The SciAm blog has a great discussion on current research into the neuroscience of morals. Two cool observations. First, while people tend to agree with the calculus of utilitarian moral judgments, they tend to reject them. Would you kill one person to save twenty? Even if you can morally justify that exchange, you are decidedly reluctant to do it. Second, this reluctance to make utilitarian moral judgments is neurologically based in the sense that if you lose a certain part of your brain (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) you are more likely to accept this calculus.
Go check it out.
I have a couple of comments on the realization that utilitarian logic is not accepted by most people.
First, I am not surprised. People tend to not remember this but utilitarianism as a moral philosophy is of recent historical derivation. It received its greatest explication with Jeremy Bentham in The Principles of Morals and Legislation. People tend to speak of utilitarian judgments like they are laws of nature or intertwined in the fabric of reality, but that is just because of an annoying modern tendency to frame all debates about policy in terms of these decisions.
Second, it is a good thing that people are not entirely utilitarian. There are three major critiques that I would make of utilitarianism as a moral philosophy.
- 1) For those of you who know me, you know that one of my favorite authors is Ayn Rand. In Atlas Shrugged and her other works, Ayn Rand offers a substantial critique of utilitarianism as a moral principle because it denies the individual. Basically -- at least according to my interpretation -- if you accept utilitarian principles completely, you accept a moral premise that states that under certain circumstances you are dispensable. For example, if you are on the life raft trying to decide who stays and who goes, if you accept the idea that you might be the person who has to go. Not only do you accept it, you morally validate it as the right thing to do. Rand states that no rational being can deny their existence in this manner; she argues that this form of altruism results in "self-immolation."
Here are two quotes to exemplify her ideas on the subject:
The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice - which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction - which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.
-- "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World," Philosophy: Who Needs It
When 'the common good' of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.
-- "What is Capitalism?" Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
- 2) Utilitarian principles make the practical matter of moral calculus difficult or impossible. Because they enunciate the greatest good for the greatest number is a good, you have to take into account every individual that is likely to be affected by an action before making that action. How do you know that you have them all? Further, how do you determine how good or bad a particular action is for someone else? I finished reading a book a couple months ago called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. One of his arguments is that human beings can barely predict what makes themselves happy over long periods much less other people. Happiness is not transitive; it cannot be converted from one person to another. In essence, utilitarianism is an impractical because it paralyzes one to act.
- 3) Utilitarian principles have been used to justify every major expansion of government, and they can justify nearly any expansion of government. When the cost to individual taxpayers is small, how can a substantial benefit to a key group not be justified on utilitarian grounds? Bureaucrats and politicians must have been high-fiving each other right and left when utilitarianism came around because it makes no logical limit on government policy. This is, however, largely an argument for another day.
For those of you who take issue with my indictment, I would respond that there are alternative moral systems. For example, rights-based moral principles do not require self-denial and make moral judgment extremely quick. Simply ask, does this action violate the rights of anyone present? Neither is Kant's statement that people are ends in themselves, not the means to other people's ends.
To summarize, it appears that the human brain has enshrined (or perhaps more accurately embodied) the idea that there is something wrong with utilitarian logic. I have argued that 1) this is not surprising and 2) this is not bad. Perhaps, Rand was right in one key regard: on a core level we deny utilitarianism because we recognize that to accept it fully is to deny ourselves.
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I am not sure a rights-based moral system would always be quick. The problem with them comes when the rights of two or more individuals conflict. The courts are full of such cases, and they do not tend to get resolved quickly.
You make a good point, but there is a solution. Define rights in terms of negative rights. The reason that rights issues gets snarled up in the courts is because we have tried to enshrine positive rights -- like rights to commodities -- in the law. Not only do positive rights in many cases violate the negative rights of others, but I assert that they are the source of much of our litigation. In the words of Jacques Barzun: "The welfare state cannot avoid becoming the judiciary state."
I rather suspect that no one moral system is suitable. For example a right-based system would make it difficult to push a mass immunisation program (and certainly impossible to insist on one), whereas under a utilitarian system such a program can be justified.
Of course then we get into arguments over which system should be used when .....
Still no one ever said these things were easy.
No, I certainly hear you on that. For example, the decision to have a government at all is a utilitarian judgment. I don't think that I am arguing that we should not make any utilitarian judgments. Unlike Rand, I doubt it is possible to function in the world without doing so at least some of the time. However, there are limits, and it would appear that those limits are at least partly neurological.
To give perhaps a better example, here in the UK their is a shortage of organs for use in transplants. The shortage has arisen for a number of reasons, improved medical care means accident victims are more likely to survive, would-be doners often fail to inform their family who then refuse consent etc. The current system requires that family of the dead person consent to the organ donation, and the family can overrride the known wishes of the deceased.
The Government's Chief Medical Advisor has recently suggested that the system be changed to an opt-out system, ie unless before your death you make plain your wishes not have to your organs used in transplants then the assumption will be that consent has been given. The family will no longer have a veto.
The current system is essentially a rights-based system, but the proposed system is a utilitarian one. I personally favour changing the system, even though I am confident my family would abide by my wishes and allow my organs to be used.
Wow! So many errors, so little time:
1. Ultimately, we are all dispensable--it's inevitable, and called "death." And citing Ayn Rand, whose own life was a profound refutation of her own professed values (see, for instance, her attempts to seduce Nathaniel Branden), is trivial at best.
Also, isn't Rand really denying that there are principles worth sacrificing for? Really, she's assuming her conclusions, and wrapping it in over-heated rhetoric.
2. It isn't necessary to calculate the happiness for every person. Simplifying assumptions are permissible, as they are in every other area of life.
3. "Bureaucrats and politicians must have been high-fiving each other...." in 1789? And where's your data (you know, data, friendly kind of stuff, allows one to establish the accuracy of an assertion) that shows what an optimal size of government is?
You fall into the trap of many libertarians - extrapolating utilitarian values to the extreme. Using utilitarianism as a reference point against which to measure something is useful, if not always the best way of going about things. This is similar to a flaw of Rand's; namely, not giving her opponents a fair hearing (decidedly unlike John Stuart Mill).
Um, okay, I guess I don't see the strict boundaries between (negative) rights and utility that others see - or are we to assume some "naive" rights/utility systems? For example, you could possibly argue that the motivation behind a rights system (government) is to increase utility. Or you could base specific rights in efforts to increase utility.
I guess I'm not only seeing the problem of trying to adhere to only one specific system, or of resolving conflicts within or between systems, I also think it is hard (at least for me) to decide the boundaries in real life.
Utilitarianism is extremely broad, and Ayn Rand (either deliberately or mistakenly) seems to have been quite confused about the varieties of it.
For example, "preference utilitarianism" is defined in such a way that the "good" is the satisfaction of each person's preferences or desires. A "good society" is one where everyone can maximize their satisfaction.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_utilitarianism
In some ways this does not differ from Rand's philosophy. It may in details like payment of taxes. In fact, utilitarianism is often identified (incorrectly) as pure hedonism, just as Rand's philosophy is often decried as selfish capitalism run rampant.
@vorkosigan1:
> citing Ayn Rand, whose own life was a profound refutation of her own professed values
Just because she didn't practice what she preached, doesn't automatically make her arguments invalid.
That, sir, is a logical fallacy.
In preference utilitarianism, the most popular type nowdays, collective satisfaction of all individual preferences is the only intrinsic good. In Rand's objectivism, individual satisfaction of individual preferences is the only intrinsic good. Rand's loving followers viciously attack utilitarianism because it asks them to be generous, but in reality the two ideas are not that different.
Utilitariansm is pretty new (well, except inasmuch as it follows in the vein of some of what Hobbes was saying, and, going way back, Epicureans and, come to think of it, Socrates as you might see clearly in Plato's "Protagoras".
But in its more modern Bentham-Mill-Sidgewick-Moore-Parfit forms, yes it is pretty new.
So, however are the ideas of Natural Rights! A distinctly Enlightenment idea.
I have noticed that Neuroscientists are lately giving a big boost to Utilitarianism (under the name "consequentialism": see Sam Harris "The Moral Landscape".
As another poster said, Rand's arguments here run her usual gamut of denying her opponents a fair hearing, and she again sensationalises the issue.
Complete denial of the self? Seriously? Utilitarianism is an affirmation of all individuals, all 'selves', in that it acknowledges them in the first place. Rand borders on solipsism with her pursuit of irrational self interest. It's not self-immolation or self-abnegation, because your own interests are included in the calculation! Furthermore, you can reach the same conclusions as Utilitarianism from a purely self interested view point. Take any form of egoism and draw the conclusion that if most people are happy that will lead to greater happiness for you (as they won't want to hurt you, steal from you, ignore you, and you are highly likely to be one of them) and VOILA.
In fairness her comments there are directed at altruism, which is not Utilitarianism, but it's clear that they're inappropriate for a rebuttal of the latter. Descriptively I find altruism problematic. Normatively it makes perfect sense, even if you begin from egoism!! Epicurus arguably began from a similar starting point to Rand over 2000 years ago and drew completely different conclusions (his are logical).
The second point is a strong one against Utilitarianism, and it's why I find it impossible to accept on its own as a rigid system of morality, despite its applicability and practicality in public affairs. More importantly it doesn't justify her own ridiculous prescription. Then again that's altogether unsurprising.
Just further to ths, because this is the most important point, the problem with with this is what relevance it would have even if the study were correct, and we have a propensity to reject Utilitarian principles. The issue is actually one of the big problems of philosophy, as first outlined by Hume, and that's the "Is/Ought" problem....in other words it's by no means clear how we get from what IS to what OUGHT to be. Nowhere is this more relevant than in ethics. Just because we may have a propensity for particular behaviour, doesn't mean we SHOULD behave that way.
Philosophy of ethics is rarely descriptive in the sense that it describes an objective fact about the Universe. At its strongest it deals in normative principles. In other words, it's not so much concerned with what IS as what OUGHT to be. Neuroscience really has little to say on the matter.