The Older I Get, The More Silly Utilitarianism Seems
And No, I Won't Argue With You About It
I studied philosophy as an undergraduate, and utilitarianism always rubbed me the wrong way. I once felt embarrassed over this, thinking this revealed a moral flaw about myself, but as I get older, I think the better explanation is that utilitarianism is a flawed philosophy.
Here are my basic thoughts on utilitarianism and its derivative philosophies like Effective Altruism and Veganism. No, it’s not an invitation to argue or debate.
Happiness is not a thing in the world we can measure, but an instinct that helps individual humans determine how to act to improve their circumstances. It’s no more valid to have happiness-maximization be the point of one’s ethical philosophy as is anger-maximization or sadness-maximization.
Many vegan arguments geared toward the general public rely on moral emotions like disgust, not foundational moral principles like harm reduction. I agree that factory farms are bad, but I come to that conclusion from descriptions of gory conditions, like chickens pecking their eyes out in a confined space. I want these conditions to change not because I have a latent sympathy with a chicken akin to a human or a hidden preference to reduce suffering across the cosmos like utilitarians think I do. No, I just don’t like gore, especially when it’s mentioned to me.
Humans naturally project our expectations of a good life onto animals, when their brains are fundamentally different from ours. The good life looks different to them. So a life where they are somewhat confined, yet well-fed and not living in fear of predation (until that one time!) is not necessarily a bad one.
Moral conversations implicitly invoking praise and shame, which are a human ethos, not objective properties of the universe. When I say “x is morally bad,” I’m implying “you should feel bad if you do x.” Moral pronouncements don’t make sense outside of this implicit context. Unless you believe there is a God that praises or shames our behavior, there’s nothing in the universe outside of other people that enforces that praise or shame. Animals clearly exist outside of the human moral community because you can’t praise/shame them, or be shamed/praised by them.
Living a morally good life is hard. The people who advocate utilitarian philosophies are atypical people who prefer clear answers to complicated questions. They don’t actually like philosophy. They like math! And they collapse their entire world view into doing math and make you feel like a weirdo because you don’t tick that way.
As I get older, these things become increasingly obvious, and I feel more secure in my personal (informal) philosophy of pluralistic virtue ethics. Being good is a lived experience, not an intellectual one. Goodness isn’t reducible to one trait or virtue, but multiple, and different people have to work differently to cultivate different traits and virtues. The answers are never clear.
If all of that seems nebulous and unfalsifiable or insoluble to you, that’s because it is. I don’t lose sleep over it.
Agree on all points.