This just puts me off being utilitarian to be honest.
Understandably so, because the outside view says that most such sacrifices for the greater good end up having been the result of bad epistemology and unrealistic assessments of the costs and benefits.
Strong rationality means that you’d be able to get away with such an act. But strong rationality also means that you generally have better methods of achieving your goals than dubious plans involving sacrifice. When you end thinking you have to do something intuitively morally objectionable ‘for the greater good’ then you should have tons of alarm bells going off in your head screaming out ‘have you really paid attention to the outside view here?!’.
In philosophical problems, you might still have a dilemma. But in real life, such tradeoffs just don’t come up on an individual level where you have to actually do the deed. Some stock traders might be actively profiting by screwing everyone over, but they don’t have to do anything that would feel wrong in the EEA. The kinds of objections you hear against consequentialism are always about actions that feel wrong. Why not a more realistic example that doesn’t directly feed off likely misplaced intuitions?
Imagine you’re a big time banker whose firm is making tons of money off of questionably legal mortgage loans that you know will blow up in the economy’s face, but you’re donating all your money to a prestigious cancer research institute. You’ve done a very thorough analysis of the relative literature and talked to many high status doctors, and they say that with a couple billion dollars a cure to cancer is in sight. You know that when the economy blows up it will lead to lots of jobless folk without the ability to remortgage their homes. Which is sad, and you can picture all those homeless middle class people and their kids, depressed and alone, all because of you. But cancer is a huge bad ugly cause of death, and you can also picture all of those people that wouldn’t have to go through dialysis and painful treatments only to die painfully anyway. Do you do the typically immoral and questionably illegal thing for the greater good?
Why isn’t the above dilemma nearly as forceful an argument against consequentialism? Is it because it doesn’t appeal in the same way to your evolutionarily adapted sense of justice? Then that might be evidence that your evolutionarily adapted sense of justice wasn’t meant for rational moral judgement.
You would likely have to, for the simple reason that if Cancer gets cured, more resources can be dedicated to dealing with other diseases, meaning even more lives will be saved in the process (on top of those lives saved due to the curing of Cancer).
The economy can be in shambles for a while, but it can recover in the future, unlike cancer patients..and you could always justifying it that if a banker like you could blow up the economy, it was already too weak in the first place: better to blow it up now when the damage can be limited rather than latter.
Though the reason it doesn’t appeal is because you don’t quote hard numbers, making the consequentalist rely on “value” judgements when doing his deeds...and different consequentalists have different “values”. Your consequentalist would be trying to cure cancer by crashing the economy to raise money for a cancer charity, while a different consequentalist could be embezzling money from that same cancer charity in an attempt to save the economy from crashing.
Which is sad, and you can picture all those homeless middle class people and their kids, depressed and alone, all because of you.
And go on to commit suicide due to losing status, not be able to afford health insurance or die from lack of heating… Sure not all of them, but some of them would. Also cancer patients that relied on savings to pay for care might be affected in the time lag between crash and cure being created.
I’d also have weigh how quickly the billions could be raised without tanking the economy. And how many people the time difference in when it was developed would save.
So I am still stuck doing moral calculus, with death on my hands whatever I chose.
Understandably so, because the outside view says that most such sacrifices for the greater good end up having been the result of bad epistemology and unrealistic assessments of the costs and benefits.
Strong rationality means that you’d be able to get away with such an act. But strong rationality also means that you generally have better methods of achieving your goals than dubious plans involving sacrifice. When you end thinking you have to do something intuitively morally objectionable ‘for the greater good’ then you should have tons of alarm bells going off in your head screaming out ‘have you really paid attention to the outside view here?!’.
In philosophical problems, you might still have a dilemma. But in real life, such tradeoffs just don’t come up on an individual level where you have to actually do the deed. Some stock traders might be actively profiting by screwing everyone over, but they don’t have to do anything that would feel wrong in the EEA. The kinds of objections you hear against consequentialism are always about actions that feel wrong. Why not a more realistic example that doesn’t directly feed off likely misplaced intuitions?
Imagine you’re a big time banker whose firm is making tons of money off of questionably legal mortgage loans that you know will blow up in the economy’s face, but you’re donating all your money to a prestigious cancer research institute. You’ve done a very thorough analysis of the relative literature and talked to many high status doctors, and they say that with a couple billion dollars a cure to cancer is in sight. You know that when the economy blows up it will lead to lots of jobless folk without the ability to remortgage their homes. Which is sad, and you can picture all those homeless middle class people and their kids, depressed and alone, all because of you. But cancer is a huge bad ugly cause of death, and you can also picture all of those people that wouldn’t have to go through dialysis and painful treatments only to die painfully anyway. Do you do the typically immoral and questionably illegal thing for the greater good?
Why isn’t the above dilemma nearly as forceful an argument against consequentialism? Is it because it doesn’t appeal in the same way to your evolutionarily adapted sense of justice? Then that might be evidence that your evolutionarily adapted sense of justice wasn’t meant for rational moral judgement.
You would likely have to, for the simple reason that if Cancer gets cured, more resources can be dedicated to dealing with other diseases, meaning even more lives will be saved in the process (on top of those lives saved due to the curing of Cancer).
The economy can be in shambles for a while, but it can recover in the future, unlike cancer patients..and you could always justifying it that if a banker like you could blow up the economy, it was already too weak in the first place: better to blow it up now when the damage can be limited rather than latter.
Though the reason it doesn’t appeal is because you don’t quote hard numbers, making the consequentalist rely on “value” judgements when doing his deeds...and different consequentalists have different “values”. Your consequentalist would be trying to cure cancer by crashing the economy to raise money for a cancer charity, while a different consequentalist could be embezzling money from that same cancer charity in an attempt to save the economy from crashing.
And go on to commit suicide due to losing status, not be able to afford health insurance or die from lack of heating… Sure not all of them, but some of them would. Also cancer patients that relied on savings to pay for care might be affected in the time lag between crash and cure being created.
I’d also have weigh how quickly the billions could be raised without tanking the economy. And how many people the time difference in when it was developed would save.
So I am still stuck doing moral calculus, with death on my hands whatever I chose.