Utilitarianism is cringe
Utilitarianism is cringe
Don't know if I am preaching to the choir, but with how much libs try to use the trolley problem to support their favorite war criminal, it got me thinking just how cringe utilitarianism is.
Whatever utilitarianism may be in theory, in practice, it just trains people to think like bureaucrats who belive themselves to be impartial observers of society (not true), holding power over the lives of others for the sake of the common good. It's imo a perfect distillation of bourgeois ideology into a theory of ethics. It's a theory of ethics from the pov of a statesman or a capitalist. Only those groups of people have the power and information necessary to actually act in a meaningfully utilitarian manner.
It's also note worthy just how prone to creating false dichotomies and ignoring historical context utilitarians are. Although this might just be the result of the trolley problem being so popular.
The problem with that stupid trolley problem meme is not that it implies utilitarianism, but that it's myopic question-begging that very precisely controls what is and isn't considered "relevant" information. Also it just plain lies even within that narrow scope about who is on the chopping block in a blue regime.
I'm mostly ambivalent to it, but I remember in a political philosophy class I took back in college, we went over what utilitarians said about US democracy, and it was funny as fuck to see all these jackasses shift from "yes, consequentialism is where it's at, the outcome determines the moral worth of an action!" to "... uh, actually it's the process that really makes a government democratic..."
Whatever utilitarianism may be in theory, in practice, it just trains people to think like bureaucrats who belive themselves to be impartial observers of society (not true), holding power over the lives of others for the sake of the common good.
Yeah that’s the problem. It’s fine in the abstract, but the moment rubber hits the road the question of “who gets to decide what the best utility is” throws a wrench in the work. Similar to “we should have a system where the most qualified candidate gets hired.”
It doesn’t help that the most prominent critique of utilitarianism is the Nietzschean “you’re holding back the ubermensches!” one, which is problematic on so many levels. So libs hear “utilitarianism has problems” and they immediately assume the person is a Randite sociopath.
Similar to “we should have a system where the most qualified candidate gets hired.”
Funny you mention that, I was thinking about making a post about how most bourgeois ideology just seems to be some flavour of meritocracy.
Both utilitarianism and meritocracy are imo the bourgeois ideologies that together form the justification of modern liberal/elitist society.
There’s a certain analogy there to virtue and piety under feudalism. The rule by nobility and aristocracy is good because they’ve been anointed by God, which means their rule will be moral and just because that anointing brings them closer to godliness. Please ignore the literal backstabbing and adultery they’re doing.
Meritocracy isn't really a 'bourgeois' ideology in the sense that it originated from favouring the bourgeoisie in some sense. However, meritocracy is still garbage, both in the sense that it is actually understood academically (i.e. broadly, where the relevant merits can be anything from one being skilled and/or knowledgeable to one being rich to one being an inheritor of a fief), and in the sense that it is understood more popularly (i.e. the skilled and knowledgeable people should be rewarded based on this particular merit). I'd argue that people should be provided for based on their capabilities and input (i.e. an old person shouldn't be required to work 16 hours a day, 6 days a week to be able to satisfy their basic needs, while a person who does more should probably also be given more). I see no sense in having some people live in luxury (at the expense of everybody else) simply based on them proving that they have some merit in the past.
RE the trolly problem itself and the application in voting, the libs are probably correct that a less bad thing is worse than a worse thing (tautological correctness being the best kind of correctness).
The way to side step this argument, on a simple utilitarian account, and which I don't really see articulated, is that we are not at the trolly switch. By arguing that the democrats should do more to reduce harm than just positioning themselves at 99pct of damage of the GOP, and aiming to create a block of constituents that could plausibly withhold support for the Dems unless they did better, you may create a world that presents fewer people tied on a proverbial trolly track, when you get to it in the voting booth. It's just of no use affirmatively broadcasting that you will support whatever the Dems give you; this very plausibly contributes to worse aggregate outcomes.
Hold on before I post this let me just consider every ramification of it unto the end of time to see whether it's good or not
But what about the utiles lost by taking the time to consider every possible ramification. MY PRECIOUS UTILES
ethics philosophy in general is full of chuddery. if you have a conversation with one long enough they get to tell you it's ok to torture one person if 8 billion people got a spec of dust in their eyes because of suffering points. deeply unserious field of philosophy.
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trolley problem
I'll spare a longer post, but it's all analytical and under determined, and any criticism of a leftist project can and is attacked under other various ethical theories as well (what'shisname's (good faith) post questioned if it was morally defensible to off the Romanov kids; he didn't do this from a utilitarian perspective).
A more common experience imo is running into accusations that leftist policies fail because they wrongly let the ends justify the means, not that they are too unconcerned w aggregate happiness (see aforementioned post/argument (from a_blanqui_slate?)). This is because leftist policies are seen as departing from a baseline of the distributive status quo, such that these departures, because they are almost necessarily not-pareto superior (ie, require a redistribution where someone must be made worse off), can always be argued to infringe on some ex ante Right, and are thus unacceptable on some deontological theory; of course, one could rhetorically change the analytic baseline, and argue that the status quo of distribution already departs and infringes on a prior Right, and argue for amelioration from a Rights based perspective; and which is again to say, it's all analytical and immaterial.
Daily reminder that virtue ethics trumps both utilitarianism and deontology for the simple reason that virtue ethics actually consider how people morally behave in real life and offers a solution, if an unsatisfactory one, to bridge the gap between how people act and how people ought to behave. Utilitarians and deontologists will write tl;dr essays on whether to pull the lever but do not have a single framework or methodology to account for people who perform the exact opposite of how they ought to act with respect to the trolley problem. In other words, the utilitarian has nothing to offer if someone doesn't pull the lever other than writing ever more elaborate polemics on why you should totally pull the lever. Even worse, the utilitarian has no correcting methodology to use if after convincing themselves that they ought to pull the lever, they don't actually pull the lever at the moment of truth. They don't understand that ethics is a personal quality that must be cultivated, which means that the utilitarian will continue to not pull the lever despite being absolutely convinced that pulling the lever is the right thing to do.
I think utilitarianism is more good than bad. It's one of the major ethical systems, and is often more satisfying than deontological systems or universalizing systems. I've seen Kantians get wrapped up in silly beliefs due to their categorical imperatives at least as much as utilitarian/consequentialist ethical floundering. The only meaningful alternative is virtue ethics, which focuses on the cultivation of the ethical agent, but that raises its own questions of how to ground the virtues in a generalizable way. I'm very interested in the attempts to revive virtue ethics.
Among the utilitarians are debates of what to min-max. For example, do we maximize pleasure and become hedonists? Do we minimize suffering like a Buddhist might? I think it's an interesting question, defining the "utile" in our actions.
As a Buddhist, I'm drawn to negative utilitarianism or 'suffering-focused ethics'. It gets memed on to a ridiculous degree though by people saying shit like "if you want to eliminate suffering, shouldn't you just kill everyone so they can't suffer anymore?"
and it makes the whole field of philosophy look like redditors.Utilitarianism and deontology are dead ends and offers nothing that virtue ethics doesn't offer as well. Utilitarianism and deontology might be what's debated in academia, but most people irl still practice a form of virtue ethics. WWJD is something that many people sincerely ask themselves, but far more common is making moral decisions based on past decisions made by people they trust or admire. It's often a parental or authority figure, and in this day and age, decisions made by celebrities are factored in as well. They seek counsel from people they trust and admire. When a friend asks you about a difficult choice they have to make that also has a moral dimension, they essentially see you as a trusted and level-headed person whose personal moral qualities (ie virtue) are sufficiently cultivated enough that your advice can be followed. Contrary to what utilitarians and deontologists say, normal people aren't vibing their way through difficult moral decisions but relying on a form of virtue ethics.
Gödel's incompleteness theorem but for ethical systems.
Ethics in general is a field that I'd argue can't produce a serious application in general in principle. At most, it seems to just be fun to think about. No state or other large organisation is going to just make a genuine code of ethics that puts people first and then derive the other rules from there in a way that can be enforced, and in the case of individual people consciously adopting any specific codes of ethics is just going to simply be a reflection of what they already like and dislike subconsciously.
That said, I'd argue that it's impossible to have a utilitarian code of ethics that is distinguishable from a deontological one, contrary to the popular perception, and every purely utilitarian code of ethics is going to be garbage that is no more insightful than just judging things ad hoc based on emotions. I.e. it's just going to be a vibe-based examination of morality of a thing.
I’d argue that it’s impossible to have a utilitarian code of ethics that is distinguishable from a deontological one
I take it you are thinking about act utilitarianism, right?
Utilitarianism and consequentialism in general, really. If one were to develop a utilitarian code of ethics, it would just be the same as a deontological code of ethics with the relevant rules. There isn't much actual difference between 'you have a duty to do what maximises happiness', and 'an action the consequences of which include maximisation of happiness is good', and 'a rule of ethics, satisfaction of which leads to maximisation of happiness is good, and so are the relevant actions', etc.
I don't think any theoretical model is gonna be able to perfectly describe the complexities of human ethics, let alone prescribe "good" actions in broad strokes. But any of them might be useful lenses to judge a situation by.
Utilitarianism is useful (ha) in situations like the prisoner's dilemma, where a selfish action results in less overall benefit than a non-selfish action, despite potentially resulting in more personal benefit. Most of us won't face the exact prisoner's dilemma, but there's frequently decisions to be made with a similar structure:
Some task has to be done, neither I nor my roommate want to do it. But I know it's harder for my roommate to do (for whatever reason) so the utilitarian action would be to do it myself because that results in less misery than if my roommate did it.
I have a pizza. Theoretically I could eat the whole pizza, but the second and third slices aren't nearly as enjoyable as the first. So sharing the pizza with other people maximizes overall utility at the cost of marginal personal utility.
I gain omnipotence and decide to construct a universe where one person is tortured for all eternity to avoid a billion trillion gazillion people from ever getting an eyelash stuck in their eyes. This maximizes utility because a billion trillion gazillion times negative 0.01 utils outweighs 1 times negative 1000 utils.
I don’t think any theoretical model is gonna be able to perfectly describe the complexities of human ethics, let alone prescribe “good” actions in broad strokes. But any of them might be useful lenses to judge a situation by.
Maybe this is just the lingering influence of my days when I was a fan of Max Stirner, but both of those tasks seem to be kind of pointless and impossible.
Right away, by making moral theories into lenses, or tools to be picked and chosen, you have undermined their imperative power.
Essentially, you have just kicked the can down the road, because we now need a meta moral theory to determine which moral theory produces the best outcome for which situation.
Really, hume's guillotine (one cannot derive an ought statement from an is statement) kills any rational or empirical approach to morality dead in its tracks.
undermined their imperative power.
Maybe this is me being a vulgar materialist but on a larger scale I think ethical considerations are mostly normative and derived from power relations, and superstructural. There's a strong tension to define right and wrong around whatever material/class interests are at play.
It's good that there's people thinking about ethics and trying to hash out detailed and coherent models and whatnot, but I think for most if not all people ethics is gonna be very vibey and dynamic, maybe instinctive or intuitive.
Which meshes, I think, with your final statement. Actually-existing ethics isn't particularly scientific nor mathematical. Imo it's constantly being produced between people at every level of relationship, and philosophical models are tools that help us communicate and hone in on ethical concepts, perhaps identify contradictions and power dynamics.
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intellectually I'm a moral nihilist
practically I'm some sort of consequentialist.
I never upbeared a post so quickly just upon seeing the title
Utilitarianism is just "the ends justifies the means" laundered through 19th century English hippies.
'The ends justify the means' is actually a(n undeservedly-maligned) good take. The ends are a primary thing that determines what means are appropriate, and I'm not sure how anybody can argue against this.
Utilitarianism is just garbage that is no more insightful than vibes-based examination of actions.
This is exactly how I feel, and is only a problem to liberals (I mean philosophical liberals) who don't understand that certain ends can only be reached by certain means, and conversely certain means can never reach certain ends.
They live in a reality where "authoritarian" measures like a one-party state are just the personal preference of dictatorial leaders who are misguided or evil and who could have just chosen to be "good" instead, rather than those measures being the only way to survive the imperial onslaught.
Utilitarianism is just “the ends justifies the means” laundered
Laundered? I thought utilitarians were pretty open about being concequentialists. When I was a utilitarian, I thought this was just obvious.
In the sense that they force it all through a tiny tube called "happiness" tha means whatever they want.
Yes.