other Indians will be released. If he declines, then all twenty will be shot as before. It is clear from the way things are set up that there is no scope for Jim to attempt an action-adventure type rescue by seizing a gun and holding the captain hostage or anything of that ilk. Any attempt at a rescue would just end with the Indians and Jim being killed. The Indians and their families and friends understand the situation and are begging Jim to accept the offer. What should Jim do?

In taking the job or shooting one innocent person George and Jim would act in a way each would regard as undermining a profound moral commitment which is in part constitutive of their very identities. Utilitarianism weighs up the outcomes. It assigns a value to George's principled opposition to weapons research and to Jim's abhorrence at killing. However, George's guilt and sense of weakness if he accepts and Jim's remorse and sense that he can no longer live with himself if he shoots are not assigned any special status. They are to be set against the other consequences of the act and the right thing to do is determined by the overall balance of utility. The objection is that the decisions facing George and Jim are not ones about potential sources of utility, but about their moral identity and integrity. George and Jim are faced by a challenge to who they are, not simply what they should do. The utilitarian approach alienates an individual from their own commitments and moral identity. For such commitments are not merely sources of satisfaction or happiness, but integral to the sense of one's identity.

The undermining effect of utilitarianism on the integrity of the individual is drawn out by the way in which moral responsibility is assigned to the individual though the actions of others. If George does not take the job, then he is responsible for the enthusiastically rapid progress of the weapons research which follows from his decision. He knows the consequences of his refusal to take the job. Likewise, Jim knows that a refusal to shoot an Indian will lead to the deaths of twenty at the hands of the captain and his troops. The terrible consequences come about because of what someone else does. Yet, on a utilitarian account the responsibility can be traced back to the agent who refrained from acting. There seems to be a clear moral difference between Jim and the captain. Yet, that difference between the responsibility a person bears for his own actions and those of others cannot be clearly accommodated within a utilitarian framework.[5]

These kinds of consideration invite the response that the notion of moral integrity and the special place for commitments amount to a kind of moral squeamishness. There is nothing ultimately special about one's own commitments from an impartial perspective such that they should not be included in an overall determination of the consequences of an action. Of course, they are especially important to the individual, but from a moral point of view no single individual is special. Each person counts for just one. To be sure, utilitarianism may require us to act in ways that are abhorrent for those having to act and that can seem counter-intuitive. Yet, this is not an argument against utilitarianism unless there be a principled reason why 'keeping my hands clean' should direct our actions.

The difficulty with this response is that it is precisely the status of one's projects, commitments and the very idea of moral integrity that is at issue. In particular, the possibility of moral agency - of deliberating and acting for reasons directed at the right or good thing to do - may depend upon a rich psychology in which we have commitments and projects. To be moved by the needs of others and to see oneself as one among many, we need to possess substantial commitments that bind us to others. This is not to deny that impartial and high level principles such as the utility principle have a grounding or role in our deliberations, but to affirm that our view of the world is also in part shaped by the commitments forming us. These are not just accoutrements to the self, but central to its nature and, as such, inextricably woven into our moral thinking.

4. Accommodating integrity and consequences

I shall finish by adumbrating two rather different ways to accommodate the intuitively compelling force of consequentialism - the states of affairs produced by our actions must figure significantly in our moral judgement - with the challenge that the appeal to utility undercuts the importance of our personal integrity and perspective.

First, recall that rule utilitarianism looked promising, but that it collapses into a practical equivalence with act utilitarianism or it is incoherent. If that dilemma can be dissolved, then the force of the challenges may be blunted. Brad Hooker has argued that the dilemma is only apparent.[6] The rule approach need not rank systems of rules in terms of the consequences of people complying with them, but in terms of their accepting them. If there were widespread acceptance of a willingness to allow an indefinite number of exceptions and modifications to the rules, then that would undermine wide-scale confidence in the rules. On the other hand, the acceptance of a relatively simple set of rules not subject to constant contextual adjustment maximises the expected good over the long term. This would prevent the collapse into a practical equivalence to act utilitarianism. For people would stick to the rules across different scenarios.

Still, in sticking to the rules such a promise-keeping the second horn of the dilemma remains. This is the incoherence that arises when following the rules can lead to sub-optimal outcomes. Or, equivalently the rule utilitarian can judge an action to be wrong even if that action maximises the expected good because the action conflicts with one of the rules. The charge of incoherence can be avoided if the rule utilitarian can reject the overarching commitment to maximise the good. Brad Hooker argues that there is no such commitment internal to either the moral psychology of rule utilitarians or to the theory itself.

Well, rule-consequentialists need not have maximizing the good as their ultimate moral goal. Instead, they could have a moral psychology as follows: Their fundamental moral motivation is to do what is impartially defensible. They believe acting on impartially justified rules is impartially defensible. They also believe that rule-consequentialism is on balance the best account of impartially justified rules.

So, even if rule-consequentialist agents need not have an overarching commitment to maximize expected good, does their theory contain such a commitment? No, rule-consequentialism is essentially the conjunction of two claims: (1) that rules are to be selected solely in terms of their consequences and (2) that these rules determine which kinds of acts are morally wrong. This is really all there is to the theory — in particular, there is not some third component consisting in or entailing an overarching commitment to maximize expected good.[7]

A second, influential approach is due to the work of Samuel Scheffler and 'hybrid theory'.[8] The significance of the personal point of view and the possession of projects and commitments underpin an agent centred prerogative.

It is permissible for agents to devote time and energy to their projects, commitments and personal relationships out of proportion to the weight from an impersonal standpoint of their doing so. Agents would no longer be required to always produce the best overall outcome; each agent would have the prerogative to devote energy and attention to his projects out of proportion to their weight in the impersonal calculus.[9]

At the same time an individual is morally free to bring about the best available state of affairs should they judge that to be the right thing to do. Here the force of consequentialism is allowed to stand with the significance of an individual's integrity. The agent has a prerogative to maximise or not when her moral reasoning sets her projects and commitments against the course of maximising impersonally determined outcomes.

Now, it is important to note that this brief description cannot do justice to the sophistication of Scheffler's work or the subsequent discussion.[10] However, it points to the possibility of keeping the individual agent at the centre of moral deliberation and judgement while acknowledging the place of outcomes.

5. Concluding remarks

Utilitarianism is, then, a theory which gives expression to the morally important considerations of impartiality, equality and the significance of the outcomes of our actions. The major challenge it faces is that its focus on the optimisation of utility - however defined - ultimately warrants acts which seem obviously morally wrong or force us to abandon a commitment to the importance of relationships and commitments which, prima facie, appear of central importance in any ethical theory. The challenge for moral theory is to accommodate the apparent truth that consequences must matter with the equally compelling thought that my relationships, commitments and personal perspective must also figure non-instrumentally and in their own right in moral deliberation and judgement.

Paul Sheehy
Richmond upon Thames College
paul.sheehy@rutc.ac.uk

Notes

[1] In developing an argument for the maximisation of utility as the moral standard it is possible to identify two distinct types of argument. The first emphasises the equality of individuals and the basic demand that each person's interests be treated with equal consideration. Taking everyone as morally equal we decide what is right by judging which act maximises overall well-being. The argument holds that people matter and matter equally; each person is given equal weight; so, the act that maximises outcomes is the right one. Maximisation is a means of arriving at a decision which takes each person and their interests as possessed of equal importance. Something like this approach is found in Bentham and Mill. A different way of justifying the maximisation of utility is to stress the intrinsic good of valuable states of affairs. A situation in which there is more happiness than any other is valuable in itself. On this teleological (goal-directed) approach the main concern of utilitarianism is with bringing about states of affairs, not with individual persons. If we are to treat people as equals, then that is because it helps bring about better states of affairs. Few have attempted to spell out utilitarianism purely in terms of this second approach (Will Kymlicka suggests G.E. Moore may be a prominent exception - see Kymlicka's Contemporary Political Philosophy 2nd Edn (Oxford: OUP, 2002) p. 36). However, the idea that good states of affairs are intrinsically valuable is a common current in utilitarian thought. Important critics of utilitarianism such as John Rawls (A Theory of Justice (Oxford: OUP, 1970)) and Bernard Williams (in e.g. Moral Luck (Cambridge: CUP, 1981) point out that individuals are ultimately to be seen as locations of utility or as levers to bring about good states of affairs, and that respect for individuals is ultimate subordinate to a concern for the maximisation of the good. [back]

[2] See Smart pp. 10-11 in J.C.C.Smart and B. Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: CUP, 1973). [back]

[3] See Williams op cit. A more advanced treatment of the nature of ethical thought is his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985/1993). [back]

[4] Williams, Utilitarianism pp. 97-99. [back]

[5] Perhaps one of the rhetorically successful points Williams makes in formulating these examples is that, according to the utilitarian, George's taking the job, and Jim's shooting the Indian are not both simply the right things to do, but look in the circumstances to be the obviously right things to do from a utilitarian perspective. This adds further force to his objection, since we may think that this is not only not obviously right, but not in fact right at all. [back]

[6] See, for example, Brad Hooker, 'Rule Consequentialism', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) [back]

[7] Ibid. [back]

[8] Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982/1995). [back]

[9] Ibid. p. 14. Scheffler is at pains to stress that the prerogative cannot itself be grounded in a 'consequentialist dispensation' (p.15) to devote more time and energy to one's own concerns, commitments and happiness than to that of others. Here I shall not address the question of whether Scheffler is ultimately successful in providing an adequate basis. [back]

[10] Importantly Scheffler resists the idea that duties or deontic constraints place an absolute limit on what an agent make permissibly do. A fully-agent centred view would not only permit an agent not to maximise outcomes, but require that he not so in circumstances where that would require a duty to be breached. Yet, according to Scheffler it is ultimately very problematic to locate a principled basis for such duty-based restrictions. For, there can be circumstances in which the breaching of a duty (e.g. to not kill the innocent) can lead to the prevention of a far greater number of breaches. [back]