Utilitarian psychopaths

See also the works of Charles Dickens.

we question the close identification of utilitarian responses with optimal moral judgment by demonstrating that the endorsement of utilitarian solutions to a set of commonly-used moral dilemmas correlates with a set of psychological traits that can be characterized as emotionally callous and manipulative

Isn’t that the definition of ad hominem?

Economist as hipster: http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.com/2011/08/economist-as-hipster.html

Well, I only scanned the paper quickly (I should actually be working but it’s a slow day…) but I felt they were fairly careful about how they presented their findings. If you read the paper, the personality traits to which they’re referring in that quote would I think be quite widely agreed to be “emotionally callous and manipulative”, so I don’t see that this use of “can be characterized” is out of line at all.

Did I not once read about a study of econ grad students, before and after, that showed a sharp decline in some measure of empathy and/or altruism?

qb, was this comment addressed to anybody in particular?

qb +1

Also, if “the endorsement of utilitarian solutions to a set of commonly-used moral dilemmas correlates with a set of psychological traits that can be characterized as emotionally callous and manipulative—traits that most would perceive as not only psychologically unhealthy, but also morally undesirable”, should we toss the utilitarian solutions or revise our judgments about the undesirability of those traits?

Reading their introduction, their main beef seems to be with Cass Sustein’s claim that utilitarian moral principles are true morality, and others heuristic and fallible shortcuts to achieve utilitarian goals.

Jim Demintia,

Charles Dickens used the English language and is readable, so he must not be a Very Serious Thinker or Insightful Analyst.
But to be fair to academic philosophers today: I believe that the trend among them is to write well and clearly, avoiding dense abstraction-speak as much as possible.

More provocative than interesting.

They authors are at places properly hedged, like here:
“We should note that our results do not speak to
whether utilitarianism (or deontology) is the correct nor-
mative ethical theory, as the characteristics of a theory’s
proponents cannot determine its normative status. In addi-
tion, favoring a utilitarian or deontological solution to a
sacrificial moral dilemma does not necessarily indicate
that a participant endorses (or understands) utilitarianism
or deontology as a full-blown ethical theory—just because
an individual responds like a utilitarian would is not suffi-
cient evidence that she is a utilitarian. ”

But at several places in the paper they’re just a mess of confused normative claims. It will be interesting to read the replies, which will surely come.

Steve, do you mean to tell me you doubt that the endorsement of Kantian views correlates with traits that could be characterized as uncaring and dogmatic? Or that the endorsement of virtue-ethical views correlates with traits that could be characterized as unprincipled? I’m trying to decide if you’re unfamiliar with Kant and virtue ethics, or if you’re unfamiliar with the kinds of ad hominem attacks every undergraduate in the world comes up with when they first encounter those theories. I suppose I shouldn’t rule out both. I like social science, but it cannot plausibly be denied that much of it could be characterized as empirical arguments for self-evident conclusions. But if you want the empirical arguments, go do the study yourself. See you in a few years, once you’ve managed to lug that methodology up the mountainside. The view from up here is great.

Fair enough!

Steve and Chris at #6 and #7.

I parse the sentence as “X tends to be a not-very-nice y and X believes b. Therefore b is not optimally moral.” Which is closer to “X is a y therefore X’s beliefs are wrong” than to “X is a y therefore we have reason to disbelieve what X says”. But I’m an ex-natural scientist too, so my sentence-parsing may not be that great.

Also, what qb says.

I wonder how they’re operationalizing “optimal moral judgment.” It sure looks like what they mean by that is judgment that correlates with traits that most would perceive as psychologically healthy and morally desirable. That pretty much rules out every mainstream ethical theory ever… which shouldn’t be surprising, since one the main motivations for doing ethical theory is the thought that our pre-theoretic moral intuitions–mostpeople’s intuitions–are deeply flawed.

Separately, I would say that utilitarianism isn’t very appealing as a basis for individual ethics, simply because it’s impossibly demanding. If those doing the study wanted to do it right, they would have asked something simple like “Would you sacrifice your child’s life to save two people you’ve never met on the other side of the planet”. The utilitarian answer is trivial, but anyone who gave it would be way off any kind of normal psychological scale.

Utilitarianism only makes sense as a basis for public and legal decisions and here the cases is much stronger (though by no means indisputable). Governments have to solve trolley problems all the time, and the distinctions drawn in the different variations of the problem don’t work as advertised. For example, should a government refrain from building a railway because some people will inevitably fall on to the tracks. Is there a difference in the case where railways are privatised and governments permit, but don’t cause new tracks to be built.

that intuitively appear immoral

I have a hobbyhorse around here labeled incredulity constrains intuition that hasn’t been ridden in awhile, with a sticker slapped on it that adds … but mostly along humane contours!

People who are willing to pretend to be credulous about a live human body acting ludicrously in the mechanical role of trolly-impediment apparently demonstrate a parallel willingness to disvalue human life the way a scheming psychopath would, almost as if that life constituted… a merely mechanical construction in a pretend game!

I’m growing increasingly fond of trolley problems but only as a sandbox for nuclear-war-brinksmanship type games, wherein the only winning move is not to play.

By the way, I haven’t seen anything in a long time about the problem of the Utility Monster. Has the problem been solved, or has it merely gone out of fashion?

I’ve said before that it seems to me that the thought-experiments of academic ethics are designed to symbolically punish the vulnerable, emotional parts of the academics themselves, embodied and externalised as soft corporeal victims, who must (via convoluted scenarios) suffer for the greater rational good. And I would say not so much that the people who construct these scenarios are unfeeling, but that they affect lack of feeling: they as pose as cold, but perhaps they are a bit warmer inside than they would like to admit.

The famous SF short story ‘The Cold Equations’ performs a similar emotional function. it is not that appreciative readers are longing to put a girl in an airlock in real life, but they want to be the the sort of person who would.

30: That summary sounds about right. It seems like these kinds of misguided studies are coming out every two or three months these days.

31: I always found the “utilitarianism is a standard of rightness, not a decision procedure” line convincing on the overdemandingness objection.

35: Ditto that. I can’t even remember what the standard reply is, if there is one. I guess the easiest thing to say, which isn’t very satisfying, is that the scale of monsterhood you’d need doesn’t describe anything that exists in the real world. But empirical solutions to theoretical problems are so blah.

37: Also blah are attempts to change the subject from morality to psychotherapy. I mean, I see what you’re saying, and you might even be right, but nothing relevant follows from it, and it kind of comes off as another non-ad-hominem ad hominem. Speaking for myself, I’m a psychopathic utilitarian who tries to come off as a big softie trying to cover for his sentimentality by coming off as a psychopathic utilitarian.

A surprising number of the thought experiments given involve dilemmas imposed on one person by an order given by an authority figure of another culture.

The best part of this paper was taking the quiz at the end, just like in Cosmo magazines. It seems that the moral answers are obvious though:

For even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-states.

or even better: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084726/quotes?qt0454854

In conclusion, utilitarian people are cold like Spock and totally come across as psycho. They hardly ever give out hugs because they are just too busy saving people in ridiculous circumstances.

But back to appendix A. Can someone catch me up on why, in formulating moral dilemmas, the question always has “you and five others.” Even when the question puts you in a group up front, we get, “if the enemy finds your group, all six of you will die” or some such. I’m sure there’s a good reason for this and that all of you know it while I don’t.

Koenigs et al. Nature 2007.

Nothing to see here. Move along. The train passed through the station 4 fucking years ago.

@35 The Utility Monster is just a mistake, arising from a misunderstanding of what utilitarianism means (admittedly, one shared by some utilitarians). There is no utility meter that would allow someone to verifiably claim that they are a utility monster and therefore deserve more goods than anyone else. As geo says above, utilitarianism is just consequentialism with a couple of constraints
(i) everyone counts equally (which reinforces the a priori arguments against utility monsters)
(ii) only consequences that affect people count directly (I’ve put this clumsily, but I’m saying, for example that, say, “preserving the rule of law” can’t count as a valued consequence in itself, only as it produces better consequences for people).

I guess I’m a bit mystified but any notion of ethics as an endeavor aimed overwhelmingly at determining the rights and wrongs of discrete situations (save these fish or those fish, run over baby or rescue it). (I don’t think contemporary philosophers (formal sense) usually think about ethics in these narrow terms, btw. I’m sure a Plato or a Kant didn’t.) Ethics engages larger questions about the nature and goals of a human life and of human lives, about what a good life would be, about the kind of habits/practices and society that might best nurture the good life, (whether “society” is capable of such nurturing), and so on. Only in the context of such larger questions can rights and wrongs of discrete situations be weighed. Economics, like political science (and yes, psychology), should be intimately engaging these same questions but instead seems to take for granted, as settled, one version of utilitarianism or another. (Even though, except maybe for accepting a very general notion of “pleasure” as a good by definition, contemporary philosophers of ethics don’t give much thought to utilitarianism as a serious ethical system — at least, that’s my impression.)

Marcus P.: CJCollucci and Barry Freed above suggested that anyone who consciously and deliberately works through some sort of consequentialist moral calculus before making an obvious ethical decision (e.g. saving a baby from a speeding car) is “psychopathic’‘. … In ordinary social situations, we have no choice but to operate on the basis of our ethical intuitions, instincts, heuristics, or social conventions, and hope that they produce a morally satisfactory outcome most of the time.

J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, ch. 2:

“Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as this- that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity, because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments. The answer to the objection is, that there has been ample time, namely, the whole past duration of the human species. During all that time, mankind have been learning by experience the tendencies of actions; on which experience all the prudence, as well as all the morality of life, are dependent. People talk as if the commencement of this course of experience had hitherto been put off, and as if, at the moment when some man feels tempted to meddle with the property or life of another, he had to begin considering for the first time whether murder and theft are injurious to human happiness. Even then I do not think that he would find the question very puzzling; but, at all events, the matter is now done to his hand.

It is truly a whimsical supposition that, if mankind were agreed in considering utility to be the test of morality, they would remain without any agreement as to what is useful, and would take no measures for having their notions on the subject taught to the young, and enforced by law and opinion. There is no difficulty in proving any ethical standard whatever to work ill, if we suppose universal idiocy to be conjoined with it; but on any hypothesis short of that, mankind must by this time have acquired positive beliefs as to the effects of some actions on their happiness; and the beliefs which have thus come down are the rules of morality for the multitude, and for the philosopher until he has succeeded in finding better. That philosophers might easily do this, even now, on many subjects; that the received code of ethics is by no means of divine right; and that mankind have still much to learn as to the effects of actions on the general happiness, I admit, or rather, earnestly maintain. The corollaries from the principle of utility, like the precepts of every practical art, admit of indefinite improvement, and, in a progressive state of the human mind, their improvement is perpetually going on.

But to consider the rules of morality as improvable, is one thing; to pass over the intermediate generalisations entirely, and endeavour to test each individual action directly by the first principle, is another. It is a strange notion that the acknowledgment of a first principle is inconsistent with the admission of secondary ones. To inform a traveller respecting the place of his. ultimate destination, is not to forbid the use of landmarks and direction-posts on the way. The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal, or that persons going thither should not be advised to take one direction rather than another. Men really ought to leave off talking a kind of nonsense on this subject, which they would neither talk nor listen to on other matters of practical concernment. Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated; and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong, as well as on many of the far more difficult questions of wise and foolish. And this, as long as foresight is a human quality, it is to be presumed they will continue to do. Whatever we adopt as the fundamental principle of morality, we require subordinate principles to apply it by; the impossibility of doing without them, being common to all systems, can afford no argument against any one in particular; but gravely to argue as if no such secondary principles could be had, and as if mankind had remained till now, and always must remain, without drawing any general conclusions from the experience of human life, is as high a pitch, I think, as absurdity has ever reached in philosophical controversy.”

I like the justifications of the popularity and expedience of whatever morality, and I appreciate that such things are a uniquely human condition and experience, but the whole paper seems mathematically mundane. Of course economists would agree with it. More value is better than less value. If you value human life, more is better than less (perhaps). That is, unless you live in my country and you think darker people are worth less than lighter poeple, or feminine people are worth less than more masculine ones. In such a case you would prefer to have less of those types, and immigrants, lest your overall human value would decrease. (I like that the “moral” dilemmas take into account the idea of the foreign or perhaps enemy of the state as @41 bianca notes). Pawns are worth less than the other pieces even though they live on the same world. And yes, a psycopath would sacrifice as many pawns as a normal person if he wanted to win the game.

But I don’t care about any of that.

Just give me a link to a non-paywalled paper explaining why “one out of six” is important in morality equations (or surveys).

I’ll buy the assertion that someone who maximizes impersonal value is more utilitarian than one who maximizes personal value, and therefore said person has a chance of being predicted more accurately.

It’s about time everyone woke up to the fact that people who disagree morally don’t just think their opponents are mistaken, they think they’re downright immoral. It is thus quite understandable that non-consequentialists would see consequentialists as psychopaths.

Speaking as a consequentialist, I see non-consequentialists as narcissists.
They’re narcissistic, because for a non-consequentialist moral deliberation is a matter of asking: “Am I acting with a good will?” “Is my soul unblemished?” — In other words, “Do I look OK?”

It’s hardly surprising that these moralistic attitudes guide philosophically illiterate psychologists’ “studies”, but philosophers should be working on a higher plane.

I never heard of the utility monster before. It sounds like some versions of God.

A quick Google says this is not an original thought.

@Fall in queue:

“What seems most controversial in utilitarianism, in my view, is the idea of aggregation: the idea that there is some number N of mild headaches that is the moral equivalent of the most excruciating pain.”

I agree, but that only applies to hedonistic utilitarianism. Once we escape from the “Cartesian Theater” and look at agents’ preferences/choices in action instead of experiences, aggregation is only possible where preferences are commensurable.

Utilitarianism will have another lease of life when it can leave hedonism behind, with its silly hedonic calculus and the inevitable “sacrifice of the one for the many”. Utilitarianism should embrace the insights of the later Wittgenstein and pragmatist thinkers such as Daniel Dennett and Donald Davidson.

On the utility monster, it’s not that we lack the technical ability to construct a meter, it’s that a utility monster is a nonsense concept just like a “justice monster” or a “rights monster”.

@Chris Bertram:

“Utilitarians long since made the move from experiences, to desires, to preferences, to rationally-informed preferences, etc etc …”

They claim to have made the move, but they haven’t really made it at all. Almost everyone still habitually thinks of mental states such as desire as experiences — something whose strength is a matter of “vividness” (an as opposed to something that guides choice in action — hence examples of “extreme pain” or “great enjoyment” rather than actual avoidance). As Wittgenstein realised, what is needed to escape that habit is “therapy” — quite a long course of therapy!

Chris Bertram @ 53: More interesting, I think, would be the question of what conclusion we ought to draw if [the study] were true: options (a) reject U? (b) revise our view of apparently bad dispositions© something else …..

It seems to me that something like these “mistakes” about trolley problems or killing 6 fish species to save 20 would be predicted by a rule consequentialism based in part on the idea that our judgment is very likely to be biased in our own favor.

If it will be for the best that we all follow certain rules, even when our (known to be fallible) judgment says that in a particular case the outcome will not be for the best, then people ought follow the rules even in hypothetical cases based on the idea that we have absolutely certain knowledge of the consequences. That is, if we have the moral duty to disbelieve our own certain beliefs when those beliefs conflict with our rules, then it will require training to suspend that duty in purely hypothetical situations. Some philosophers are trained that way; but in real life, how many would actually push someone off a bridge, no matter how firmly they believe it will save five lives?

“Utility Monster”: Ah, that explains Jeremy Draws a Monster (Jeremy draws a monster and, basically, it asks him for all sorts of consumer goods before he decides to play with the neighborhood kids instead, it’s really quite a good book). I may make a collection of utilitarianism-related picture books (sorry for the self promotion).

I assume I’m not the only one to notice that under intercorrelations between traits tested for, “machiavellian” correlates relatively highly with “socially desirable.”

Chris B: Utilitarianism is a maximizing doctrine, it is indifferent to distribution as such. … There just may not be a unitary conception of well-being that will do all the things people want it to.

Again, Mill in Utilitarianism had an answer to this:

It is quite compatible with the
principle of utility to recognise the fact, that some kinds of
pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be
absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is
considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should
be supposed to depend on quantity alone.

If I am asked, what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or
what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a
pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one
possible answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or
almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference,
irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that
is the more desirable pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are
competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that
they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater
amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of
the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are
justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in
quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison,
of small account.

In admitting “quality” of pleasures, Mill is abandoning “a unitary conception of well-being.” By vesting authority in judgment rather than measurement, Mill is acknowledging that utilitarianism cannot do “all the things people want it to” — if one of those things is to deduce morality from self-evident first principles. He is asserting, in advance of Rawls and Rorty, the priority of democracy to philosophy.

To those who still feel the attraction of reasoning metaphysically about morals, Mill had yet another answer in Utilitarianism:

I might go much further,
and say that to all those a priori moralists who deem it necessary
to argue at all, utilitarian arguments are indispensable. It is not my
present purpose to criticise these thinkers; but I cannot help
referring, for illustration, to a systematic treatise by one of the
most illustrious of them, the Metaphysics of Ethics, by Kant. This
remarkable man, whose system of thought will long remain one of the
landmarks in the history of philosophical speculation, does, in the
treatise in question, lay down a universal first principle as the
origin and ground of moral obligation; it is this: “So act, that the
rule on which thou actest would admit of being adopted as a law by all
rational beings.” But when he begins to deduce from this precept any
of the actual duties of morality, he fails, almost grotesquely, to
show that there would be any contradiction, any logical (not to say
physical) impossibility, in the adoption by all rational beings of the
most outrageously immoral rules of conduct. All he shows is that the
consequences of their universal adoption would be such as no one would
choose to incur.

But someone who believes that doing either of those things is good will score higher in Machiavellianism, since they disagree with the test statement “honesty is always the best policy” along with “there is never any excuse for lying to someone.”

I am not much into these debates but I thought truly believing that “there is never any excuse for lying to someone” *is* a sure sign of psychopathy.

Chris: I guess I am confused. Could you explain?

Like Chris #69, I don’t understand JohnQ’s dismissal of the utility monster thought experiment as nonsense. Utilitarianism is the branch of consequentialism that aims to maximize the sum total welfare in the world. Any version of utilitarianism includes a theory of welfare. The dominant versions of the theory accept that intra and inter personal welfare comparisons make sense in principle. Given all those things, the idea of the utility monster is obviously coherent. As such it has relevance as a thought experiment against the theory and tempt a move to directly distributive sensitive versions of consequentialism.

On the utility monster, it’s not that we lack the technical ability to construct a meter, it’s that a utility monster is a nonsense concept just like a “justice monster” or a “rights monster”.

Oh absolutely nonononono. Maybe in Nozick’s original version, but Derek Parfit in Reasons & Persons demonstrates that for seemingly plausible assumptions, there is an actually existing Utility Monster, and it’s called “Future Generations”. One of the most important constraints on the equation in the Stern Report is that you have to parameterise it so as not to create Utility Monsters.

seemingly plausible assumptions

This is what I came up with from a brief Google search on Parfit’s Utility Monster. It seems to be a quote form Parfit:

For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living

Perfectly plausible. Of course, now that we know animals can feel pleasure and pain, it’s not even necessary that the “members” of the “larger imaginable population” be human. A gazillion vibrantly happy earthworms or bacteria would be a more desirable state of affairs than ten billion happy people.

Isn’t this a reductio ad absurdum less of utilitarianism than of the ideal of formalizing moral argument? By “formalizing,” I mean “doing without appeals to the imagination.” Given drastically different, apparently irreconcilable intuitions, aspirations, tastes, ways of life, etc., the only way forward is to increase the parties’ experiences in common. And the most efficient way to communicate experience is through the products of the imagination, where experience is at its most intense and concentrated.

@Chris and dsquared – it is a brilliant point. Of course, it’s a real problem and not just for utilitarians.

@Dsquared: You are right that the “tyranny of future generations” is a major ethical problem. But I don’t recall Parfit discussing it in R&P. If I recall correctly, the closest thing to “future generations” in R&P is a special case of a much more general paradox he discusses, namely the Repugnant Conclusion.

As I’m sure most CT readers already know, the Repugnant Conclusion asks you to choose between the survival of two possible future societies. One society is relatively small, but relatively happy and affluent (say, 5 billion people whose quality of life is roughly comparable the middle class in Western Europe). In the other society, everyone has a life of grinding misery, and finds continued survival just barely preferable to oblivion. But the other society is astronomically large. Say, 100 billion people. Or 10 trillion. Parfit’s observation is that, if we make “astronomically large” large enough, then utilitarianism (or anything vaguely similar) will choose the survival of the astronomically large population of miserable people over the small population of happy people.

Parfit plays with several variations of this experiment. In one variation, the astronomically large group is spread through time, rather than through space. In other words, you must choose between two futures: in one future, there is a single generation of 5 billion happy people, who live a normal lifespan and are then instantaneously and painlessly snuffed out (say, by a supernova explosion). In the other future, there are a million generations, each with 5 billion miserable people. I think perhaps this is the version of the “future generations” paradox to which DSquared refers.

Note, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion is not a version of Nozick’s Utility monster. In fact, it is almost exactly the opposite sort of problem. In Nozick’s Utility Monster paradox, we must sacrifice the happiness (or even the lives) of a very large number of people to increase the still greater happiness of one utility monster (or, generalizing, a small number of utility monsters). In Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, on the other hand, we find ourselves compelled to sacrifice the interests of a small number of relatively happy people for the sake of a much larger number of unhappy people.

Indeed, supposing you give the “wrong” answer to the Repugnant Conclusion, and insist that we should choose the world of 5 billion happy people over the world with 100 quadrillion unhappy people. Then your 5 billion happy people are playing a role dangerously close to Nozick’s Utility Monster. Indeed, it seems like any attempt to modify utilitarianism to avoid the Utility Monster makes it more susceptible to the Repugnant Conclusion, and any attempt to steer clear of the Repugnant Conclusion makes a modified utilitarianism more susceptible to the Utility Monster.

Of course, the Tyranny of Future Generations is a much more general problem than this particular version of the Repugnant Conclusion. The basic problem is that the interests of 10 000 generations of future people plausibly “outweigh” the needs of the present generation, according to any reasonable weighting system.

Also, as John Quiggin observes, the Repugnant Conclusion (and the Tyranny of Future Generations) are not just problems for utilitarians. They are problems for pretty much any ethical theory where the needs of a very large group of people can outweigh the needs of a much smaller group of people. That is: pretty much any ethical theory worth the name. And unlike the various Trolley Problems, in the Repugnant Conclusion, the choice is not one between action (pull the lever, push the fat man) and inaction (do nothing). In the Repugnant Conclusion, you must choose to either sacrifice the small group for the large group, or sacrifice the large group for the small group. You don’t get to pretend you can maintain deontologically “clean hands” by just looking the other way and doing nothing.

FiQ that’s exactly my view. Utilitarianism makes sense as the basis for social decision procedures, not as a theory of right actions for individuals.

This thread is so silly it’s drawn me out from lurking.

The problem with the utility meter isn’t that we’ve exhausted the world’s supply of love sensitive copper, from which the windings must be made, manufacturing love charms. It’s that there’s no such thing as a utility meter, because “utility” can’t be objectively quantified.

The problem with doing utilitarian calculations isn’t that you can’t complete them in real time because they’re an NP complex problem. Or even that we haven’t yet settled whether utility is a scalar or vector quality. It’s that the very idea of doing said math is nonsensical.

The problem, in short, is that utilitarianism is a perfectly satisfactory metaphor, which can never actually settle any moral controversy, because it’s only a metaphor, and nothing more.

@Brett Bellmore

We can’t objectively quantify utility but human beings are good detectors in some situations. Likewise, we don’t have an objective criteria on when a pile becomes a pile, or when a group of people becomes a crowd, but we know one when we see it.

Problems of that type are note exclusive to utilitarianism. Deontology would require moral knowledge from agents and in this respect it is understandable that we distinguish between the actions of a child and an adult. Obviously, a man in his thirties is an adult and a seven-year-old boy is a child, but somewhere in between there is an area of ambiguity. And we just put an arbitrary boundary of 18 years or 21 years for practical, that is utilitarian reasons.

Going back to utility comparison, it would be wrong to punish someone who has stolen a can of beer with 30 years in prison, because it would be a disproportionately severe punishment. As for whether he should spend a month in jail, or 10 days, or maybe he should get a probation, our utilmeter breaks and can’t give a definite answer.

CB: Mill is trying, in his late Victorian way…

Utilitarianism first appeared in 1861, which isn’t late Victorian at all–only just over a third of the way through her reign. Late Victorian utilitarianism is Mathematical Psychics or the later editions of The Methods of Ethics–by which time I’m not sure anyone much wanted to hold on to Mill’s higher/lower distinction: some of Mill’s earliest critics (e.g. Grote in the 1860s, Jevons in the 1870s) made the point that to insist on the distinction was to abandon the distinctive terrain of utilitarianism altogether.

“By the same method of decision, we might all be required to get up at five o clock in the morning and do four hours of head-work before breakfast, because the few hard-headed and hard-bodied individuals who do this sort of thing are unanimously of opinion that it is a healthy and profitable way of beginning the day.”

Don’t all rightthinking people agree on this?

If we try to put it in the context of intergenerational trade-offs, this will mean that the current generation, let us call it generation “t” will have to make a lot of sacrificies in the standard of living, in order to save resources for future generations

Yes, this was (iirc) Partha Dasgupta’s critique of the Stern Report.

FiQ – yes that’s a good point – the Utility Monster thought experiment carries an implication of inequality as well as the problems which exist with respect to the level of sacrifice that can be reasonably required. But the sting in that thought experiment comes from the fact that in factory-gate, unmodified versions of utilitarianism, there isn’t a “maximum level of sacrifice that can be reasonably required from any one individual”.

@DD This was Dasgupta’s critique, but his numbers relied on the spurious assumption that the risk-free rate is 4 per cent. Where the numbers are right, as in poor countries experiencing a sudden take-off into very rapid growth, we often see the kind of high savings rate that would be expected on the basis of (mostly intra-household) utilitarian calculations about later-born generations.

@ dsquared

So, obviously I got the argument correct. But then my criticism of it is, that the same logic could be applied to generation “t+1” and so on. At one point in time or another, in order to have an Utility monster, we need to have a generation “t+j”, which will be the first generation to start consuming the utility sacrificed by previous generations and will mark the appearance of the Utility monster. The problem is that what applies to “t+1”, would apply to “t+j”, provided that there are infinite number of generations. The monster will never come into existence, and the net utility will never be positive.

And if there are limited number of generations and people, then we don’t have an Utility monster. We are back to ordinary (if I may say so) utilitarian calculations among a fixed number of people.

The idea about the Utility monster is that net utility is always positive, because no matter what new suffering there is, the pleasure felt by the monster will outweigh it. This can not happen in a fixed population. There is, in this case, a limit to the suffering, which can be outweighed by the pleasure of the others.

61: “…and pragmatist thinkers such as Daniel Dennett and Donald Davidson.”
As a lexical rule, this leaves out CT’s very own dsquared. And why Dickens when we have George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda? We expect great things from this young man.

I think that’s right, that in practical terms Mill did want a world in which the population of competent judges was steadily growing, moving towards the kind of democracy you describe. But on the level of theory, I’m not sure I see that. The phrase he uses in Utilitarianism is that “from this verdict of the only competent judges, I apprehend there can be no appeal”. He could have presented the verdict of existing competent judges as a kind of hypothetical verdict, one to be ratified by–or appealed to–a future, more enlightened demos. But he didn’t.

I suppose I read Mill through the lens he provides in the Autobiography, where he says of his younger (pre-1848, say) self that “In short, I was a democrat, but not the least of a Socialist”, but that, over time, he and Harriet Taylor “were now much less democrats than I had been”, and with views “would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialist.” I’m not sure (because largely ignorant of Rorty) where that shift might fit into the idea of the priority of democracy to philosophy.

Chris Brooke: Your concern about “no appeal from the verdict of competent judges” is plausible, but I don’t think the context (the passage is in chapter 2 of Utilitarianism, for those interested) offers any real reason for anxiety, absent any other reason to suspect Mill’s democratic and libertarian commitments. Is the sentence you quote from his Autobiography a reason to suspect them? I’d say no, but perhaps I’m partial. Here’s the context (Autobiography, ch. 7); others can judge:

In those days I had seen little further than the old school of political economists into the possibilities of fundamental improvement in social arrangements. Private property, as now understood, and inheritance, appeared to me, as to them, the dernier mot of legislation: and I looked no further than to mitigating the inequalities consequent on these institutions, by getting rid of primogeniture and entails. The notion that it was possible to go further than this in removing the injustice — for injustice it is, whether admitting of a complete remedy or not — involved in the fact that some are born to riches and the vast majority to poverty, I then reckoned chimerical, and only hoped that by universal education, leading to voluntary restraint on population, the portion of the poor might be made more tolerable. In short, I was a democrat, but not the least of a Socialist. We were now much less democrats than I had been, because so long as education continues to be so wretchedly imperfect, we dreaded the ignorance and especially the selfishness and brutality of the mass: but our ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists. While we repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve, we yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert on an acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be, or be thought to be, impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to. The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour.

Lemuel: Thanks for the kind word, but actually I haven’t looked at the study or said anything about it. My little crack way back @26 (“How very odd”) was just a harmless (I thought) bit of anti-social-science know-nothingism. For what it’s worth, I do think (without benefit of social science) that most economists are, if not quite sociopaths, then at any rate … well … very odd.

Chris Bertram @96:
I agree with you that any implied contract by which citizens bind their “trustees” likely should not, on a deeper analysis, be thought of as purely utilitarian. I’m just trying to give a story (roughly following Taurek, IIRC) of where utilitarian intuitions might come from, on the assumption that interpersonal aggregation does not in general make sense.

… what I meant to say in my last sentence was:

I think both the Rawlsian counterexample to utilitarianism and Parfit’s use of a similar future generations counterexample in reply to those who object to the impossibility of a utility monster are brilliant points.

@ Slex

I read and noted those posts but was neither convinced by them nor moved to comment on them.

The whole point about the Utility monster argument is to show the untenability of the utilitarian position. It is not a critique of utilitarianism per se, trying to show its inconsistency as a doctrine, but the goal is to elicit an emotional reaction in the defender of utilitarianism. Nothing stands in the way of admitting the acceptability of the Utility monster in some versions of utilitarianism, but the desire not to feel and look like a monster yourself.

But the utilitarian has a cop out. We need ethics to guide us in this universe. To reject an ethical theory, based on its inability to deal in a proper way with non-existant situations would be the equivalent to reject Newtonian physics as a valid scientific theory, because it will not explain a universe with no gravitation. You can’t judge the merits of utilitarianism (or deontology) based on things that can’t happen.

If we go back to Nozick’s original argument – here’s the excerpt:
http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/nozick01.htm
he uses the Utility monster example in the context of humans eating other animals (there are also wider issues at stake, but I will ignore them here). The monster eats people and in the process it always gains more utility than the people lose. The net utility is above zero. Um – Up > 0. The current-future generations trade-off has everything to do with actual future generations benefiting from previous sacrifices. Without them it will be -Ut -Ut+1 -Ut+2 and so on. Net utility is always below and going even further below zero. It’s like running to the horizon and speeding up in the hope of reaching it sooner. There is not even a trade-off, let alone a Utility monster. It is a clear cut case for the utilitarian.

But let’s assume that this is not the case and that the above deliberations are wrong. How well does the Utility monster compare to the challenges of our civillization?

First, there are reasons to think that global warming could become self-reinforcing. A postivie feedback loop is at least a possibility. If that is the case, our generation should take measures now and lose utility, because future generations will not be able to stop the warming processes by analogical or even bigger loss of utility. That is, if we start taking measures now, they will at least pay off in the future. Chances are, that if the same measures are taken by next generations, they will not pay-off at all and there will be only loss of utility.

Second, how big should the sacrifices be? Here it should be noted, that unlike the Utility monster example, sacrificies of the current generation do not automatically lead to an increase in the utility of future generations. Some sacrificies will lead to benefits, some will make no change at all, others will be plain and simple detrimental.

And that is where the analogy breaks. Let us say that the Utility monster enjoys torturing people. First, it slaps the man in the face. The man feels pain, but the monster feels pleasure that outweighs it. Then the monster runs electricity through the man’s body. The man feels even more pain, but the monster feels even more pleasure. You get the picture.

Now, let us come back to global warming. If the current generation tries to limit gas emmissions, it will lose some of its standard of living. This could slow global warming and buy more time to develop better and environmental-friendly technologies. Let us say that the current generation makes an even bigger sacrifice by abandoning oil as fuel and going to sun energy, etc. This will slow the warming even more and give boost to the development of eco-friendly technologies, because the sheer scale of their usage will lead to better feedback on what works and what not. Future generations will obviously benefit from this more (compared to the benefits from the previous sacrifice – whether the utility they gain will outweigh the utility lost by the current generation is another matter; I will assume it is). What next? We can return to the preindustrial mode of production. This will obviously incur very high losses to our generations, but the benefits to future generations will be very dubious. Not only because it will seriously slow the dissemination of knowledge, innovation and technological development, but also because it is suspicious whether the pre-industrial organization of economic life will decrease damage, environmental pollution and the exhaustion of resources when applied to the current population level. If we take all this into consideration, most probably what we have done would lead to the postponment of the problem by a few generations, not its solution. We would be in the position of a long-jump athlete who decides to run not 20 metres before the jump, but 200, thinking that this way the jump will be easier.

Note also that the Utility monster, even if it were a possiblity, would not be a problem for some versions of utilitarianism. The one to which I subscribe (I am not a strict utilitarian, actually) does not measure suffering against pleasure, but suffering against suffering, and pleasure against pleasure. So, while inflicting suffering could be justified to avoid more suffering, inflicting suffering to bring pleasure to someone else does not. Of course, there are challenging dilemmas for this type of utilitarianism, but this Utility monster is not one of them.

Every ethical theory I have seen is either incomplete, or contradictory. Utilitarianism has its defficiencies, but it is better than deontology. In the real world (not just some imaginary one) duties often come into contradiction, and we should resolve this by either not acting (if it is an option at all) or by doing a cost-benefit analysis (i.e. apply utilitarian thinking). If lying is wrong, and murder is wrong, would you lie to prevent a murder? This is not an exception, this is an example of a categorical failing of deontological ethics.

I couldn’t find such a definition of deontology in the paper, but I have only skimmed it. I suppose it would be something similar to deontology with prima facie duties or the principal of permissibal harm. In my opinion this is incorporation of utilitarian principles in deontology, just like (but to lesser extent) rule utilitarianism draws near to deontology (more in effect than in motivation).

It’s possible, on second thought, that I’ve misunderstood what the authors mean by “constraint,” in which case I’ll also have to revise my understanding of why they mention that utilitarianism relies on “one simple rule.”

Well, I haven’t read far enough to figure out whether their argument or their methodology is going to depend heavily on the idea that relying on “one simple rule” is simplistic and thus related to psychopathy, hence undesirable. Or to know whether there is any upshot to the answer to that question. Answering those questions may require an intimacy with psychological theory that I don’t have. It may also be the case that their paper looks entirely different when you factor in a more sophisticated understanding of utilitarianism.

But my point was that the kind of deontology they defend, clearly, isn’t the kind that says you have to tell the truth to the Nazis about where Anne Frank is hiding. They could be defending an idea that morality is a kind of knowledge and involves a lot of separate principles that aren’t derivable one from another.

@ Andre F

<i.So apply that same reasoning to the Utility Monster. “Utilitarian ethics would not work in a universe with a Utility Monster because that universe lacks one of utilitarianism’s key assumptions.”

My point is rather that utilitarianism does not have to deal with utility monsters because we live in a universe, where the ability to feel pleasure is limited (at least that is what our experience tells us). The Utility monster is not a subject to such a constraint, as far as I understand it.

Slex @161:

But that misses the point. The contrast between the unsatisfactory outcome of utilitarianism applied to a universe with a Utility Monster, and the more satisfactory outcome of utilitarianism as applied to this universe, illuminates a key underlying assumption of utilitarianism.

That key assumption, illuminated by its absence in the Utility Monster’s universe and its presence in this universe, contradicts the basic principle of classic utilitarianism. That is, it turns out that sheer aggregation of utility insufficiently accounts for our sense of what actions are ethical – and it turns out that distribution of utility also plays a role.

I do wish you’d all stop assuming that ‘utilitarianism’ means hedonistic utilitarianism. We utilitarians are not all pre-later-Wittgenstein, pre-American Pragmatist, old-fashioned Cartesian nitwits, you know!

The idea of a “utility monster” poses no threat whatsoever to non-hedonistic utlitarianism.

@ Andrew F.

I guess that we will have to agree to disagree. In my opinion, ethical theories should be judged on their relevance in our world.

As for the distribution of utility, you probably know that there are versions of utilitarianism that incorporate it, e.g. prioritarianism. I am not even sure that it is a problem for classical utilitarianism, given appropriate valuations of utilities and the fact that the ability to feel pleasure is limited.

we all have to be deontologists in the end

Ha! There’s one in the eye for you, Chris Bertram! Vindicated by Brett Bellmore — can you ever live down the shame?

Herder pointed to an interesting implication of the aggregative kind of utilitarianism – it is inherently competitive. Perhaps this is what makes it so attractive in a capitalist world, and less attractive as we move beyond capitalism?

When deontologists are faced with conflicting duties, they dump one on the basis of utiltiy.

Yes, some certainly do:

Demand for [Robert] Kaplan’s unorthodox analysis became more popular after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. In his book Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, published shortly after 9/11, Kaplan offered the opinion that political and business leaders should discard Christian/Jewish morality in public decision-making in favor of a pagan morality focused on the morality of the result rather than the morality of the means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Kaplan

Which, incidentally, makes them sound a bit psychopathic.

@ Brett Bellmore

“Nobody does actual utilitarianism, because it’s flatly impossible. Impossible due to the utter and complete lack of any objective measure of “utility”.”

On the contrary. The criminal justice system is full of utility comaprisons. As I have written in post 95, if utility didn’t matter, and we couldn’t compare it, it wouldn’t matter if punishment for small thefts would be a month in prison or 10 years in prison.

An example for a very utilitarian government action can be found here:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,978031,00.html

Could you explain this, please. If I don’t care about utility, how does that prevent me from realizing that 10 years in prison for a small theft is disproportionate and barbaric?

It seems that the opposite may be true: if small thefts were to become a serious problem, utilitarians might feel like tightening the screws, and, perhaps, punishing it by 10 years in prison. Something like Giuliani and the broken windows theory.

Both caring about utility exclusively and caring about proportionality require being able to do intersubjective utility comparisons., even though they’re incompatible. (No human actually cares about utility exclusively – or, for that matter, not at all – so this is as hypothetical as the trolley problem itself.)

@ Henri Vieuxtemps

The point of the example was to show that people employ utility calculation very often (contrary to the claim by Brett Belmore that no one does actual utilitarianism). Of course, if you didn’t care about utility, it wouldn’t matter. Obviously, it matters for institutions, and as institutions usually reflect the opinion of the people, it matters for them, too. In opposition to the view that we are all covert deontologists, I think that we are all utilitarians in disguise, because we all compare utilities in one way or another. In my opinion, even sociopaths estimate roughly the utility/disutility that others experience, it is just that they don’t care about anyone but themselves.

Regarding the broken windows theory, as far as I know, it is about taking prompt action against minor crimes, misdemeanors and their artifacts, not about imposing harsh penalties for them. There is no utilitarian justification for imposing severe penalties for small crimes, because it will create incentives for potential offenders to commit more serious crimes.

Slex, in the society where I grew up serial rape is considered a much more serious crime than a bar fight. I’m sure there is a utilitarian component in it, but I see it as a result of social evolution. I imagine there are societies where serial rape isn’t a crime at all, depending on the circumstances. As an obvious example: if it’s a married couple.

I’m probably completely confused about all this, because I don’t see your example as a utilitarian calculation at all. Beating someone up involves physical pain and injuries, while rape (assuming it’s merely a forced copulation) is a violation of personal dignity, which is a social construct. If, in a particular society, it doesn’t exist, then there is no harm whatsoever.

@ Henri
I’ll concede for now that you really don’t see it as an utilitarian calculation, but still it does not become clear on what grounds you think that the punishment for multiple rapes should be higher than for a broken nose in a bar fight (if you think it should be higher at all).

@ bianca steele
Bar fights per se may not be criminalized at all. But their consequences, if severe enough, are. Do you think that the punishment for a broken nose should be different from the punishment for multiple rapes? And if yes, on what grounds. I think the question is pretty simple and straightforward. I don’t know why both of you find it confusing.

Consequentialism is fine, just not necessarily the notion for individuals to be guided by; not under ordinary circumstances, at least. We are trained to act automatically, without calculating the balance.

We are trained to act automatically, without calculating the balance.

We’re also trained/taught to not impulsively break stuff that would probably be hard to fix (where ‘stuff’ includes windowpanes, noses, and relationships). That’s a crude form of calculating some kind of balance, isn’t it?

Henri,
I don’t really agree with you (not to make a federal issue out of it–and furthermore this is really really really OT, sorry to pursue it), but I would actually be interested in knowing what you think of when you hear the word “indoctrinated.”

@ Salient

As far as I understand you do have a problem with the word “punishment” I used. According to me the purpose of punishment is first and foremost to deter. The acceptable period should be anything between zero days and any period which does not cause excessive suffering over the one it is intended to prevent. If capital punishment has approximately the same deterrent effect as 20 years in prison, then 20 years should be our first option. There are other considerations, but these are the most important ones.

The part about my interlocutors – I didn’t quite get it, nor what it has to do with the meaning of utility.

The part about my interlocutors – I didn’t quite get it, nor what it has to do with the meaning of utility.

What is the meaning of utility?

If you can’t imagine a justification for punishment/determent/whatever that doesn’t rely on utility, you’re facing one of two problems: either your definition of ‘utility’ is so absurdly broad that it sweeps up all possible justifications for detaining someone, or your imagination is impoverished. I think I’m being reasonable in assuming the former, right?

@ Salient

I can’t imagine a plausible justification for the differences in the punishments (in the cases of the broken nose and serial rape) that does not involve utility comparisons. And no one has come up with one so far in the thread.

And no one has come up with one so far in the thread.

Well, in a way, that’s a point against you. Suppose I say, “I can’t envision any justification for taxes that doesn’t rely on hippogryff.” You would be inclined to reply: well, uh, one of two things is going on — either your definition of that word hippogryff is so broad that it’s not a useful word, or your ability to envision things is really weirdly skewed. Probably the former.”

It would make sense if you said, “here are three justifications for punishment that are not based on utility, X, Y, Z, and I think all of them are horrible” — then we could at least get down to specifics. As it is, it sounds like you’re meaning ‘utility’ to be something as general as ‘whatever we think is good for society overall’ which is too broad to be useful. And if you mean something more specific, then specifying it carefully should help you come up with examples on your own of non-utilitarian justifications for punishment (not to say I’m unwilling to help, as I think this is interesting enough as it goes, but it’s impossible for any of us to help if your definition of utility is unspecified and seems too broad for us to nail down).

@ Salient

Regarding #168

You seem to be conflating punishment and corporal punishment. Imprisonment is certainly a form of punishment, though not corporal. I personally have nothing against corporal punishment, as long as it is optional for the offender (i.e. he can choose between 1 year in prison or 50 lashes) but I don’t think it should be done in public.

What works and what doesn’t work well in terms of deterrence is an empirical matter. But potential lawbreakers do pay attention to the consequences – to what extent depending on the type of crime. Expected punishment would deter more in planned crimes, not in crimes of passion. The probability of being caught is just as important, if not more, than the punishment itself. We have also other factors such us biological and socio-cultural that provide the framework within which the choice whether to commit the crime is taken. But to say that punishment does not matter

The paper isn’t really about utilitarianism. The examples are, in the first instance, about doing/allowing, double effect, novus actus, etc., and by concerning themselves solely with generic deaths, they exclude any distinctive role for ‘utility’.

Bianca, I think it’s one of those things where we instill values in our children, while they indoctrinate. So, I’ll say: it’s all indoctrination, whether you raise them to be good Anabaptists, or good Satan worshipers, or good secular humanists and freethinkers. Same shit, different doctrines (or ‘memes’, if you wish).

What you’re doing here is conflating “utilitarianism” with “caring about other people”. While it is indeed quite common to care about other people, it is exceedingly rare to, for instance, take seriously the idea that you should live on instant ramen so as to maximize your charity to the worst off in the world. Or, in dating a beautiful woman, wonder if there was somebody else out there who’d enjoy her company more. Or seriously contemplate covertly killing unloved orphans so as to increase the supply of transplant organs without causing too much grief to families.

These latter, conspicuously not engaged in practices are consequences of the structure of utilitarianism, which is universal, in that it implies duties towards people you’ve never met that are equal to those you might have to your acquaintances, and reliant on formal, pseudo-objective math-like interpersonal comparisons. Three hamburgers – a stubbed toe = an orgasm type reasoning.

Which nobody engages in, because they don’t have the numbers to do the math on.

So, no, I stand by my position: Nobo

172: Mark Kleiman has published some interesting research on this – there doesn’t seem to be much if any relationship between the severity of punishment and the rate of a lot of crimes, but there is a strong relationship between the crime rate and the detection rate. I.e. criminals don’t think “how many years will I get?” but “will I get away with it?”

There’s quite a lot of uncertainty about what will happen in the courts, but it’s certain as can be that getting arrested is no fun and involves lots of pointless hanging about waiting for hearings and perhaps also unofficial police brutality. If you’re actually living by crime, of course, it means you’re off the streets and essentially unemployed for a while whatever happens. Also, what sentence you get is not completely out of your control, especially in countries where plea-bargaining is practiced.

So it’s quite rational to worry more about the chances of getting caught than about the sentence you’re likely to get.

And what do non-’criminals’ think? They are also deterred who stay in line.

Less important in practice than in theory – something like 90% of crime is committed by the top few % of the criminality distribution.

@ Andre F.

As I have written before, a classical utilitarian has no reason to reject the Utility monster, other than on emotional basis. If he/she is logically consistent, he should accept it as the morally superior position.

The point is not that what you say here is not true:
When a theory fails to explain why its produced outcome for a logically possible situation seems ethically unsound, this is a mark against it, since it means that – for some sets of facts – the theory does not accord with deeply held moral intuitions.

Besides, as it has already been mentioned the Utility monster is not a problem for several versions of utilitarianism.

On a second thought, I am willing to reconsider some of what I’ve written about the crimes of passion.

Or – just for balance – to stand by as five are killed so as to avoid being personally implicated in killing one (to make things clearer, stipulate that the one is also among the five, perhaps?)

But any reasonably sophisticated approach to utilitarianism as an organising principle (Mill, Hare, Feldman spring to mind) would of course take into account the many conclusive reasons not to apply ticking time bomb fantasies to the real world. And epistemic limitations will also apply to discerning the nature of acts for deontological purposes – thou shalt not impose risk of death?

I suppose the point I had in mind was that the examples themselves were designed as abstract debating points stipulated to depict closed systems with various unrealistic assumptions such as perfect foreknowledge, and that the original paper didn’t specify any such presuppositions. Nor did it try to ascertain whether respondents took the examples in that spirit, or whether they very understandably introduced (consciously or not) the kind of wider considerations that you mention.

In the paper, the respondents were asked to imagine themselves in the proposed situation, so not only would this tend to encourage the introduction of real-world (consequentialist) factors you mention, but in particular would tend to require people to consider whether they personally would have the stomach to directly kill.

Programnmatic remarks on the wider issue:

Actual moral practice and intuition tends to combine, in varying proportions according to circumstances and framing, the interrelated categories:

1. default simple absolute rules based on a characterisation of ‘the act itself’, as Jonathan Bennett would put it, that incorporates certain ways of thinking about personal moral responsibility – the verb

2. the cultivation and instantiation of personal virtues – the subject

3. a direct pragmatic assessment of actual predicted consequences – the object

Consequentialism as a programme is then the approach which holds that if one wants to explain and possibly revise these practices and intuitions, then consequences in the broadest sense must in the end be the arbiter – or as on might say , conseuqnces are the only element that can subsume the others, or that can never be eliminated without making the whole enterpise senseless.

the many conclusive reasons not to apply ticking time bomb fantasies to the real world

or rather not to misapply them. One way this gets done, besides failing to reintroduce the epistemic and other limitations that are stipulated away by ‘thought experment’ type debating points, is by reading off state policy and law directly from personal ethics.

“Would you sacrifice the life of an innocent person to save the rest of humanity? No, if you are a deontologist.”

No, if you are sane. How often do situtations that require killing one innocent person to save the rest of humanity come up? Once a month, and twice on leap years? No, they’re so wildly improbable that, should you perceive yourself to be in one, the only rational conclusion to draw is that you’ve suffered some kind of psychotic breakdown, and that you should curl up into a ball, while waiting for the men in white coats to snap you out of it.

Sure, it’s a real pity if that Presidential candidate really WAS the antichrist, or your dog really is a disguised time traveler warning you of the coming apocholypse. But that’s just a risk any sane, responsible person would ahve to take.

Most people don’t read the penal code but they have roughly an idea about what punishment corresponds to what type of crime, because the law is, more or less a reflection of the values of the societies they live in. A lot of people regularly involved in criminal activity, however, are aware even with the details. The proposition that punishment does not matter is plain and simple wrong. Of course, it is subject to the preferences of the socio-cultural environment, which is the main determinant of crime. Most people won’t violate the norms of the society they live in anyway, but especially for those that are willing to do so, punishment matters. If the penalty is small enough it will be considered a cost worth taking, if outweighed by the expected profit. This is especially true for financial crimes.

The marginal deterrent effect of a punishment drops to zero after the punishment becomes severe enough. It is practically impossible to conceptualize in advance the difference between very severe punishment and very very severe punishment on a meaningful level, let alone modify your behaviour based on it. The marginal deterrent effect will not be zero when 100% deterrence is achieved, it will be zero when an additional unit of punishment fails to make changes in the deterrence rate.

Henri,
Okay, now I think I understand what you were saying. So if we didn’t have memes in our brains, would we have any idea of norms? If we would, is there some way we can rediscover those norms after we’ve been indoctrinated? Or do we just have to make our choice, one set of memes or the other, “as a conservative, I think government is a stern father” or “as a progressive, I think government is a nurturant parent”?

Allow me to summarize the state of the debate on this thread so far: Slex wins.

FYI: I am currently working on a paper noting certain correlations between rule-worshipping deontologists and the tendency, even beyond childhood, to believe in fictions like witches, unicorns, and Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Shorter Brett Bellmore: “But he’s the friendliest ghost you know!”

So if we didn’t have memes in our brains, would we have any idea of norms?

Of course not. Someone who grew up alone in a dark basement would not have any idea of anything at all, except for the most basic physiological functions.

Yes, once you’ve been indoctrinated, formed as an individual, it’s very difficult to change. You could have an epiphany and become a different person, but that’s rare.

@ Salient

It wasn’t that hard. I basically do agree with you. A rapist should get a heavier punishment than a pickpocket, because the rapist causes more harm (the one causes suffering, the other inconvenience). We don’t have a way to objectively verify it, but to think otherwise would be contrary to our experience. We do make utility comparisons (and I don’t think the notion of dis/utility in this case is too vague, abstract, or encompassing).

As for the severity of punishment, whether someone will be tortured for an year and killed, or tortured for two years and killed, really wouldn’t make a difference as far as deterrence is concerned. Just like we don’t perceive the difference between 10 million and 2o million – we know the latter is twice the former, but both fall into the category “an awful lot”. Excluding probably the likes of NBA players and Hollywood stars, if you ask the average Joe on the street what he will do for 10 million or for 20 million you will see that it won’t make much (if any) difference.

Now, I can’t think of an exact example to your challenge, but this at least comes close. The prospect of Hell. It offers a theoretically infinite punishment. You can’t devise an additional unit of it. And yet, history shows that it has not achieved 100% deterrence. In the years many true believers have committed horrendous crimes. Some haven’t looked like crimes in their own eyes, e.g. the inquisition. Some were probably rationalized away (God will punish, but not with Hell). But at least some of them have really pondered the possibility of going to hell, both before and after the offence. This is valid especially regarding crimes of passion and sex-related offences.

There is another reason why overtly harsh penal code may backlash and fail to deter. Punishment is important, but not the only determinant of crime. You can levy more severe punishments and expect at least a small increase in deterrence, provided that nothing else changes. But what you propose (just for the sake of the argument, not that you really endorse it) – public torture and mutilation – we may suppose, could habituate the senses and change the overall attitude towards violence in society. We will have something like hedonic adaptation, just in the opposite direction – people will become accustomed to scenes of violence. If you take as examples countries such as Uganda and Sudan, you will see what I mean.

This brings me to my next and last point, that the regulation of behaviour in society as a whole is best done by norms and values. Norms and values can take different forms, however, and the utilitarian position (and I think the deontological position) should be to popularize the norms, corresponding to the respective ethical view up to the point that they get internalized by the largest possible number of people. There will be always deviants, however, and that is where punishment has a role to play.

Slex @183: As I have written before, a classical utilitarian has no reason to reject the Utility monster, other than on emotional basis. If he/she is logically consistent, he should accept it as the morally superior position.

It’s no more an “emotional basis” than are the very intuitions that furnish the impetus for utilitarianism in the first place. We reason ethically, in part, by considering different possible situations and trying to account, in some satisfactory way, for our different intuitions, strong and weak, regarding the ethical course of action in those situations.

Certainly, one can cling to a chosen ethical position and ignore any contradictory ethical intuitions, regardless of their strength. But this is the path of the absolutist and the ideologue, that of the libertarian who refuses to countenance taxation for the sake of destroying a humanity-ending meteor. I don’t think such a position is persuasive to most – nor do I think it particularly a wise position to adopt.

Regarding the rest of your comment, I agree that other moral theories suffer from the same failings, but that to me is simply a good reason to reject them all as complete accounts of ethical questions. I’m a pragmatist and a humanist, and I view utilitarianism as quite useful – once one rejects some of the absolutist tenets of its classical form.

A rapist should get a heavier punishment than a pickpocket, because the rapist causes more harm (the one causes suffering, the other inconvenience).

I’m not sure ‘more harm’ ever entered into it, on my end. In coming up with the assertion I didn’t make a comparative analysis. It’s definitely true that I carefully and completely discounted all notions of aggregate utility. This is what I meant about me offering a very non-utilitarian deontological proposal and it getting the “well that’s utilitarian!” response. So far as I can tell neither you nor I applied an assessment of utility when making that evaluation of appropriate punishment, and saying that under the right circumstances there exists a possible way for a utilitarian to come to the same conclusion… is falling prey to what I was complaining about.

We do make utility comparisons (and I don’t think the notion of dis/utility in this case is too vague, abstract, or encompassing).

But neither of us made a utility comparison. Suppose hundreds of thousands of people derive ‘utility’ [1] from the attacker remaining free and unhindered (perhaps for reasons unrelated to the crimes, e.g. because the rapist is an acclaimed and beloved film director). The attacker should still be removed from society, by the way of reasoning that I proposed. That directly contradicts a utilitarian approach (I think my proposed reasoning is fairly deontological, maybe somewhat intuitionist, but very opposite-of-utilitarian).

There is another reason why overtly harsh penal code may backlash and fail to deter.

My assertion would be ‘for any penal code to successfully deter crime in a differentiated way, it would have to be overly harsh’ (where in a differentiated way means varying intensity of punishment depending on the crime).

I agree that assigning some sort of consequence versus none at all has a powerful deterrent effect (e.g. losing one’s job and receiving ex-con status is pretty huge no matter if you get 10 years in prison or 10 days), I just don’t agree that varying certain aspects of that consequence in a non-brutal way will have a measurable effect on deterrence. Specifically I don’t think varying the length of a prison sentence will have a measurable effect on deterrence.

I acknowledge that a longer prison sentence will mean it literally takes longer for a recidivist to get back out and be able to commit their crime again. But that’s not a question of deterrence, it’s a question of threat-removal.

Hell… offers a theoretically infinite punishment.

Your intuitive feeling that this isn’t a terribly good example matches mine. We have no evidence that the place exists, and there’s definitely no evidence that a state (or other enforcing entity) can credibly assert its intention to assign eternal Hell to people.

If you take as examples countries such as Uganda and Sudan, you will see what I mean.

Well, yes. That (and the rest of what you said) is part of why I feel punishment as deterrence is horrible and wrong. My two-step is this: [1] to be an effective deterrent, punishment has to be brutal, [2] that brutality is repellent to me, therefore [3] I should not endorse any attempt to employ punishment as a deterrent. I endorse restricting a person’s access to society by force only in those circumstances where I feel confident asserting that person has attempted to derive satisfaction from inducing suffering in another human being (I am stating this in absolutist terms for the sake of simplicity).

I’ve recovered enough from some blood toxicity problems to reread my own comments here and elsewhere slightly more clearheadedly, and have discovered I’m not at all happy with them (wondering why on earth I was being so silly and dramatic) so I’d best bow out of the discussion.

^1^I put ‘utility’ in quote marks here to indicate that we can be fairly flexible about what ‘utility’ means and the statement’s still true.

Henri: What are some other possibilities: that we’re born with social norms already programmed in us? That seems rather unlikely, doesn’t it?

Depends on what you mean by ‘social norms.’ I’d say it’s plausible our brains are more receptive to some types of indoctrinated beliefs and less receptive to others, and that that receptivity could be physiologically pre-programmed.

That adults change their personalities like gloves? Nah, I don’t think this is supported by observations.

Well,

The point is that some people think it does, and still it does not deter them from committing crimes.

I dispute that [1] assignment to Hell is superlative suffering (I’d take an eternity of postlife Hell for a productive predeath life any day, and even if you disallow that kind of preference, surely people will generally prefer to endure Hell themselves rather than cause loved ones to be forced to endure it), [2] that people believe in the exact combination of beliefs that would lead to your conclusion, [3] other stuff.

[2]: for Hell to be a superlative deterrent, someone would have to believe: I am guaranteed to avoid Hell so long as I avoid this specific crime. I am guaranteed to receive Hell if I commit this specific crime. Forgiveness of all transgressions up to the present moment is guaranteed, forgiveness of all future transgressions other than the specific criminal act in question is guaranteed, and forgiveness of the criminal act in question is the guaranteed to be impossible. Does anyone, criminal or no, really believe all of this?

If Hell is superlative suffering, it must include the suffering of remorse, and the feeling that not only was the act a bad choice on balance, but also there was absolutely no benefit or enjoyment derived from the act in any conceivable fashion. (If you thought otherwise, you would be able to derive some satisfaction from the bit that was good, which means you’re not suffering as much as possible.) How can someone imagine suddenly feeling that categorically remorseful about something? It’s imagining becoming a different person, which implies it’s a different person suffering Hell.

the claim that we can’t make interpersonal utility comparisons

You’re not being utilitarian. You’re just using ‘utility’ as a synonym for benefit or improved experience, and ‘disutility’ as a synonym for loss or bad experience. That’s why I keep trying to tell you that you’re not a utilitarian (or at least, you’re not taking a utilitarian approach to the stuff we’re talking about). “This act hurt somebody worse than that other act, so it should be punished more severely” is, I repeat emphatically, not utilitarian. Its conclusion might coincidentally coincide with the conclusion of a utilitiarian assessment, but only coincidentally.

For premeditated crimes you can achieve 100% deterrence if the punishment is certain even if it is not very severe.

Where has this been achieved?

Regarding utility – yes, you could define it in that way

There are only so many times I can try to point out how absurd this is. No. It’s a useless definition of utility. This is why you’re unable to understand how people could devise a non-utilitiarian justification for… well, anything. That’s what I’ve been trying to point out to you from the start. Utility means something much more specific than ‘good stuff’ and a utilitarian approach is something much narrower than ‘try to maximize goodness.’

If ‘utility’ is ‘good stuff’ and any model which attempts to bring about good stuff is utilitarian, well, that’s just not a meaningful way to use the words. And I can’t see that you’ve analyzed anything utilitarianally in any more narrow sense. In the examples you’ve put forth, you’re not even attempting to aggregate over an entire population. A pretty basic tenet of utilitarianism is that you have to aggregate utility over an appropriate population. (There are some carefully constructed disaggregated forms of utilitarian computation, but they’re fairly highly technical and you’ve made no reference to them.)

Pretty much everything you are saying is somewhere on the intuitionist-deontological-commutatarian spectrum (and to be honest in my eyes you’re being a completely reasonable intuitionist), but you’re calling it utilitiarian, for reasons I can’t fathom. Given that, I don’t know how to move forward. It would help if you could point to your source(s) for utilitarian theory, maybe I just need to flip through the book you’re using, and heck, maybe I’m wildly off-base.

@ Substance McGravitas

Where has this been achieved?

It hasn’t, because the condition for certainty does not hold. I am theorizing.

@ Salient

Hell will have an anti-deterrent effect for all crimes after the first one. Suposedly, it will decrease the incidence of committing crime for the first time.

Me: The hell example intended to show that no punishment can ever achieve 100% deterrence

Salient: Well I don’t disagree with that. I don’t think differentiated punishment can achieve differentiated deterrence, unless the punishment is unacceptably severe. I thought that’s what we were disagreeing about.

I get such impression from 188:

The only point at which the marginal deterrence effect drops off and becomes zero is when the absolute deterrence effect has become 100%.

If we can’t have 100% deterrence, this means that the marginal deterrent effect becomes zero before that. My views on the current condition of the criminal system in the Western countries are more or less summed up in the introduction here:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9133.2010.00680.x/full

I do think that differentiated punishment can achieve differentiated deterrence, though to what extent depends on the type of crime. I will allow myself to quote from this paper (p. 190), which reviews the empirical literature and which confirms what I think:

http://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/1054/

Another example is the type of offense (table 3.43): while results for tax evasion, drunk driving and fraud – and property crime in general – are more compatible with the deterrence hypothesis, those for homicide or assault are not. Results for the probability of punishment are also more in favor of the deterrence hypothesis than those based on the severity of punishment.

In my opinion short-term imprisonment should be avoided when possible, because the deterrent effect on would-be offenders could be outweighed by the demoralization effect by the prison environment. Inmates, who are there for petty crimes could be brutalized by their interactions with inmates with longer sentences for violent crimes or can build up networks with other criminals, which will open up new opportunities to benefit from criminal activities after prison. I don’t know at what point exactly, but I think that for most crimes the maximum deterrent effect is achieved somewhere between 15 and 25 years and beyond that it just doesn’t matter for deterrence, only for incapacitation.

Empirical tests of the deterent effects of punishments are difficult, because crime is the result of many factors, and even if we change significantly the laws, it will still take time to change the awareness about them. Maybe the best way to examine the matter is to see whether the behavior of juveniles changes as they reach adulthood, because we can change the relevant factor while keep the others constant. But the evidence as a whole is mixed, even though the most famous study by Steven Levitt finds significant deterrent effects both for property and violent crimes.

Turning to utility, I don’t know what you mean by it, but the example of the Utility monster involves negative and positive experience, so do trolley problems and many other examples both criticizing and defending utilitarianism. My example was not devised to aggregate total utility in society, but to counter a single criticism against utilitarianism – that it fails because we can’t compare utility. You can’t aggregate, if you can’t calculate, and you can’t compare if you can’t calculate. And there we have people who fight taxation and income redistribution as a way to maximize total utility on the basis that we can’t compare utility between persons, but don’t question the criminal justice system, which is also based on interpersonal comparison of utility.

I haven’t read any books on the topic, so I can’t guide you in this respect, just articles on the internet, Wikipedia, SEoP.