Counter-Intuitive Utilitarian Views on Obligation and Inflicting Suffering
The concepts of obligation and supererogation cause problems for utilitarian thinking
Utilitarianism is very demanding if treated as an obligation. If you must maximize utility to be ethical, then every utilitarian fails to do so unless they spend all of their time and money saving lives and giving to effective charities. Usually, when the issue of this extremely strong obligation is raised, utilitarians say that calling for consistency at an extreme sacrifice is not a good way to advertise the ethical system and they settle for doing pretty good.
Where to draw the line of supererogatory and obligatory is once again an issue for utilitarianism. If you make no distinction then everything is obligatory, in which case everyone is blameworthy for their massive moral failings. If you make everything supererogatory then nobody is to blame for their so-called moral failings. These are theoretically consistent positions but I believe utilitarians frequently make blameworthy judgements that are not according to utilitarian thinking. These judgments are intuitions that count as evidence against their theory.
For example, they would consider someone worse for committing a murder than saving a life. Not committing the murder would be treated as obligatory. Saving the life supererogatory. However, there should be no distinction morally. In a recent discussion in which I raised this point, one commenter objected that there is a certain degree of fear involved when a murder takes place. This is true. However, I think there is an underlying intuition regardless of fear that one is worse than the other because you could have this intuition even if no one is in danger. I can account for these problems by changing hypothetical situations to remove moral hazard but the intuition remains.
I believe that utilitarians typically think like normal people. Imagine I have a utility scale of non-consensually inflicting unjustified suffering on others (-infinity, 0). I think that utilitarians find it morally obligatory to not inflict suffering through murder, assault and abuse. Imagine a utility scale of preventing suffering (0, infinity). I think most utilitarians feel as though it might be necessary to do a little bit but probably not condemnable if you don’t do a ton. You don’t recognize this incongruence until you start coupling actions from different scales.
Let us imagine two scenarios. One in which I did not send my money to the third world to prevent the unnecessary starvation of a toddler but I used the money to buy cigars. (not creating +5000 utility). The other situation is that I used the money to order a hitman to kill that same toddler on the brink of starvation in a far off country. (creating -5000 utility). I imagine the second scenario is significantly worse even without considering moral hazard. I would say it is obligatory not to murder but supererogatory to save lives. Under a utilitarian framework, this common sense opinion that I hold is not justification because our only scale is more or less suffering.
Establishing rules of action could be another possible objection but my point is that it seems more wrong because it is more wrong, not because it seems like a suboptimal rule that creates moral hazard. If I amended the hypothetical to include no one ever knowing what you’re doing and the hitman never being caught, then you are left without moral hazard.
The discussions that take place among utilitarians appear baffling to me as well if murder is equivalent to letting die as some believe. A utilitarian saying “Yes, you should give all your income but people aren’t perfect and you have to do the best you can” appears very reasonable. A consistent utilitarian could say to a serial murderer “Yes, you should stop killing innocent people but people aren’t perfect and you have to do the best you can.” If that murderer then cut down by 10% on their murders, the consistent utilitarian would consider this morally praiseworthy in the same way donating is considered. But that seems very absurd. And I feel when I press utilitarians they don’t say “Yes, this is correct” but they say something like “Well, I don’t want to live in a society that normalizes murder.” From a utility maximizing perspective, the normalization of letting foreign starving children die is equivalent to the normalization of allowing murder.
I have demonstrated a weird conclusion in utilitarianism. You can bite the bullet and accept this counter-intuitive treatment of obligation and supererogation as correct or you can abandon utilitarianism. How is pointing to a crazy conclusion in utilitarianism an argument against it? It is because the proper way of ethical reasoning is through weighing of various intuitions. By pointing out a bunch of counter intuitions, I can create skepticism about utilitarianism even if someone does not accept this meta-ethical approach.