I'm an engineer so my job is to understand the tradeoffs inherent in designing a device to suit a purpose. Utilitarianism appealed to me because it treats all ethical decisions as tradeoffs. I was trying to come up with a definition of tradeoffs and concluded that a tradeoff is any attempt to compare incomparables : e.g., maximum speed versus average power consumption, or cash on hand now versus a distribution of returns later. There is no natural ordering of such values, so engineers fall back on (hopefully) their client's utility function : Q(low max speed, low power consumption) > Q(high max speed, high power consumption) is meaningful.
Since tradeoffs can only be made in the presence of a utility function, utilitarianism requires a global utility function. I started to think about the properties such a function would have. For it to be useful in making moral decisions, it must be computable or at least approximable in a time that is sublinear to the number of inputs given that utilitarianism says that everything is potentially an input -- potentially the entirety of the moral actor's past light cone. It must also be able to concretely balance short term gains against long term gains unless one is to forever be sacrificing present good for some distant utopia.
Then I realized that my client's utility function is part of the dynamic system that describes them -- it might be better for my client that they change their utility function than that I really remove seatbelts to save weight. This is not a problem for an engineer since it is my job to understand what the client wants, not worry about their mental health (within reason). But utilitarianism equates "good" and "utility" so I can't make conative assumptions ; if I did, the global utility function would just be a fancy name for a personal god for which I have no evidence. This is not fatal to a global utility function since many functions have fixed points, but it does eliminate many classes of simple functions so there is reason to be skeptical that there exists an approximation that requires only a very small portion of the inputs to the global utility function.
These criteria (approximability, tractability, and horizon-independence) are not trivial so I can't just assert that such a function exists in the same way that any other mental abstraction exists. Unless I have positive reason for believing such a function exists and that I can apply it to solve moral questions, then I have no business calling myself a utilitarian.
So for now, I'm just an ex-utilitarian who thinks that the techniques engineers use to optimize designs can be useful in thinking about moral priorities, but that there are probably other principled ways to the same end.
2 comments:
Maybe you are an ex-utilitarian at heart, but if you find the utilitarianism covers most scenarios that you run into on a day to day basis, and that it's how you make most decisions people observe, anyone who talked to you would still think you were a utilitarian.
And I don't think you've established that anything else is tenable as a moral philosophy. Really, the criterion of "tenability" seems to rule out any discrete system of morality. Or, rather, it shows that you can't treat moral decision making as a mechanical process in actual practice.
That doesn't mean a discrete morality is useless. It is useful just for the academic purpose of debating, which I'd say is necessary to build a moral system without relying exclusively on trial and error.
"if I did, the global utility function would just be a fancy name for a personal god for which I have no evidence."
It would be a name for a sort of underlying moral order to the universe, which could correspond to a catchall philosophical "god".
Ben,
My problem is precisely that I don't think utilitarianism is useful for making day to day decisions. I still agree with some consequences of it : that proper action require weighing pros and cons, and that people are the only appropriate ends of moral action (Kant's second that you're familiar with) are supported by utilitarianism but not exclusive to it.
You are right that I have not established an alternative, but that does not mean that I can advocate utilitarianism to others, which is what I do by identifying myself with it. (Granted, my advocacy is unlikely to change any minds, but even without an ethical framework, I still have principles :)
I agree that it is unreasonable to expect any one framework to convert moral decision making into a mechanical process. That is not how I judge the success of an ethical framework.
First, an ethical framework must allow one to effectively triage ethical decisions : lump many decisions easily into definitely good and definitely bad buckets, so that precious attention can be focused on the remaining bucket of hard decisions.
Second, I, like anyone else, am prone to self-serving rationalization. A moral framework should let me step back and determine when I am rationalizing in a self-serving way. I can't do that right now.
The reason I used "personal god" instead of a more general term like "moral order" is that for a global utility function to allow a conative assumption that goals and utility are interchangeable, there has to be some special being who has intent and whose utility correlates with the global utility.
Post a Comment