The Utilitarian Fallacy

Utilitarianism is ultimately bankrupt as an ethical philosophy, and really offers nothing to anyone seeking a viable ethics. As it stands, utilitarianism requires acts great and small of fantastic absurdity, which conflict with common notions of justice as well as our pre-reflective intuitions about what is moral to do. Furthermore, the utilitarian defense is feeble at best, and offers no modification of the theory which make it viable.

Herein, utilitarianism shall be considered as the claim that a person, when acting, should always aim to maximize utility. This claim is hereafter referred to as 'rule U.' 'Utility" may be variously defined, but it shall not be our concern to explore the effects of fiddling with the details of the concept, since it will be argued that no such specification could make a significant enough difference to save utilitarianism from its problems. Thus, utility will be spoken of in a general sense, and treated specifically as necessary in each of the problematic examples considered.

Such examples are all too easy to come up with, when applying even the most general utilitarian view (that is, rule U). The actions we find ourselves committed to if we embrace rule U range from merely eccentric, to rather bizarre, to outright fanatical. Three examples will roughly illustrate this spectrum of weirdness. The first is a very simple application of rule U. Suppose I would like to purchase an antique book, say Milton's Paradise Lost illustrated with Doré's engravings. This fine volume costs fifty dollars, which strikes me as not at all unreasonable considering the quality of the book. Before making the purchase, however, I remind myself that I ought to apply rule U to my action. Immediately it becomes apparent that by no means should I make the purchase; the fifty dollars may better be applied elsewhere, whether in my own budgeting, or to contribute to increasing the utility of others. Assuming my own necessities are taken care of, I really ought to give this money (and perhaps all of my surplus money) to a charitable organization, for example. Even if it is asserted that my owning a copy of Paradise Lost will have a maximizing effect on total utility (for no small value is placed on education in this country), certainly a much less costly copy of the text can be obtained, even with Doré's illustrations to boot, leaving the rest of my fifty dollars to be applied elsewhere, to the greater benefit of total utility. To sum up, rule U seems to require that we ought never to indulge in the purchase of "luxury" items, but should see that our extra spending money be channelled away from ourselves so as to maximize utility.

Such budgeting behavior may be rather odd, but not necessarily damaging to our persons, and such a lifestyle might even be considered laudable by some. As I am walking home from the bookstore having refrained from buying the old book, however, I continue to think about rule U, and how to apply it to my action. It occurs to me, as I pass by an ambulance driving away from an automobile accident, that the lives of a great many people in hospitals are hanging in the balance, waiting for organ transplants. Surely there are among them people whose work represents a potentially fantastic increase in the total utility of mankind: philosophers, doctors, master artisans, and so on. I may be a far from useless individual myself - even the humblest of Reedies is among the best of scholars - but no comparison to these people can be drawn. If they can live by receiving my transplanted organs, and continue or complete their great work, total utility will doubtless be much more increased than it might be decreased by my demise. Having checked my drivers' license for confirmation of my status as an organ donor, I ought therefore to kill myself without delay, that my healthy organs might save the lives of the hospitalized benefactors of mankind.

Clearly rule U's stipulations have quickly become quite bizarre, and our intuitions about morality are likely already conflicting with the utilitarian demands. At the risk of redundancy, one further example will be considered. Having returned home, just before I end my life to donate my organs, another utilitarian revelation comes upon me. While I might affect a net increase of total utility by the donation of my own organs, I could certainly achieve an even greater net increase by systematically killing others to provide their organs to the hospitalized benefactors. Furthermore, while at it I could see to the execution of (other) murderers whose less discriminating killing would result in decreased total utility. Indeed, that rule U requires the maximization of total utility in turn morally obligates me to undertake these and other maniacal tasks.

To deal with such evident absurdities, a number of potential modifications to utilitarianism have been proposed. The three that shall be considered below are all ultimately no use as defensive arguments, as each modification itself contradicts the very utilitarian premise (rule U). First, for example, is the notion of rule utilitarianism, which suggests that rule U be supplemented with additional rules designed to avoid circumstances like being morally obligated to kill myself for the sake of maximizing utility. This modification is no sooner proposed than it is seen to be quite contradictory, for it just does not make much sense to the utilitarian mind to follow such additional rules when breaking them results in greater utility.
A second modification is that the utilitarian give up always and everywhere acting to maximize total utility, and rather act to maximize total utility "only if we do so in a fair way." (Smart p. 37) It would be unfair to act so as to maximize utility when doing so "involved making some people less happy than they might be otherwise." This amounts to a specific form of rule utilitarianism, and again it is liable to collapse into simple adherence to rule U. Even Smart, defending utilitarianism, only concedes that "fairness" may at best be adopted "as an important, but not inviolable, rule of thumb."

Finally, the lamest of the defensive arguments is so-called objective utilitarianism. This is essentially the view that utilitarianism is an ethical philosophy meant solely to render a moral classification of acts, rather than to prescribe how one ought to actually act. Such an argument is supremely useless for two reasons: first, that again it is contradictory for the utilitarian to use rule U merely to assign moral status to various courses of action, and then act against those considerations. The very judgment that the one course of action which will maximize total utility is the moral one obligates the utilitarian to choose that course of action, and it is therefore absurd to propose that he should so oblige himself without following through. Secondly, if utilitarianism is not meant as a functional, practically applicable ethical philosophy, it immediately seems questionable whether there is any merit in giving it any consideration whatsoever. Any viable ethics ought to provide us with a way of ordering our lives and guiding our actions responsibly and practically. In this regard, utilitarianism fails utterly, and the argument for objective utilitarianism seems to reflect the inability of rule U to function as an actual ethical philosophy.

This failure of utilitarianism, as illustrated by the problematic examples and untenable defenses outlined above, arises primarily from a fundamental problem in the unspoken ideas which constitute the foundation of the philosophy. Two presumptions are made which preclude rule U from ever serving as a viable ethical tool. The first is the notion of utility itself, and indeed, much ink has been spilled over what really constitutes utility. The presumption that some single thing could be identified as universally desirable and beneficial by all is a deeply flawed one. Furthermore, the presumption that, even allowing for the hypothetical possibility of such a thing's existence, one could ever determine what it is can lead only to the kind of trouble seen in the cases above.

Second - and this is the greatest error of utilitarianism - is the presumption that anyone can know indubitably what the results of their action will be. While we must generally, to some degree, act as if we knew the outcome of our action in order to function, we are ever confounded by unforeseen circumstances and sudden change. Some information we did not have prior to deciding to act a certain way may reveal that our action was entirely the opposite of what we would have done in light off the new information. So also with the presumption that the utilitarian can act as if he knows for certain that his actions will maximize utility. It is the very fact that we are always uncertain about whether our inclinations to do one thing or another are appropriate that leads us to seek an ethical philosophy to guide us. Such an ethics - one that can be lived by - is what we need, and what we ought to pursue; and it is just such an ethics that utilitarianism fails to provide.