Chapter 7: Moral Theories
I. Philosophy
For about four years I had gone through these steps collecting different pieces of information about value. Then, I stumbled into a university tradition that required that students got what they called a “well-rounded education.” They require that students take classes in fields that the student has absolutely no interest in before the student can graduate. You can go to college to study electrical engineering, for example. However, you had better be prepared to take a wide variety of classes.
Students complain, “I came to this school to study X — why do I have to take all of this other stuff? It is not relevant to X! I will never use it! I will forget it two months after the course has ended! It is a waste of my most valuable time!”
Yet, twice, this annoying practice on the part of universities provided me with a tremendous benefit.
The first of these incidents was when I found out what the subject of “Philosophy” was all about. It was my second year of college. I was actually studying astronomy, because I felt that one of the things that I could do to benefit humanity was to help them get off of this rock. I felt that putting all of our genetic eggs in one planetary basket was a horrendous gamble that threatened the future of the human race. So, I wanted to contribute something to getting at least some of us off of this rock.
My education in physics required that I take a series of courses in world history. I had an interest in history, so this was not a particularly dreadful requirement. I got through the first class in this series, which covered the period from the dawn of civilization through the middle ages, easily enough.
The next quarter, I signed up to for the next class in the series. I wanted the same teacher that I had for my first class, for the sake of continuity. However, that class filled up before I got registered, so I was forced into a different class.
That teacher said that he was going to teach the class in a somewhat non-traditional way. Instead of covering the important news items — who was King, who was he at war with, and how well were the wars going — he was going to focus on the great thinkers of the time. The time period we were looking at was the end of the dark ages to the birth of America. Glancing through the text book, I saw excerpts from the writings of such people as Descartes, Rousseau, Leibniz, Locke,Voltaire, and Hume, to name a few.
I read the passages, and I found people who were writing essays on the very questions that most interested me. They were trying to get down to the root of some of our most complex issues, including the question of what is “good” and the nature of morality. I had a vague idea of what “philosophy” meant, but I had thought it dealt with obscure oriental mystical systems and ideas that sounded nice but could not be proved. I had no idea how dedicated philosophers had been to digging up reasons to support their positions, or how eager they were to toss away theories that did not stand up to rigorous logical scrutiny.
After having made this discovery, I looked at the Philosophy curriculum and found a long list of classes on these same subjects. Among these were courses in contemporary moral problems, moral theory, and philosophy of law.
I could not wait to join.
II. The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number
After fulfilling a few pre-requisites, I got into a class on ethical theory, taught by Dr. Sanford Levy. This class promised to expose me to some of the most widely accepted theories of moral value. Perhaps, in one of them, I could find the glue that made sense of the scattered ideas I had collected over the past four years. Maybe somebody had already figured out what “better” is, and I did not have to look any further.
A key distinction presented in this class was the distinction between rights-based or duty-based (deontological) moral theories and utility-based (teleological) theories.
A. Basic Utilitarianism
I learned, from Dr. Levy, of a family of moral philosopher that fell under the general name “Utilitarian.” I learned that utilitarians seek “the greatest good for the greatest number” (an oversimplified cliché of utilitarianism that goes back to the early 19th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham). To determine if capital punishment is justified, according to the utilitarians, one does a cost/benefit analysis in terms of pleasure and pain (for the hedonistic utilitarian) or happiness and unhappiness (for the eudaemonistic utilitarian) or some such good. That action which creates the most pleasure (or happiness) over pain (or unhappiness) wins over all other competitors.
For example, let’s assume that we were computing the morality of capital punishment. When performing a moral calculation, we fill the “benefit” column the value of the added safety (if any) for people in society who will be less likely to be murdered. There is the pleasure of obtaining revenge, and the monetary savings (if any) for executing somebody as opposed to locking them up indefinitely. Utilitarians would say that, on the benefits side, we also would have to add any entertainment value. If people get joy out of watching a condemned man killed, then that is an argument in favor of providing them with an entertaining execution, under a utilitarian system.
In the “cost” column, we put the losses suffered by the person executed and by that person’s family. We add the cost of whatever safeguards are in place to reduce the number of innocent people being executed. Even when it comes to executing innocent people, we only worry about preventing the execution of innocent people to the degree that it benefits us to do so. At the point where the cost of preventing the loss of one more innocent life exceeds the benefit, at that point the utilitarian stops being concerned with the loss of innocent life and votes for saving money instead. We must also add in the price of the electricity (or whatever tool is used to do the killing), labor, and other methods.
Anyone who responds to this by saying that the losses suffered by the person executed, or the entertainment value of a live execution, are not relevant does not understand utilitarian theory. Utilitarian theory says that all costs and benefits are relevant, and the right action is the action with the greatest social “profit”.
B. Basic Natural Law Theory
When Dr. Levy sought to describe natural law theories, he brought up Shakespeare. Specifically, his play JULIUS CAESAR has a scene where the Caesar’s murder (which has not actually happened yet) has knocked the cosmic order out of balance. Shakespeare alluded to this metaphysical disturbance in describing the visions and strange events reported in Rome the night before Caesar was assassinated — lions walking the street, strange storms, and other ominous forebodings.
Justice requires restoring the cosmic order to its original balance. This requires capturing the murderers and subjecting them to a punishment that is proportional to the severity of his crime. Once this is done, the world is set right again. Balance has been restored. The spirits can return to their rest.
I remember Dr. Levy saying that he had no better way to describe the alternative to utilitarianism except in these bizarre terms. I assume that he was a utilitarian. To him, rights theory made no sense. Of course, he would not be able to come up with a way of describing rights theory that gave it a credibility he did not accept.
III. A Problem with Utilitarianism
A. The Case of the Utilitarian Sheriff
Utilitarianism is not without its problems. Dr. Levy described one of the major problems with utilitarianism by referring to a traditional counter-example to the theory. This counter-example asks us to imagine a town in the American Old West — at least as Dr. Levy described it — in which a horrible murder has taken place. A suspect is in prison, and this suspect belongs to some disliked social minority (native Americans, African Americans, whatever). The town’s people want their revenge. In their anger, they gathered at the saloon, downed a few drinks for courage, formed a mob, and marched up to the jail, demanding the prisoner.
The Sheriff does not share the mob’s conviction that the prisoner is guilty. In fact, there is nothing but the most circumstantial evidence — testimony from people known to have animosities towards the accused.
Still, the mob comes.
The sheriff knows these people. If he turns the prisoner over to the mob, they will spend their anger on him, then go home and have a good night’s sleep, joyful and content with the ‘good’ they have done. However, if he insists on protecting the prisoner, then the mob will turn its anger elsewhere. They will enter the section of town where the members of this minority group live, burning and killing. They may well do to a half-dozen innocent people as bad or worse than the will do to this one accused man in prison if the sheriff would only stand aside.
So, the sheriff asks, “What shall I do? Shall I turn my prisoner over to the mob, or shall I initiate several murders by refusing to do so?”
Utilitarianism implies one clear answer; turning the prisoner over to the mob. This option produces the best consequences; the fewest number of murders. In fact, utilitarianism paints this conclusion as being so obvious that it must hold the sheriff who would not do so in moral contempt for the greater suffering that his decision to protect the prisoner would have.
It is common for people to try to save the utilitarian sheriff by pointing out all sorts of ill consequences that may still result from turning the innocent person over to the mob. For example, once the crowd tastes blood then isn’t there a chance that this will wet their appetite for blood and attack the others anyway?
These attempts to save the sheriff demonstrate a lack of understanding of the point of the story. The case lets listeners fill in the details however they like. All that matters is that, in the end, the story is consistent with the general assumption that there is more utility in turning the prisoner over to the mob than in protecting him.
If the defender of utilitarianism states that he cannot imagine a case in which turning over the prisoner would produce the most utility, the opponent is justified in answering that the problem rests with the utilitarian’s poor imagination, not with the critic’s counter-example.
Logicians call this form of argument “reductio ad absurdum” — to reduce to absurdity. The argument says, “I am going to assume that the central pillars of your case (in this case, the central assumptions of utilitarianism) are correct. I am going to stick these assumptions into an otherwise sound argument, and I am going to show that they lead to an absurd conclusion. Because the conclusion is absurd, we must go back and question the premises. The premises that we are going to question are those same pillars of utilitarianism that lead us to this absurdity.
In this case, if we accept the assumptions inherent in utilitarianism, and plug them into the Sheriff example, we yield an absurd conclusion — that morality requires turning the innocent prisoner over to the mob. The absurdity of the conclusion tells us that our assumption is in error, which means that utilitarianism itself is in error.
B. Reductios
I would like to look at this alleged counter-example to utilitarian theory a bit more closely. However, to do that, I want to talk about “reductio ad absurdum” arguments in general, and what can and cannot be implied by them.
Reductio arguments come in three different levels of strength.
The most potent reductio yields a contradiction. This is often in the form of a conclusion that contradicts the original assumption. For example, if we were to plug in the assumption “X is a circle” into an otherwise sound argument and come out with the conclusion, “X is a square,” we have the strongest form of reductio argument available. The conclusion is so absurd given the premises, that the originator of the argument has no logical course of action but to abandon the original assumed premise.
The next most potent level of reductio holds that the conclusion contradicts some known empirical fact. For example, a reductio of this type could take a set of observations and yield the conclusion that, “Therefore, the surface temperature of the earth is an average of -100 degrees F.” Of course, we have sufficient evidence that this conclusion is false, so somewhere in the assumptions that the individual made in reaching this conclusion is a mistake. It may be difficult to find, but it is there.
Finally, the weakest form of reductio argument yields no logical contradiction. It yields no conclusion that contradicts known science. It simply yields a conclusion that seems wrong somehow. In reality, the person who answers, “I do not like the conclusions implied by your thesis therefore your thesis is not sound,” is not arguing from a position of strength. In fact, we have reason to suspect that the fault lies, not in the thesis being reduced to a supposed absurdity, but in those who hold that the conclusion is absurd.
C. 3rd Level Absurdity and Prejudice
The standard way of characterizing a third-level reductio when used in moral debate is that the theory ‘contradicts our moral intuitions’. As a reductio, it assumes that our intuitions have some sort of special weight.
I grew skeptical of intuitions at about the same time I entered college, because I found out just how unreliable they are.
Back when I was working for the Libertarian Party, I spent several afternoons collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to deregulate milk prices. On one such day, a friend of mine and I were in front of a large grocery store. We would split up to cover both entrances to the store, and then get together to talk about how well we were doing.
After one of these sessions, he told me about a conversation he had that day. Over the course of their discussion, the man reported that he was totally against interracial marriage. My friend called this person a racist, and the individual responded that this was incorrect. He thought that blacks had the same rights and moral worth as whites, but that it was wrong for the two races to interbreed. During the conversation, an interracial couple came out of the store, and the man said, “That is what I am against right there. That’s just wrong. You can look at it and see that it is just wrong.”
Here was a man relying on his intuition to tell him the difference between right and wrong, and getting some very bad advice. He was not the only one. No doubt there were many slave owners who found it intuitively comfortable to own slaves, and the vast majority of KKK members felt at ease with their white sheets as they lynched blacks with a perfectly clear conscience. I suspect that the majority of crusaders were caught up in the righteousness of the crusade. Inquisitors in the 15th and 16th centurie, testing the torture of a heathen against his consciousness, found no conflict.
To the degree that we find our intuitions at odds with a utilitarian conclusion, it could just as easily mean that we are still plagued with intuitions in need of correcting, just like the slave owners, inquisitors, and crusaders of the past, as it is that the flaw rests with utilitarianism.
Yet, the case of the Utilitarian Sheriff did strike a sympathetic nerve with me. If I thought of myself in the position of the prisoner, I reacted to the scenario with a sense of outrage. “What good does it do, really, to have me die for the sake of a bunch of baboons who have no concern with guilt over innocence?” If I thought of myself as a member of the community where people think it is okay for a sheriff to sacrifice innocent people, I would worry about being his next sacrifice. Even if I were a member of the minority community that would be attacked, I have a sense that I would rather face the mob than have the blood of an innocent prisoner on my hands.
IV. R.M. Hare’s Defense of Utilitarianism
Dr. Levy somehow got the British philosopher R.M. Hare to visit our small university in Montana, and he had a respectable answer to this problem. When asked of these cases create a problem for utilitarianism, he would answer, “It depends.”
If I were to follow Hare’s line of reasoning, I would say that the outlandish “fill in the blanks as you see fit in order to get the desired results” scenarios are so outlandish that it would not apply to any real-world situation where I might have to make such a decision.
Let’s place the situation in a more real setting. If I were that sheriff, I would also have to worry about the consequences of rewarding the intellectual recklessness of the mob, and the likelihood that this would only promote similar events in the future. I would generate fear in the community about the possibility of somebody else being sacrificed to the mob. These cases often contain an element is that “nobody will ever catch you, so you do not need to worry about these effects.” However, those same ‘nobodies’ would know that they lived under a system that prompted sheriffs to make such calculations.
Even here, if some grossly unlikely string of coincidences were to find me in such a situation where sacrificing the innocent person would promote utility, with the certain and unquestionable knowledge that I was in that type situation, I would still (rightfully) look for other options. For example, I may present the situation to the prisoner and see if he will volunteer to sacrifice his life for the good of his people. Each option will require a new set of assumptions to block, and each new set of assumptions further erodes any real-world applicability.
As for me, I have learned some things in the years since taking this class that alter the answer I would give now. Yet, one thing that I would have said back then, that I would still say now, is that I need something better than a “feeling” to justify all the pain and suffering that would follow from refusing to hand over the prisoner.
Ethics involves more than a mental exercise to give us warm fuzzy feelings about acting out on our own cultural or individual prejudices and bigotries regardless of who may be caused to suffer as a result. Later, I encountered “something better.” But that did not happen until graduate school.
V. Rawls’ Objections and the Veil of Ignorance
John Rawls, in his book, A THEORY OF JUSTICE, proposed a method of divining moral truth that aimed to make sense of these intuitionist attacks on utilitarianism.
Rawls asked us to imagine that we are under a veil of ignorance. This veil conceals from us the specifics of our life — our social status, our race, our gender, our sexual orientation, all of these individual particulars, and to come up with a set of rules. After the rules have been agreed upon, we would pop into our original bodies and live out our lives under these rules. Justice consists of the rules we would all agree to.
A. Hypothetical Veils and Real World Ethics
Yet, this form of argument required a leap of logic that I just could not grasp. I could imagine somebody coming up to me, as I lay on my bed in my dorm room, and asking, “What would you do if you discovered that the building was on fire?” My answer would be, “I would probably leave the building as quickly as safety allowed.” I then imagined the questioner saying, “Then you should be doing that now. Quick! Get out of the building!”
“Why? Is the building on fire?”
“No, but you said you would leave the building if it was on fire.”
“So what? When the building is on fire, give me a call. What I would do if some story would be true tells me nothing about what I should be doing in the real world where the story is false not true.”
I cannot see any way that the decisions that I would make in a hypothetical fantasy world where I was behind this veil of ignorance had any legitimate implications for the choices I make in the real world where no such veil exists.
B. Reflective Equilibrium
Rawls, however, presented a defense for his “veil of ignorance” program, a method of thinking that he called “reflective equilibrium.” This is where he gave weight to intuitions.
The first step in this equilibrium procedure was to take our moral intuitions and to try to come up with some sort of general rules that described them. These would be principles such as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” or “do the greatest good for the greatest number,” or “act in such a way that you can will the principle of your action to be a universal law.”
Then, test these principles against your moral intuitions. Ask what the principle would have you do in this case or that, and measure it against what you “feel” is right.
Where you notice friction, you may need to make some adjustments in your original principles. Perhaps they are not as reliable as you give them credit for. A slight adjustment there might capture a number of different intuitions more fully.
Then, you need to go back to the intuitions. You may then discover that some of them simply cannot be made to work with any set of reasonable principles. In this case, we may be forced to categorize that intuition as a prejudice, and start to go to work on changing it. Typically, it can be done — as we have changed our intuitions regarding slavery, the subjugation of women, interracial marriage, dictatorships, and gladiatorial games. It takes a lot of time and a lot of work, but it can be done.
Using reflective equilibrium, we look at how the veil of ignorance model explains our intuitions. Where we notice friction, we may need to make some adjustments to our veil of ignorance, or we may be forced to conclude that some of our “moral intuitions” are mere prejudice in need of change.
Unfortunately, even if we accept “reflective equilibrium” as a method for refining moral theories, we find that we must reflect on two factors that do not support any type of veil of ignorance.
(1) We have good reason to deny that our intuitions and “feelings” have the special status that the Rawlsian would give them. The assumption that we need to explain our intuitions is questionable.
(2) The fact that I would do something under some fictional set of circumstances implies nothing about what I ought to do in the real world where those fictions are false.
I want to make it clear that I am not raising any objections to “reflective equilibrium” here in any broad sense. My argument is that reflective equilibrium, when it includes the arguments that our moral sentiments are nothing more than our personal prejudices, and that choices in a fictitious world have no relevance to choices in the real world, does not give the “veil of ignorance” method of eliciting our moral intuitions any merit.
There is a special instance of the second issue that I have a particular concern with.
(2’) What information can take with us behind the veil of ignorance?
Let me illustrate this point with an example. Is the cause of disease something that we carry with us behind the veil of ignorance?
Jim believes that disease is caused by rejection of God. Through prayer and devout acts of faith, one’s relationship with God is restored and good health returns. Are these ideas that somebody can take with them behind the veil of ignorance, or should they — as well as the competing theory that diseases were caused by bacteria and viruses — be kept out by the veil of ignorance?
If we say ‘yes’, then people are going to be bringing so much baggage with them behind the veil of ignorance that it is unlikely that they will reach any conclusion other than the prejudices they started with. If we say ‘no’, we do not carry our knowledge about such things as the cause of disease with us, then we have no way of making decisions that have any real-world merit.
The cause of disease is not the only questionable issue that creates problem for any type of Rawlsian veil of ignorance. Are people allowed to bring their beliefs about the existence of God behind the veil. If they are, are they allowed to bring their beliefs about what God commands?
If people are allowed to carry all of these things with them behind the veil of ignorance, then it seems that they would not be ignorant of very much. It is likely that they will make exactly the same decisions behind the veil as they would make in front of the veil, in which case the veil of ignorance serves no useful purpose. If they are not allowed to carry these assumptions with them behind the veil, then it seems that they would not be able to make any decisions at all.
I want to repeat, these objections are not objections against “reflective equilibrium” as a tool. They are arguments that state that, using “reflective equilibrium”, we have reason to reject the “veil of ignorance” as a meaningful account of justice. There are too many problems associated with inferring something that we should do under real-world circumstances from what we would do if certain false premises were true, and with determining which false premises we should assume are true (what ignorance we should pretend to have).
VI. Moral Intuitions and Pink Elephants
As I thought about this issue, I came up with another way of looking at intuitions.
I imagined a group of people at a party in which they have managed to become quite drunk. They are in a well-lit building, and it is dark outside. One of them looks out of the window and thinks he sees a pink elephant. It is difficult to know for sure with the reflections in the window. He is uncertain.
To test whether the pink elephant is really there, he calls over a friend and asks the friend what he sees. If the friend also sees a pink elephant, this suggests that the pink elephant is real. If the friend does not see the pink elephant, this would support the thesis that it is a figment of the first person’s imagination.
The more friends who see a pink elephant, the more support there is for the thesis that there really is a pink elephant out there.
Testing moral theories against our intuitions could be described the same way. What we do when we test our intuitions is we are calling our friends over to a “window” through which we see the moral landscape outside, pointing to a specific part of that landscape, and asking, “Do you see any wrongness over there?” If the friend answers that they see wrongness, this supports the conclusion that the wrongness is really there. If not, then this suggests that the wrongness is all in our mind.
If enough people see “wrongness” in a particular piece of the moral landscape, and utilitarianism says that there is no wrongness out there for them to see, then utilitarianism must explain why they all think they see a wrongness that does not exist. Either that, or admit that utilitarianism fails to account for what exists outside the window.
The question is not that difficult to answer. If one person tastes a juicy steak and likes it, and another person tastes the steak and likes it, and yet a third person likes the same steak, this does not imply that the stake has an intrinsic goodness that all people happen to perceive. It only implies that those who are tasting the steak have certain similarities, and among these similarities is a taste for steak.
Given our common genetic heritage and the fact that the vast majority of people in a given area are raised in the same culture (and culture has an influence on the tastes and preferences we acquire), there is no mystery to the fact that there are some things that we all like.
But it does not follow from the fact that most of us, or even all of us but one, like steak that the one who does not is ‘in error’ or is blind to some type of value that is intrinsic to steak. The fact that all of us likes something is not proof of any type of intrinsic merit, or proof that we have discovered some truth that would leave those who do not like it “mistaken” in some way. No matter how many of us like steak and mushrooms, the person who would prefer liver and onions is not in error.
If it turns out to be the case that all of us like a situation in which the Utilitarian sheriff protects the innocent prisoner, rather than turning him over to the mob, this preference has its place in the utilitarian calculus. If we like a world in which sheriffs do not turn in innocent prisoners, then a world in which sheriffs do not turn in innocent prisoners would tend to maximize utility.
VII. The Evolution of Morality
A. Morality and Evolved Desires
Another way that people sometimes try to explain our moral intuitions, and at the same time argue for their legitimacy, is through evolution. They argue that certain community-oriented sentiments of cooperation evolved because they help the species to survive, and it is this evolved disposition we appeal to when judging right from wrong. Our intuitions are grounded on our evolved capacity to recognize what works.
One immediate problem with this approach is, “Is morality to be understood as those sentiments that we have acquired through evolution, or is morality something else and, by luck and the forces of nature, we happened to have evolved a tendency to act in accordance with this ‘something else’?
We see this tension when those who try to link morality with evolution try to explain the evolution of altruism. Unless one can defend an evolutionary altruism, then a defense of an evolutionary ethics seems hopeless.
However, why link evolution to altruism? Why believe that evolutionary altruism would help an evolutionary theory of ethics, but evolutionary sadism would be a problem?
The only reasonable answer to that is to argue a conclusion that contradicts the goal of the evolutionary ethicist — to say that the concept of morality is tied to altruism, independent of whether we actually evolved a disposition to be altruistic or not.
If we go this route, then we cannot say that “X is wrong because we evolved a disposition to disapprove of
X.” Rather, we would have to say, “X is wrong and, by luck and the forces of nature, we happened to have also evolved a disposition to disapprove of X.”
What if we had not evolved to have these altruistic or community-oriented sentiments of cooperation? Would this mean that cruelty and selfishness would be moral? Or would this mean that humans evolved to be inherently evil?
If we conceptually link morality to evolution, then no matter how we evolved, that would define what is moral. Under this conception, if we were to discover that a disposition on the part of males to commit rape is an evolved trait, then this discovery would call for us to move rape out of the “wrong” column and into the “right” or even “obligatory” column. If male humans, like male lions, evolved a disposition to slaughter their stepchildren (or to have sex with their step daughters), then we would be wrong to identify the slaughtering of step children (or having sex with step daughters) as wrong.
The other option, that morality consists in altruism and community-oriented cooperation, and we happened to have evolved these dispositions, rules out all possibility of appealing to evolved sentiments as the justification for morality. Perhaps we have, in fact, evolved a disposition to treat people a certain way. So what? It does not make it right or proper for us to do so.
These, then, are our two options. Either morality is determined by our evolved sentiments, or morality is something different from our evolved sentiments and perhaps, maybe, we have evolved sentiments to do what is moral.
If the former is true, than any evolved sentiment — including a disposition to rape, murder, or slaughter human clans who do not look or think like us — is moral. There is nothing special about evolved altruism or community-oriented cooperation. This just happens to be the direction in which evolution has taken us so far. With each passing generation, this could change.
If the latter is true, then our evolved sentiments have nothing at all to do with what is right or wrong in fact. They tell us nothing about what we ought or ought not to do, only what we want or want not to do. We are still left with the possibility that we may want to do things that we morally ought not to do, or not want to do that which is our duty.
B. Pride
In thinking about the issues of evolutionary ethics, I once imagined a civilization of intelligent lions, and what that would be like. The citizens in this imaginary community had the sentiments common to lions, and appealed to them in deciding what was right and wrong.
They concluded that the only legitimate form of family unit was the pride. The value of this relationship was intrinsic to the pridal unit itself, and any being that lacked the capacity to perceive the intrinsic value of the pride was considered defective — a sick pervert suffering from a type of moral blindness.
Consistent with this, they held that pair bonding was immoral, a crime against nature, a degrading and degenerate form of “alternative lifestyle” that was inherently wrong. They fought to ensure that their social institutions — their laws and customs — discouraged pair bonding in favor of pridal relationships. They insisted on defining marriage as a union between two closely related males (typically brothers), and any number of closely related females — sisters, mothers, daughters, cousins, and the like.
Because we are considering a link between evolved sentiments and ethics, let us introduce a pair of lions that are genetically different from the rest. A genetic mutation has caused these lions to prefer pair bonding to pride bonding. Two such lions (one male, one female) meet and decide that they want to have their own cubs and raise them without membership in a pride. Of course, these double-parent families are considered contemptible by the rest of the lionid society.
Let us then imagine humans discovering this community. The pair-bonded lions go back to their elders, point to us and say, “See, they are pair-bonded. There is nothing wrong with a pair-bonded family.”
“They are not lions,” the elders answer.
“So? Maybe I am not really a lion either? If you call me a lion, you are saying that some lions prefer pair bonding to pride bonding, like humans. If you say that no lions prefer pair bonding, then that implies that I am not a lion. Neither option says that those lions that desire pair bonding are wrong or defective.”
I see no answer to this challenge.
This highlights another problem with evolutionary ethics. It cannot distinguish between being “different” and being “wrong”. If evolutionary ethics were true, “different” is “wrong”. Are those who do not have these different dispositions to be considered “defective” members of the same subspecies, or a different subspecies? If they are to be considered “defective” — what makes them “defective,” if not the sole fact that they are different?
C. Intuitions Evolved Sentiments
The problem with grounding morality on evolved sentiments ultimately is the same as that for grounding morality on intuitions. Indeed, intuitions, on this account, are evolved sentiments. That problem rests on the distinction between saying that ethics needs to consider these elements, and saying that ethics must be grounded on these elements.
Grounding morality on intuitions or evolved sentiments makes the well-being of others entirely contingent. If you want to protest the harm that I may inflict upon you under either of these systems, you need to assume that I have an intuition or an evolved sentiment against doing this type of harm. Otherwise, your protests that I ought to take your harm into consideration will be mistaken. You cannot sensibly assert that morality is grounded on evolved sentiments and, at the same time, I ought to obey an evolved sentiment that I do not have.
I want to be clear about this point. Assume it is true that ‘I ought not to torture you’ merely means that I have an intuition, feeling, or evolved disposition not to torture you. If I have no such intuition or evolved disposition, then the statement that I ought not to torture you is false. In fact, if my intuitions or evolved feelings suggest torture, then I ought to torture you. If you were to try to deny that I have an intuition or evolved disposition, you would be wrong.
If, instead, we want to argue that the badness of torture rests, not in the fact that I do not want to torture you (which may be false), but in the suffering inflicted on the person being tortured, then we cannot base the wrongness of torture on the sentiments of the one doing the torturing. The one during the torturing may not care about that suffering, and may even crave it.
Utilitarianism, unlike intuitionist theories or those grounded on the sentiment or feeling of the agent, take the harms inflicted on the victim as necessary part of the moral calculus. The person reaching a moral conclusion cannot just ignore it. Any theory grounding ethics on intuition and moral sentiment can ignore a great deal of suffering inflicted on others, if it turns out that the person inflicting the suffering just does not care about it.
VIII. Humans and Utilitarian Creatures
One question still bothered me about our utilitarian sheriff.
What type of creature is this that bases all decisions on what will bring about the greatest good for the greatest number? It certainly is not human. Humans have a huge bundle of interests — an aversion to pain, a desire for food, a desire for sex, and aversion to liver and onions (at least some of them), and so on. All of these wants, desires, interests, and aversions, influence a person’s actions. The creature that cares nothing about these other things — whose only goal in life is to maximize utility — has to be some sort of space alien.
We can, perhaps, imagine a being from some distant planet that selects the toppings for his pizza based upon which set of toppings will produce the most happiness, but it would be hard to imagine a human being doing that.
This then raises the question, “What moral advise should we give to a human sheriff — a sheriff whose desire to maximize utility must stand in competition with a list of other desires, all putting pressure on him to perform other types of actions?”
In the case of our innocent prisoner, let us toss a few more variables into the stew and see what it tastes like. Let us say that the innocent prisoner is the sheriff’s lover. Indeed, imagine that you are the sheriff, the prisoner is your lover, and the reason that you know that the prisoner is innocent is because you were with her the night of the crime. However, if you say so, rather than helping your lover, your confession will only put your life in danger for the crime of union with this other race.
Now, can you be expected to act like the utilitarian sheriff? The utilitarian sheriff would go before the mob and say, “Well, what matters here is the greatest good for the greatest number, so here you go mob people. Take the prisoner.” It simply would not be possible for a human to act this way.
Of course, our non-human utilitarian sheriff would have also have selected a lover (as well as selected whether or not to have a lover) based solely upon the criteria of which lover (if any) would produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Personal preference is such a small part of the greatest good for the greatest number that, for all practical purposes, it is irrelevant.
Our human sheriff is a different type of creature entirely.
IX. Conclusion
These classes that I took as an undergraduate in college only provided me with a basic introduction to ethical theory. They explained the basic elements of these theories to me, but left me with more questions than answers. Utilitarianism seemed to be the system that made the most sense. However, it was not without its problems.
The common criticism of utilitarianism is that it asks us to do things that we are intuitively uncomfortable with. Those who raise this objection, it seems, are failing to answer an important question. If there is a conflict between utilitarianism and our intuitions, then on what grounds to we presume that our intuitions must win the contest?
If we look at the intuitions that people have had in the past, they do not have a good track record, permitting all sorts of immorality and barbarism. People have, in the past, been intuitively comfortable with slavery, genocide, religious oppression, the divine right of kings, inquisitions, crusades, the banning (and burning) of ideas considered heretical, among a great many other evils.
If we look for a foundation to give these intuitions merit, we cannot find it behind a veil of ignorance. We must either take so many ideas with us behind the veil that we are not truly ignorant at all, or so few that we could not hope to make wise decisions. Besides, what sense does it make to say that a conclusion reached in an argument with a premise that is known to be false is in any sense well founded?
Nor can we justify our intuitions by claiming that they are evolved dispositions. A disposition is not necessarily good (or evil) merely because it has a pedigree. Any disposition could evolve under the right circumstances — there is a lot of random chance in nature. We may have evolved some sort of disposition to treat others with a certain amount of kindness. However, history tells us that this disposition is limited, and evolution tells us that any tendency to treat others with kindness is merely an accident. Is kindness an essential part of morality, or is it just an accident of nature?
If our intuitions come into conflict with utilitarianism, then perhaps this means that we — like our slave-owning, misogynous, religiously bigoted, crusading, ancestors — would be better off reconsidering our prejudices rather than rejecting utilitarian theory.
At the same time, we do need an ethical system that is a fit system for human beings. A creature that concerns itself merely with maximizing utility may be useful, but it is certainly not human. Nor is utilitarianism a fit theory to be recommended for a group of beings that are human.
So, what can we say about a theory of ethics that would be fit for humans?
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