Don't Live as a Utilitarian

The laws of physics won't teach you how to drive

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Imagine you are explaining Newton’s first law to someone – you tell them, “An object at rest will stay at rest, and an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

“That’s nonsense,” they say. “If I brake my car, it’ll stop all on its own, without anyone else pushing on it in any direction. If I put it in neutral, it’ll come to a stop.”

“It’s not so simple!” you cry. “When you brake your car, the coefficient of fric–”

“An obvious adhockery. You can cook up whatever epicycles you like about friction or air resistance or whatever, but these make your theory unfalsifiable. The facts are, things slow down and speed up all the time with nothing pushing on them. Everyone knows this. What about when I start my car? No one’s pushing on it then, either! Or when I raise my arm? This is an absurdity.”

Fundamental explanations of the world are frequently counterintuitive in this way. This is fine – and it is still perfectly sensible to live in accordance with our intuitive principles – so long as we do not consider them fundamental. There is no good reason to suspect our intuitions reliably track fundamental truths. If I think of my car as an object that moves on its own, day to day, this is no issue – so long as I do not hold this as a fundamental fact about the world. As long as I am open to the possibility that my car's motion is explainable in terms of underlying facts about lots of smaller and more complex moving pieces, I make no error.

Further, fundamental explanations are useless to most people in most contexts. I can get by in the world just fine without knowing Newton’s first law – I can throw baseballs, drive to work, build a house, chop down a tree, and so on – without ever needing to consider it. It is vital in specialized fields – among scientists or, say, astronauts – but most of us are not astronauts or scientists, and our intuitive principles serve as perfectly adequate “rules of thumb” regarding how things move.

As in physics, our intuitive ethical principles are generally adequate to get through the day. We tell the truth, follow the law, stay faithful to our spouses, donate to charity – or at least, acknowledge that these are all good things to do – and these principles rarely lead us astray. We believe bad people should be punished; we believe it’s good to forgive; we believe it’s wrong to kill people or steal their organs. There are strong reasons to believe all these things.

As in physics, the fundamental explanations of morality are frequently counterintuitive on their face. The utilitarian will (or at least, should) always admit that hypothetical cases can be imagined in which you should rob a charity, kill a child, forge a check, and so on, if doing so would (e.g.) prevent the sun from exploding. These are very weird conclusions – but they are not much weirder than concluding that your car would never come to a rest after a trillion years if it rolled on a frictionless surface through a vacuum.

But there is simply no way, from day to day, to “live as a utilitarian.” It is good when people enjoy life, and bad when people suffer – these are fundamental – but it is not productive to do some sort of calculus on the expected suffering-to-enjoyment ratio when I am deciding whether to forge a check. No one can do this, and it’s foolish to try. So we live in accordance with our intuitive principles, and generally expect that following these rules of thumb will lead to a good life, and make us a good person.

But, as in physics, a small number of us are “scientists”: people who explore the limits of society’s principles, and search for ways to improve or explain them. In ethics, these are philosophers, but also artists, activists, pundits, and priests – people who argue, perhaps against our intuitions, that we should get rid of some principle or another, or adjust our principles to account for exceptional cases, or develop new principles to account for new types of choices we confront as society changes. But society’s principles cannot be used to check its principles - they must be analyzed in terms of more fundamental facts. For these people, utilitarianism offers the terms according to which one might interrogate society’s existing principles – does this norm, if followed, reliably make lives better? If everyone lives in accordance with this principle, what are the foreseeable long-term consequences? Does it make lives worse? Are there clear-cut exceptions? Utilitarianism sets up the framework for this analysis.

And, as in physics, some are “astronauts”: people who operate in extremely exotic environments, where society has not developed many useful intuitive principles. In the ethical field, these are the people who wield tremendous power and face choices that affect thousands or millions. Legislators, judges, diplomats, generals, and the like, are “ethical astronauts,” in this sense. Beyond obvious principles like “don’t take bribes,” societies do not develop many useful “rules of thumb” regarding what sorts of treaties should be signed, what lengths of sentence should be imposed for crimes, what financial regulations should be passed, and so on - and so people in these roles operate in ethically exotic environments. There are few rules of thumb, in these cases, to rely on. So for these people, the basic principles of utilitarianism are vital – perhaps a matter of life and death (though usually, someone else’s). It is intrinsically bad if millions suffer. It is not intrinsically wrong to lie to prevent a war. It is perhaps extrinsically wrong – and there are perilously few principles to rely on to make this assessment, at this scale.

Most of us are not scientists or astronauts. We might study physics or ethics as a hobby; we might not. We do not need to do any math to drive to work, nor do we need to do any math to conclude that we ought to. We defer to the scientists as authorities in contested or complex matters, but, day to day, we live based on simple, intuitive principles. This is fine – it is, arguably, the only way a society could function.

But if, one morning, you wake up and find yourself taking off in a rocket ship – you had better hit the books!