TYCD: Extra Credit - Utilitarianism, Drowning Hitler, Stealing the Enterprise

In today's Extra Credit, I talk a little (okay, a LOT) more about utilitarianism, some of its strengths and weaknesses, some important thinkers in its history, and my view on why the way that we currently teach it is missing something.

10:05 | RM Hare, "Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism"

14:16 | JJC Smart, "Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism," pg. 353

15:34 | Ibid., pg. 347

***Godwin's Law says that the longer a discussion goes on, the more likely it is that someone will invoke a comparison to Hitler. It has conceptual overlap with the logical fallacy reductio ad Hitlerium.

21:32 | John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, pg. 32 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001).

23:09 | Shelly Kagan, "Does Consequentialism Demand Too Much? Recent Work on the Limits of Obligation"

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Sometimes there are things that I have to cut out from my main episodes that, in a perfect world, I'd love to include, but they're just too dense or they make the episode too long or they require a set of quite technical terms or concepts to explain. Since I want to make my podcast something that any reasonable person can listen to, I try to keep the jargon to a minimum. But sometimes I have some parts that feel really crucial to me and that I just love talking about. So today we're getting into some more Extra Credit. Honestly, any episode where I talk about utilitarianism could have about eight hours of stuff that goes with it. It is an ethical framework that has a lot of history and that a lot of scholars have engaged over the last two centuries. Also, if you have taken even only one philosophy class in your life, chances are this is one of the things you talked about. It's an influential idea, and it has a noticeable impact on the way that we think about thinking about ethics. This isn't exactly a super scientific way of measuring this, but I made a list of what are likely the ten most used philosophy textbooks in colleges and universities in the United States since I started as a university student about 20 years ago. They include traditional style textbooks, more readable survey type books, and anthologies. Every single one has a chapter or major section on utilitarianism, many of them multiple. All four textbooks I have used as a professor include major sections on utilitarianism and consequentialism in general. It's simply an idea that permeates the way that we think about philosophy and ethics. Because of this, I want to dive a little deeper into the way that we use utilitarianism and the way that we think we use utilitarianism. When I was in college, I learned about utilitarianism as a way of thinking about how to make informed choices in healthcare in a course called theological bioethics. In fact, I credit this course and my professor, Dr. Kent Eilers, as the reason why I ended up pursuing philosophy rather than continuing in studying religion, even though Dr. Eilers was my systematic theology professor. Sorry, Dr. Eilers. But even in that course, in my first encounters with utilitarianism, it seemed like a kind of alternative ethical theory. That is, utilitarianism was the justification you invoked when you wanted to make an ethical choice that seemed to go against commonly held wisdom about justice or fairness. Let me give an example. In one of my ethics courses, I frequently use a version of the trolley problem that asks students to imagine themselves as a firefighter. They have to choose between going to a house with five people in it that's burning down, or going to a museum full of priceless and unique historical artifacts that's on fire. Oftentimes, my students will say something like, It's sad that we lose those priceless artifacts, but I would make the right choice and save the people. In their mind, the transparently morally upright choice in this situation is to save human lives. Making an excuse via utilitarian ethics to save the artifacts instead of the people seems immoral or wrong, or in one student's opinion, evil. I'm assuming that you're familiar with the trolley problem here because this is extra credit, so I won't rehash the purpose of the exercise in too much detail, but suffice it to say that the thought experiment is designed to lay out plainly what your personal methods of making that choice are. I find that even though we're talking about that problem in the context of utilitarian, or more broadly, consequentialist, ethics, most students don't appear to use utilitarian ethics to answer the question. They just say people's lives are more important than objects. This reasoning tends to fit with our idea of a duty or rights-based ethical framework, and that makes sense to us. But we have to remember that utilitarianism is a method of finding out what the morally upright choice might actually be. Additionally, we may also be trying to find out what is merely permissible. That is, we might be asking, okay, this isn't gonna make me popular, but is it at least okay to do? It won't make me a good guy, but will it at least not make me a bad guy? It often feels like using utilitarian ethics gets us to this place where we can at least say, okay, I didn't do a bad thing because, well, look at the good that came from it, even though it seemed like a morally uncomfortable thing to do. In order to illuminate the difficulty of using utilitarian ethics as opposed to what we often find ourselves leaning on, a more duty or rights-based ethical framework common to our Western US culture, let's discuss two distinct types of utilitarianism: act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. First, I want us to understand that these aren't supposed to be competing types of utilitarianism, but rather they represent a way of thinking about their use that aligns with different intentions and contexts. Rule utilitarianism is pretty much what it sounds like. We use a rule to decide how to weigh the amount of pleasure and pain an action or series of actions will cause, and the best rules, the ones that we should follow, are the ones that overall tend to work most of the time. We might call it a rule of thumb.

SPEAKER_04 5:52

Wait your turn in line. Or measure twice, cut once, or never put off tomorrow.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

Wait, that's not right.

SPEAKER_04 5:58

Never put off until tomorrow, what you can do today.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

These are rules for conduct that collect into one statement a whole history of ideas about patience, preparedness, or prudence. We understand that people with lots of life experience can attest that these rules for living generally pan out.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

No one says, Well, one time I measured twice and I still messed up, so that rule's broken.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

That's just sort of intentionally misunderstanding what the rule is meant to do. On the other hand, act utilitarianism is meant to be a method of judging each individual action on its own merits in as close to a vacuum as can be achieved. Someone utilizing act utilitarianism is going to say, well, this circumstance may fit with some rule that we tend to think about. But this situation is an exception to that rule. Or maybe it's a situation where no meaningful precedent exists. This happens. Think about some kind of historic first. For example, Georgiana Simpson was the first black woman to earn a PhD in the United States. Up until this point, the utilitarian argument against this happening would have been something like, well, black women don't need PhDs.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

They might be teachers or writers, but they certainly don't need to study things at the level that more educated white folks do. It isn't a good use of society's resources to allow her to do this, and it takes away from the work that black women should really be doing elsewhere.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

But someone, or more likely a lot of some ones, including Simpson herself, would have had to have said, no, that calculation doesn't seem correct. The rule of black women don't need advanced degrees doesn't work here, and we're going to insist on setting a new precedent. It's important to understand that insofar as we think of our decision-making process as utilitarian, we don't choose just one or the other of these two types, act and rule. We use both, and we tend to use rule utilitarianism more because, well, can you imagine having to agonize over every single decision, weighing it on its own individual merits every single time you think about bringing your mom a coffee from Starbucks or navigating an uncomfortable social situation? Rules for action act as sort of behavior macros. We recognize the kinds of situations where that rule works, and we use them flexibly in lots of different situations, even when we don't know all the details. We even tend to think that this is good when the choice turns out to have less than desirable results. If I give a man on the street $20, but he uses it to buy a knife that enables him to hold up a convenience store, we don't say, well, I guess you can't be generous or charitable with people because they'll turn around and be monsters. No, you don't think that the rule itself is broken. It was your limited amount of information and the situation's less than ideal circumstances that led to that negative outcome. Well, to be clear, I think that there are plenty of people who use this as an excuse to not care about or be supportive of or charitable toward poor folks or the unhoused or the mentally ill. But I think those folks should just come out and say, I don't like being charitable toward people I find socially or morally repugnant, rather than saying that there's a problem with being charitable in general. But I digress. Okay, so we have act and rule utilitarianism, and we can use these sorts of flavors of utilitarianism to navigate all kinds of situations that life can throw at us. This is generally how I teach this. If this is the way you tend to think, you can use these functional rules for life that have been shown to generally have positive consequences. And then when you don't have a good rule for a weird situation, you can try to be as thoughtful and careful about the elements as you can. This is also known as two-level utilitarianism, and it's the method of utilizing utilitarian ethical frameworks described by English philosopher R. M. Hare. In his 1976 paper, Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism, Hare says that we can think of rule utilitarianism as being a sort of intuitive moral thinking. We internalize actions that fit with our values based on moral codes expressed by rules. Then, when we find ourselves in a situation where those rules seem to fail us, we can enter a more critical mode that looks like act utilitarianism. I find this way of thinking about utilitarianism really helpful as a method of teaching ethical thinking. Not only does this feel relatively intuitive to many folks, but it also seems to have a flexibility that allows us to bend or break rules and circumstances that seem especially unusual or unprecedented. But if I were to teach an advanced level course in utilitarian ethics, I would do all of this on like day one. Because then we would have to dive into the Olympic-sized swimming pool of issues that a consequentialist moral theory like utilitarianism has. But first, let's do a quick drive-thru trip to the Agra for a special announcement, a cool collab between me and Matthias Austin from the Lord of the Rings AMA podcast.

SPEAKER_02 11:21

Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small, slimy creature. I don't know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum, as dark as darkness, except for two big round, pale eyes in his thin face.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Tolkien's description of Gollum in The Hobbit seems both viscerally vivid and frustratingly vague. Perhaps fitting for such an enigma as Gollum. What drives him? How does he think? Should we, like Frodo, pity him? Or should we align ourselves more closely with Sam and be skeptical of his every move? Hi, I'm Peter. I'm a professor of ethics, and I'm excited to announce a crossover podcast event between me and Matthias, a Lord of the Rings AMA podcast Things You Can Do Collaboration that we're calling L-O-T-R AMA Pod and Things You Can Do The Hunt for Gollum's Conscience. Matthias and I will discuss Gollum's character, motivations, and the outcomes of his actions in Middle-earth as we try to decide if we pity him, fear him, despise him, or something else. LOTR AMA Pod, Things You Can Do, The Hunt for Gollum's Conscience comes out May 8th. Subscribe to Things You Can Do and The Lord of the Rings AMA Pod wherever you get your podcasts to download it as soon as it drops. And I want to begin with a criticism of my own. Now, as far as I can tell, there aren't any major thinkers that have expressed this particular criticism. I haven't read anyone who has formulated this opinion before, but also more thinkers are publishing in more journals than ever before, so there's a chance this isn't an original thought. Nonetheless, I don't believe I'm relying on the thought or research of any other thinker when I say this, so I'm excited to put some possibly brand new philosophy out there into the world. My problem with the distinction between act and rule utilitarianism is that I think the difference between the two collapses easily and without very much scrutiny. Now, this in itself is not new. Philosophers have made this criticism for over 60 years, but interestingly, they tend to say that rule utilitarianism decomposes into act utilitarianism. Both British-Australian philosopher JJC Smart and American philosopher David Lyons argue that rule utilitarianism is just act utilitarianism with more parts. So in his paper Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism, Smart says, Moral rules of the extreme utilitarian view are rules of thumb only.

SPEAKER_03 14:22

But they are not bad rules of thumb. But if we do come to the conclusion that we should break the rule, and if we have weighed in the balance of our own fallibility and liability to personal bias, what good reason remains for keeping the rule?

SPEAKER_01 14:39

What Smart seems to be saying here is, hey, even if these are good rules of thumb, if they can just kind of be ignored or superseded when the rule doesn't fit, what makes this any different than act utilitarianism? Also, as an aside, I just wanted to point out that Smart, in his paper, uses this hilarious word picture to describe using moral rules in lieu of making moral calculations in the moment. He says that if you saw someone drowning in a river, you would likely jump in and try to save them based on the moral rules you follow, not reasoning out that it's good to help someone. But this could have the unfortunate consequence of you accidentally rescuing a drowning Adolf Hitler. Yes, he really says that. Whereas an extreme utilitarian would, if he had time, work out the probability of the man's being the villainous dictator. And if the probability were high enough, he would, on extreme utilitarian grounds, leave him to drown. Just goes to show you that Godwin's law was in full effect long before the invention of the internet. Alright, so Smart and Lions seem to think that rule utilitarianism is just act utilitarianism with some shortcuts. The rules are helpful, but when we get down to it, if we can choose to not use the rule when we feel like it, they don't really make up the substance of our moral sense. To Smart, especially, to say something like, it's wrong to steal, except in the case of Jean Valjean who was starving. Well, that's really to say something like, it just so happens that the way I describe the right behavior fits with the idea of don't steal more times than not, but in the end, there's something greater that we appeal to. In short, according to Smart, rules just describe act utilitarianism pretty well most of the time, but they don't determine it. To be honest, when I was researching this, I was kind of flabbergasted by this approach. To me, it kind of seems like saying, well, if the rule doesn't work once, well then it really isn't a rule, is it? It's just a description. And that well, that's certainly a way to think. And I'm not even saying it's necessarily a bad one. If I have a computer program that works according to the rules of programming, but only most of the time, I have a computer program that doesn't work. But let's be honest, this is not the way that I think that we think about how the world works. There are plenty of times where the moral rule of thumb, don't steal, seems to not work very well. I mentioned Jean Valjean, I feel quite strongly that someone who is starving should absolutely steal, and even steal from me. Please, I'll just leave loaves of bread strewn around my yard for any starving French peasants to nab on their way through town. But also consider that doing things like leaking information to the press to hold public officials accountable, or helping an undocumented refugee escape persecution in their home country. Heck, think about the scene at the end of The Sound of Music. The nuns sabotage the Nazi vehicles to allow the von Trapp family to escape. These are situations where we often feel pretty strongly that not only did they not do something morally blameworthy, we also praise them or judge their actions to be praiseworthy and not just permissible. Why is that? Well, I think Smart would say that it's because the rule itself is just a descriptor, and that the real principle is in the act. That is to say, the principle of utility as described by Bentham and Mill. The rules help us act expeditiously, but they don't give us reason to act. I actually think the opposite. So here's my hypothesis. What we describe as act utilitarianism, that's just actions motivated by a rule. Maximize pleasure, minimize pain. But we've seen that as a rule, that is really broad, right? It can be hard to know how to do that. So we have the rules that Bentham describes for us fecundity and location and certainty and the rest. So what do we do in situations where we need more guidance? Well, we make more rules, of course. This maybe sounds legalistic, but it is practically how we function. It's how programming works. Do this action if there is this condition, unless there is this condition, until there is this condition. It's how we go about solving everyday problems. Put the laundry into the washer unless you have something with a big grass stain. Then you pull that out and pre-treat it and put the laundry into the dryer. But if it's a wool cardigan, well then you have to hang it up to dry instead of cooking it in the dryer. I'm interested in pursuing this idea further because I think that the way, even that John Stuart Mill describes utilitarianism, is more like, hey, these rules tend to work, than Bentham, who says that weighing pleasure and pain can give us scientific certainty. I wonder if this isn't why we tend to think of Mill and not Bentham when we talk about utilitarianism? Dying on the whole I can measure how much happiness you have with science seems like a pretty good reason to think Bentham hadn't discovered a moral theory for the ages. I feel this way because of something I didn't really appreciate about Mill until I started working on this episode. Many modern thinkers who engage utilitarianism seem to think of it as a sort of moral calculus. And I mean this in not exactly a flattering way. It's important to understand that many of these thinkers are continuing in the tradition of Kant, specifically with regard to trying to find objective, unchanging answers to moral questions. In order for philosophy generally, and ethics specifically to be a science and therefore legitimate, it needs to be able to provide answers that are just as reliable as, say, mathematics or physics. And that's definitely a possible way to look at ethics. But I don't personally take that tact, and I also think it tends to create more problems than it solves. So while Mill himself acknowledges this need for exactness and objectivity, he also does so in the context of his vision for society, a place where people coexist as equals, and with the understanding that everyone is indeed equal. Mill wasn't just a navel-gazing ivory tower philosophro. He argued before British Parliament for women's suffrage. He believed in empowering labor unions. Remember, this was in the middle of the Industrial Revolution in Britain when working conditions were abominable. He thought the dogged pursuit for uncapped economic growth was a recipe for the destruction of the environment and the decline of human happiness. Mill believed in a society that sought to make the lives of all people as good as possible, because, as he says, quote, society between equals can only exist on the understanding that the interests of all are to be regarded equally. The base condition for a society that is able to function according to a utilitarian moral framework is one in which the people have a sense of the interests of others as also their own. Honestly, to me, this sounds a lot more like a duty or A sense of virtue than it does a calculation of utility. The duty to see others' interests as important as your own is the prerequisite for understanding the use of utilitarian principles. My tentative conclusion is that Mill describes utilitarianism almost like a kind of deontology. That is to say, he describes it like an orientation toward a moral duty rather than a scientific endeavor with immutable results. Now, I'm leaving this as a provisional conclusion because, well, I don't study Bentham and Mill as deeply and carefully as I do other scholars, and I could find out tomorrow that I'm wrong. That's why I generally tend to hold my own conclusions as kind of eternally provisional, and I teach others to do so as well. There's no shame in changing your mind when you have better evidence and better conclusions. So maybe I'll keep testing this idea and find out that, you know, I don't think it works as well as I thought it did at first. But until then, I think it's really problematic to teach utilitarianism as a sort of moral mathematics. I think it's weird to get caught up in debates about whether, as Shelley Kagan says, consequentialism demands too much of us. That's the thing. Consequentialism, and really all these ideas of ethical frameworks, don't demand things of us. We use them to demand things of ourselves. The purpose of going through all these weird little arguments and picking and prodding at these ideas, it's not to see which is the prettiest ethical theory, it's to put them to the test and see if they're able to help us become the kinds of people we're trying to be. At the end of Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan, Commander Spock repairs the Starship Enterprise's damaged warp drive by exposing himself to lethal levels of radiation. He saves the ship from being destroyed by the massive explosion emanating from the Genesis device, and he sacrifices himself to protect his crew.

SPEAKER_02 24:25

Outweigh. The needs of the few.

SPEAKER_01 24:36

To Spock, it made perfect sense that the needs of the hundreds of people on board outweighed his need to stay alive. His courage resulted from his moral calculation, his moral sense that it was worth it to give his life for everyone else. To honor his friend, Captain Kirk makes the newly formed Edenic Genesis Planet Spock's final resting place. But after Captain Kirk, Scotty, Sulu, and the others discover that Spock's soul has been transferred into Dr. McCoy's body and that there's a chance to bring their friend back if they reunite his soul with his body, they're faced with a dilemma. Travel back to the new planet has been restricted by the Federation, and Captain Kirk is specifically under orders that he is not to go there for any reason, not even to rescue Spock's body. Fleet Admiral Morrow tells Kirk, consider it a quarantined planet and a forbidden subject. So Kirk and his friends risk everything. Under direct orders to stay out of it, instead, they steal the Enterprise. Crippled from its recent battles and piloted only by Scotty, Sulu, and Chekhov, the Enterprise escapes a pursuing ship, the technologically advanced Excelsior. But not before Kirk's resolve is tested once more. The captain of the Excelsior gives Kirk a final chance to turn back to avoid the pain and punishment his choices will cause him and others.

SPEAKER_03 26:09

Excelsior closing to 4,000 meters, sir.

SPEAKER_01 26:12

Scotty, we'll need everything you have.

SPEAKER_03 26:13

I sir. What drives standing by? Kirk.

SPEAKER_02 26:20

You do this, you'll never sit in the captain's chair again. What's speed? Ice.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

Without knowing anything about the more fortuitous of the consequences of his actions, Kirk ends up being uniquely positioned to travel through time and save Earth from a civilizational level catastrophe. Kirk decided that it was more important for him to save his friend than to maintain his good standing in the Federation. Spock saved the ship, and to get him back, Kirk sacrifices his rank, his duty to Starfleet, the Enterprise itself, all because, as we learn, he believed that the needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many. I think that when we debate how our ethical frameworks function and the way that they can influence us to act, we have to remember that their purpose is not to decide what is important for us, we decide what's important. I often tell my students when they ask about how hard my class is or something like that, I say, math doesn't give you a grade. I do. And by that I mean I don't really care how many points out of a hundred you got, or whether you were within a tenth of a percent of a B or an A or whatever. The numbers are just guidelines that help me make decisions. They are not the decision makers. I am. Likewise, we have to remember that ethical frameworks are ways to illuminate to ourselves what it is that we value and what kind of person we are trying to be. But a spotlight is useless if it's pointed at empty space. There has to be something there to illuminate, to shine a light on, to point out. In all this conversation of moral math, let's remember that utilitarianism can be a useful calculator. But a calculator is useless without someone punching in the numbers. Thanks for listening. See you next time when we'll talk about some more things you can do. Thanks for listening to Extra Credit. Uh a couple things. First, uh thanks to Bonnie Grace for the use of her song Neptune, and Stationary Sign for the use of their song Sneaky Theft. Also, yes, you did hear that little circus music tune in there. That's Entry of the Gladiators by Julius Fuchik, performed by the Black Diamond Band. Also, I know that for all you Star Trek purists out there, Kirk was an admiral at the time he stole the Enterprise. I'm just saying Captain Kirk because that's how people who aren't total trekkies tend to think of him. And also, to placate you, I have plans to do a whole mini ethicsode on Stealing the Enterprise. So you can look forward to that. Also, if you've got suggestions for movies, TV shows, or other popular media that you'd like to see me do a mini ethicsode on or an extra credit, let me know. Shoot me an email at thingsyoucandopod at gmail.com.