Each day we must ask ourselves what we should do. We also happen to have very distinct ideas about what those around us should be doing. We all know people that we believe to be virtuous and upstanding citizens. Likewise, we all know people that we despise and who we feel embody some vice or another. Why do some people seem to get it so right and others seem to be so lost in their ways? Most people that we believe act in poor judgment would strongly disagree. They attempt to make virtuous decisions, and usually believe that they have succeeded in such a goal. It is just that, then: poor judgment. It is not that they act with malice (most of the time), it is simply that they failed to correctly assess the situations they encountered and made bad decisions. In fact, even virtuous people make poor choices all the time. It seems that even virtuous people are unable to consistently make good decisions. So, if both people we perceive as virtuous and vicious have the same goal in mind, and both believe that they are fulfilling that goal, then how can we determine which choices are virtuous in our own lives? This is the fundamental question of moralist philosophy and a problem that many philosophers have attempted to answer with different theories.
A large part of moralist philosophy attempts to apply a universalist set of principles that dictate moral action. This means that the framework should be able to objectively identify the morally correct actions in any given situation. Philosophers have proposed a wide range of solutions to this problem and, at the same time, philosophers have heaped criticism onto these competing ideologies. The moralist theory analyzed in this essay is act utilitarianism. This is a part of consequentialist moral philosophy, which dictates that actions should be morally judged based on the consequences that arise from them. More specifically, it imagines that the correct action to take is the one that produces the best outcome. Jeremy Bentham was the first to coin the term utilitarianism, in a dream no less! He specifically felt that actions should aim to maximize utility relative to all other outcomes. He believed that there were two dominant things that should drive actions: pleasure and pain. He believed that pleasure added utility and pain was subtracted from utility. Utilitarianism is usually described as the belief that maximizing utility for the greatest number of people is the best way to achieve morality.
Now, the phrase “maximize utility for the greatest number of people” is an incredibly important one. Most philosophers, including most utilitarians, interpret this goal as “maximizing net utility.” In my opinion, this interpretation only relays half of the phrase — the “maximize utility” part. The second part, “for the greatest number of people” adds another dimension to consider. It presents a tradeoff between the maximization of net utility and the amount that the utility should be spread. For the purpose of this essay, we will assume that there are three dominant ways to interpret this phrase.
The first gives weight to the first part of the phrase. This is the traditional view of utilitarianism that most philosophers adopt. It simply imagines that the maximization of utility is what is most important. In other words, creating the most net utility in the world is the way to achieve the best outcomes. The second way to interpret the phrase is by giving the last part of the phrase the most weight. In other words, utility for the greatest number of people is important. This seems to imply equality is a tenet of utilitarianism; that the utility in the world should be spread among as many people as possible. The third interpretation would therefore put equal weight on both parts of the sentence. Now, there are two ways to interpret this: we should strive to achieve the highest net utility and equality at the same time. These are powerful values, but it does not acknowledge that many situations represent a tradeoff between the two and it fails to give us a solution to solve many moral dilemmas. A different interpretation would be that average utility is the most important. This acknowledges both the maximization of utility and the number of people, and as such it bypasses the problem of not being able to sufficiently reconcile tradeoffs and will be the interpretation used in this essay. In this essay, I aim to show that we often prefer different interpretations in different situations, and as a result, demonstrate that there is no way to count utility that offers a suitable universalist solution to moralist philosophy.
Derek Parfit was the philosopher to introduce the repugnant conclusion in his essay Overpopulation and The Quality of Life in an effort to answer the question “Can there be overpopulation: too many people living?” While he hardly mentions utilitarianism, his essay has since been adapted by many to critique net utilitarianism. Imagine there are two possible worlds, and you must choose one to be brought into existence. In the first world, everyone has a great amount of utility. The second world has twice as many people, but each person only has slightly more than half the utility of the people in the first world. The net utilitarian would say choose the second world, the average utilitarian would choose the first world, and the equality utilitarian would not have a preference. But which utilitarian interpretation gives the best answer? Parfit takes the example to the extreme to better serve his point.
Imagine the same situation, however, there are different worlds. Imagine the first world has a hundred people that each receive a 1,000 utility. Imagine a second world with 100,001 people who each receive only one utility. In the first world, each person is abundantly happy and enjoys each day of their life. In the second world, each day is only barely worth living and people are just barely better off than miserable. At this stage, most people would agree with the average utilitarian perspective rather than the net utilitarian, but this conclusion must be proved. Imagine now a single life: your life. You have the choice between living 500 years with 1,000 utility for every year of living for a total of 500,000 utility. In the second scenario, you would live for 500,001 years but are confined to only 1 utility per year for a total of 500,001 utility.
The second option seems more like torture, especially in comparison to the first option, however, a net utilitarian would say the second life is better as it maximizes utility. In fact, if someone else was pushing the button for you, they would be obligated under net utilitarian contract to choose the second option for you, and you would likely resent them for it. You had better hope that they aren’t net utilitarian. So, simply by looking at personal preference, we are able to establish that the maximization of utility is not always the most desirable choice. It appears that in this situation the number of years matters as much as the amount of utility in the world, and average utility provides the best outcome.
However, this doesn’t always seem to be the case. Robert Nozick famously proposed the utility monster objection to utilitarianism in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. This was written as a strike at net utilitarianism, but it also strikes at the heart of average utilitarianism. Imagine a monster that receives twice as much utility from eating people as people get pain from being eaten. Additionally, the monster feels twice as much pain when not eating people than people get utility from existing. Once all the people in the world have been eaten, the monster is satisfied and no longer is in anguish. In this situation, the greatest amount of aggregate utility can be found by feeding everyone to the monster. Similarly, the highest average utility would be reached through the same course of action. Of course, the inequality in this situation is extremely high, and someone who values the equal distribution of utility would certainly not feed everyone to the utility monster.
While the most utility surely can be created through feeding the utility monster, this situation ignores the intrinsic value of humanity. The violation of innocent people is a clear moral wrong. Humanity and existence have intrinsic value that utility is unable to account for. A painless death is a death no less, and to bring death onto an innocent person is a violation of their rights as a human being to make their own decisions and the right to life in general. Asking people to expend themselves for a vicious monster is a violation of this value no matter how much pleasure it brings the monster. Pleasure for a single being should not be contingent upon the displeasure of every other person in existence, and in this situation, the equal utility principle is a clear arbiter of that message.
In our first example, equality utilitarians were indifferent, and in the second, they promoted a morally correct conclusion. Perhaps, you may think, equality utilitarianism should be the first approach and, if satisfied in both situations, we can check average utilitarianism to make a final choice. Parfit has created a scenario that proves this methodology is also problematic. Similarly, you have the choice between creating two different worlds. He imagines world one with 100 people who are maximally happy, at 1000 utility each. World two has that same 100 people who are maximally happy, but has a second group of 100 people that only have 900 utility each. Are we truly to say that world one is better than the second? On average, people are less happy and there is inequality, but can we truly say that the world would be better off if the second group of people didn’t exist at all even while the first group continues to be the same? All that seems to be added is a group of people that are nearly as happy as the first. To deprive them of what would still be considered an incredibly happy and utility-filled life does not seem to be the moral conclusion. Not at all.
We can once again turn to Parfit’s single-life idea to prove this. Once again imagine a choice between 500 years of life, each year with 1000 utility. Now imagine a second choice where you may live 600 years. For the first 500 years, you live with 1000 utility per year, but after this, your utility falls to only 900 per year. Does the inequality between the first 500 years and the last 100 make the second scenario bad? Would you not choose it, despite receiving the same first 500 years and getting another 100 years nearly as maximally happy? Of course, most people would choose the second option, and thus it is reasonable to imagine that the second world in Parfit’s inequality scenario would be the better choice. In this situation, both average utilitarians and equal utilitarians seem to be found in the wrong, while net utility is the only principle that delivers a sound moral judgment.
At this point, we have analyzed utilitarianism through three different lenses: net utility, average utility, and equality of utility. In this process, we deployed three different situations and found that we give weight to different utility principles in different scenarios. In the repugnant conclusion, we find average utility to be the most attractive conclusion, at the expense of net utility. Nozick’s monster seems to embarrass both average utility and net utility, giving preference to equal distribution of utility. In the last scenario, the presence of an additional group with lower utility seems to negate the equal utilitarian principle and average utility, where only net utilitarianism provides a satisfactory moral conclusion. These conclusions alone may rule out one principle of interpretation or another, but in conjunction, they point to a larger conclusion. The problem with attempting to apply a universalist moral principle using utility is that any single principle is far too static to satisfy the variability of human values in different situations. There is no single way of counting utility as it is defined in act utilitarianism that may reconcile all these conclusions, and as such, it is unfit to be a universalist principle for moralist philosophy.