Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Gertie]

CIN

My consequentialist wellbeing argument is that a society where people worry that their organs could be whipped out at any time without their consent would be fearful, untrusting, unstable, and likely to collapse, losing all the other benefits of living in that society. People would be unlikely to cooperate when you came for them or their loved ones, hospitals would have to be akin to prison camps, and trust between the state and the citizen would be unsustainable.

My consequentialist wellbeing role of rights in society is to ensure basic welfare needs are met as far as poss in a society and allowing all the opportunity to flourish no matter what laws any particular government wishes to impose.

Neither pleasure, well being nor moral good can be graded into units the way you count grains of sand, because they are about the experiential nature of being a subject. But that doesn't mean we can't make meaningful comparisons. We can agree for example a right to having bodily autonomy, a basic income, healthcare, education and a home, is likely to be overall necessary to wellbeing and flourishing. Where-as ice cream might be pleasurable, but isn't important in that way.

[Pattern-chaser]

We can't reasonably (morally) expect someone else, whose kidneys are fine, to die or be killed so that we can use their kidneys to continue living.

You appear to be equating reasonableness with morality. So are you claiming to derive moral principles from reason alone? If so, how would you do that? If not, what do you mean by 'reasonably'?

Apologies, I used "reasonable" in an 'everyday' usage:

Reasonable adj
1 sensible; rational; showing reason or good judgement.
2 willing to listen to reason or argument.
3 in accordance with reason.
4 fair or just; moderate; not extreme or excessive.
5 satisfactory or equal to what one might expect.

The dictionary does include a reference to "reason", but the other meanings illustrate the more dilute, and less formal, definition that I intended. Meanings 1, 4 and 5 are closer to what I intended. I am definitely not suggesting that we can, could or should "derive moral principles from reason alone".

Well, let’s go through these words.
1. sensible; rational; showing reason or good judgement.
What could be more sensible and rational than sacrificing one life to save five? That’s a net gain of four lives. This is clearly a better outcome than letting the five die and being left with only one life.
4. fair or just; moderate; not extreme or excessive
I think the surgeon is being fair. He is treating each of the six people’s lives as of equal importance, and is therefore treating all six equally as moral ends. Seems fair to me.
‘Just’ seems to have several meanings. I’d be interested to know, if you think the surgeon is being unjust, why you think this; what standard or principle of justice are you basing your judgment on?
‘moderate; not extreme or excessive’: I’m not sure how these would apply in this case. If you think they do, perhaps you could say why.
5. satisfactory or equal to what one might expect.
Satisfaction is surely subjective: some people might be satisfied with the surgeon’s solution, others obviously would not be. As for ‘equal to what one might expect’, it certainly wouldn’t be expected in our society that a surgeon would kill a healthy person to obtain their organs, but I don’t think what society at large expects is a rational basis for morality.

There seem to be several ideas here, some of them not very clear. I don’t think any of them amount, as they stand, to a coherent argument against the consequentialist view.

Last first: yes, my argument is offered in general terms, because that approach seems most appropriate (to me) to what we are discussing. I do not offer a precise, logical, 'scientific', argument. Perhaps there is no such argument?

The non-greyed text seems to be central. There don't seem to be any universal or "eternal" moral truths, but only subjective - non-universal; non-eternal - ones.

[Leontiskos]

If taking a life has a moral weight or value distinct from its consequential value, by virtue of what does it have that extra value?

Apparently we have two different foundational conceptions of human society. On your conception human society is like a bee hive, where the organism is found in the collective and the individuals are merely accidental parts of an organic whole. On this conception just as I might amputate my foot in order to avoid a deadly infection, we might kill members of society in order to avoid dangers to the societal organism. Or just as I might graft skin from one part of my body to another, we might kill individual parts of the organism in order to shore up another, more important, part of the organism (say, by redistributing healthy bodily organs).

On my conception the individual human person is the organism, and the societal whole is an accidental collection of organisms/persons. From this comes the classical conception of morality as a set of rules that govern the interactions between autonomous organisms/persons. One of the most basic rules, then, is that an innocent person cannot be harmed, and anyone who does harm an innocent person incurs a debt (both to that person and to the societal order which they have disrupted). The reason "You shall not harm the innocent" is a hard and fast rule of morality is because it is presupposed by and necessarily linked with the entire moral paradigm. To undo this rule would be to undo and undermine all of morality. We could call it a first principle of moral reasoning.

It is interesting to ask whether your consequentialism should be considered a moral system at all--whether it involves real normativity of any kind. This is especially true if I am right in my supposition that it is coming from a place of materialism/determinism/moral skepticism. Even if we could measure utils in principle, why should anyone agree with you that the collective is the organism, or that the util you have identified should be maximized?

It seems to me much easier to say that people do act entirely for consequences than that people should act entirely for consequences, but in that case we have a descriptive claim rather than a normative claim. In that case one would not need to justify the primacy of the collective or the legitimacy of the principles, for it would just come down to some form of "might makes right," and all that is needed at that point is might. After all, consequences are within human control, and this is precisely what makes consequentialism so enticing. The more threatening and powerful Hitler becomes, the more plausible is his claim that Jews must be exterminated, at least for the consequentialist. This is because insofar as Hitler is powerful, the consequences of denying his claim become bad indeed.

So I think you need to either abandon your arguments from moral skepticism and accept your own burden of proof for normativity, or else bite the bullet and forfeit any real claim on normativity or morality.

[CIN]

As noted earlier, I don't have any significant problems with the idea that good is what merits a positive attitude. I will say that insofar as something is sought it is also desired, and we only approve or commend that which is desirable, so I don't think any of those notions diverge from desire. I have more issues with hedonism (the reduction of good to pleasure).

As I would expect, since that is where I attempt to bridge the supposed gap between fact and value.

In outline, my thesis depends on these two statements both being true for some value of X:
1. ‘Good’ means ‘has property X’.
2. Pleasantness intrinsically has property X.

This would enable us to say that pleasantness is intrinsically good, and would be enough to bridge the supposed gap between fact and value. What exactly X is, is less of a concern to me, though I prefer not to tie X to some unreasonably narrow property which would make it easy for people to say ‘but we call this good, and it doesn’t have X’. Desirability is pretty broadly applicable, and so is pretty good, though I don’t think it gets first prize.

I will say that one way in which "meriting a positive attitude" does not track 'good' is in its abstraction. Often we use the word 'good' in a rather immanent way. For example, "This ice cream is so good!" The substitutions would be, "This ice cream very much merits a positive attitude!," versus, "This ice cream is so desirable!" The word and concept do not always carry that level of third-person abstraction from what is called 'good'. In those cases merit takes a back seat.

Are you not confusing what is said with the manner in which it is said? If I say ‘This ice cream is so good!’, no doubt the way I say it makes clear that I am not standing back from the object making a dispassionate judgement, as I might be if I said, ‘I always think ice cream is good.’ But this is surely to do with my behaviour during the speech act, rather than the meaning of the word ‘good’.

I tend to think that most people are consequentialists, and that any legitimate system of moral reasoning must include consequence-based reasoning.

Agreed. If I break two promises, one to pay back a fiver to a billionaire and the other to deliver life-saving drugs to a hospital, even the most ardent deontologist would presumably accept that the two derelictions are not equally wrong, and that the reason is that the second has worse consequences than the first.

I think deontological prohibitions, which may seem on the surface to be absolute, are often disguised consequentialist rules. Why do we think it so terrible to convict someone of a crime they did not commit? Because if we convict them, we send them to jail (or even, in some countries, execute them). If all we ever did was write down ‘Fred is guilty of murder’ in a ledger somewhere and take no further action, it would be no worse than the fact that some inattentive official got my brother-in-law’s name wrong on his death certificate (yes, really). This is why I claimed that deontologist thinking is mere superstition: I think the burden of proof that there are moral rules that don’t in the end boil down to fudged consequentalism is on the deontologist, and I’ve yet to see an argument that goes anywhere towards achieving that proof.

But consequentialism goes hand in hand with forms of materialism, which is probably why it has become more popular since the Enlightenment. Given posts like <this one> I assume you are a materialist, and a determinist.

Only as a working hypothesis. As regards consciousness, I’m a mysterian.

[I'm a surgeon. I have six young patients. One is healthy, the other five will die soon if they don't get organ transplants. If they get their transplants, there's every reason to believe that they will live healthily to a ripe old age.

As a consequentialist, I believe I ought to kill the healthy patient and give his organs to the other five. (We will assume that I'm clever enough to make it appear that the guy died naturally.) Am I right when I say I ought to do this, or am I wrong? If I'm wrong, why am I wrong?

The basic answer is that there is an asymmetrical relation between the healthy person* and the healthy person's kidney, and the terminal patient and the healthy person's kidney. The healthy person has a right to their kidney; the terminal patient does not. Nor does the surgeon.

Yes, the relation is asymmetrical, but why is this asymmetry morally relevant?

I assume by 'right' you mean a natural right, or something of the sort. I see no reason to suppose that there are natural rights. Can you give me a reason?

My guess is that most consequentialists, including yourself, posit an asymmetrical, morally relevant relation, that could be called a "right."

For example, you used an example where the ratio of harmed:helped is 1:5. But if we change the ratio of harmed:helped to 1:1 or 1:2, what would you say? You would probably say that the fact that the healthy person possesses the healthy kidney, and the unhealthy patient does not, is a morally relevant difference, and that the special relation that the healthy person has with respect to their kidney is called a "right."

No, I wouldn’t. Here in this forum, with my philosopher’s hat on, in the 1:1 case, I say that it is not morally wrong to kill the healthy patient and give his kidney to the patient who is dying, it is merely pointless, because from the point of view of the felicific calculus, there’s nothing to choose between the two outcomes. (Outside this forum, without my philosopher’s hat on, I would express outrage at the very idea of a surgeon killing someone to obtain their organs, and I would employ all the kinds of arguments that are currently being employed against me here, and I would give every appearance of believing them to be sound; but that’s another story.)

A rule utilitarian might go so far as to say that the violation of one's bodily autonomy is the violation of a special utilitarian rule.

I’m not a rule utilitarian, though I might pretend to be one if I thought it led to better consequences. I’m not really a utilitarian anyway, because as I’ve said to Belindi, I believe that it’s a mistake to think that it makes no moral difference how pleasantness and unpleasantness is distributed; distributing it unevenly (without good reason) amounts to treating some beings as more valuable ends than others (without good reason), and that isn’t rational.

[Leontiskos]

As noted earlier, I don't have any significant problems with the idea that good is what merits a positive attitude. I will say that insofar as something is sought it is also desired, and we only approve or commend that which is desirable, so I don't think any of those notions diverge from desire. I have more issues with hedonism (the reduction of good to pleasure).

As I would expect, since that is where I attempt to bridge the supposed gap between fact and value.

In outline, my thesis depends on these two statements both being true for some value of X:
1. ‘Good’ means ‘has property X’.
2. Pleasantness intrinsically has property X.

This would enable us to say that pleasantness is intrinsically good, and would be enough to bridge the supposed gap between fact and value. What exactly X is, is less of a concern to me, though I prefer not to tie X to some unreasonably narrow property which would make it easy for people to say ‘but we call this good, and it doesn’t have X’.

What bothers me about hedonism isn't the "fact-value gap." It is the reduction of good to pleasure. The idea that pleasure is good seems uncontroversial to me.

I will say that one way in which "meriting a positive attitude" does not track 'good' is in its abstraction. Often we use the word 'good' in a rather immanent way. For example, "This ice cream is so good!" The substitutions would be, "This ice cream very much merits a positive attitude!," versus, "This ice cream is so desirable!" The word and concept do not always carry that level of third-person abstraction from what is called 'good'. In those cases merit takes a back seat.

Are you not confusing what is said with the manner in which it is said? If I say ‘This ice cream is so good!’, no doubt the way I say it makes clear that I am not standing back from the object making a dispassionate judgement, as I might be if I said, ‘I always think ice cream is good.’ But this is surely to do with my behaviour during the speech act, rather than the meaning of the word ‘good’.

I think that what one means by 'good' in "immanent" utterances such as that one, is something other than "merits a positive attitude." "Good" is a concept that bridges sensate and intellectual objects, and your definition falls on the intellectual side. Similarly, "good" is a concept that bridges descriptive and normative judgments, and your definition falls on the normative side, because the claim that something merits a positive attitude is the claim that someone should respond to it with a positive attitude.

I tend to think that most people are consequentialists, and that any legitimate system of moral reasoning must include consequence-based reasoning.

Agreed. If I break two promises, one to pay back a fiver to a billionaire and the other to deliver life-saving drugs to a hospital, even the most ardent deontologist would presumably accept that the two derelictions are not equally wrong, and that the reason is that the second has worse consequences than the first.

Yes, true.

I think deontological prohibitions, which may seem on the surface to be absolute, are often disguised consequentialist rules. Why do we think it so terrible to convict someone of a crime they did not commit? Because if we convict them, we send them to jail (or even, in some countries, execute them). If all we ever did was write down ‘Fred is guilty of murder’ in a ledger somewhere and take no further action, it would be no worse than the fact that some inattentive official got my brother-in-law’s name wrong on his death certificate (yes, really).

Let's suppose you know Fred is innocent and yet you accuse him of murder. This leads to his conviction, his imprisonment, and his execution. Now the consequentialist is committed to the claim that at each step nothing per se evil is occurring, but only something that will likely lead to bad consequences. This of course means that each step might be justified if the contingent consequences allow, but it also has the effect of an infinite regress. If it isn't possible for anything to be evil in the here and now, then it also isn't possible for anything to be evil in the (consequent) future. For example, it would be plausible to say that executing an innocent is intrinsically evil and convicting an innocent is "consequentially" evil, but it seems unreasonable to say both are merely "consequentially" evil, and that nothing at all is intrinsically evil. If there are no intrinsically evil events then there are no evil consequences, for all consequences are events.

Stated more generally, the problem is that the consequentialist requires that all acts be intrinsically morally neutral, and that only once consequences are considered can the acts be considered good or bad in light of the specified consequences. You can then hold that consequences are only arbitrarily connected to acts (which will lead to various absurdities), or else you can hold that some acts are teleologically ordered to certain consequences. For my money the teleological route seems like the only realistic option, but once you go down that road you already have one foot in the door of the position which says that some moral acts are intrinsically good or evil, i.e. in this case you would be committed to the preliminary idea that some acts are intrinsically ordered to good or evil consequences.

But consequentialism goes hand in hand with forms of materialism, which is probably why it has become more popular since the Enlightenment. Given posts like <this one> I assume you are a materialist, and a determinist.

Only as a working hypothesis. As regards consciousness, I’m a mysterian.

Okay.

My guess is that most consequentialists, including yourself, posit an asymmetrical, morally relevant relation, that could be called a "right."

For example, you used an example where the ratio of harmed:helped is 1:5. But if we change the ratio of harmed:helped to 1:1 or 1:2, what would you say? You would probably say that the fact that the healthy person possesses the healthy kidney, and the unhealthy patient does not, is a morally relevant difference, and that the special relation that the healthy person has with respect to their kidney is called a "right."

No, I wouldn’t. Here in this forum, with my philosopher’s hat on, in the 1:1 case, I say that it is not morally wrong to kill the healthy patient and give his kidney to the patient who is dying, it is merely pointless, because from the point of view of the felicific calculus, there’s nothing to choose between the two outcomes. (Outside this forum, without my philosopher’s hat on, I would express outrage at the very idea of a surgeon killing someone to obtain their organs, and I would employ all the kinds of arguments that are currently being employed against me here, and I would give every appearance of believing them to be sound; but that’s another story.)

Okay. Is anything morally wrong on your view? I'm still not sure whether you're positing a moral skepticism/descriptivism, or whether you really are committed to a normative moral theory.

If we follow Thomas Aquinas we would say that every act is subjectively considered to be good by the actor. In consequentialist terms we would say that the agent, in the moment of acting, believes their act will produce more good consequences than bad consequences, and that this is a necessary condition for acting. If that psychological account is correct then if no external objective reality can be brought to bear on the individual's subjective valuations, no moral evil can exist. Since consequentialism is so mired in subjectivity I'm not sure how this can be overcome.

A rule utilitarian might go so far as to say that the violation of one's bodily autonomy is the violation of a special utilitarian rule.

I’m not a rule utilitarian, though I might pretend to be one if I thought it led to better consequences. I’m not really a utilitarian anyway, because as I’ve said to Belindi, I believe that it’s a mistake to think that it makes no moral difference how pleasantness and unpleasantness is distributed; distributing it unevenly (without good reason) amounts to treating some beings as more valuable ends than others (without good reason), and that isn’t rational.

I have some memory of your response to Belindi, but I cannot find it. In any case, I don't follow your reasoning here. Presumably the utilitarian reason for an equal or unequal distribution is precisely more aggregate happiness (or pleasantness). I don't know of any utilitarians who would propose to distribute it unevenly apart from that justification.

[Leontiskos]

I think deontological prohibitions, which may seem on the surface to be absolute, are often disguised consequentialist rules. Why do we think it so terrible to convict someone of a crime they did not commit? Because if we convict them, we send them to jail (or even, in some countries, execute them). If all we ever did was write down ‘Fred is guilty of murder’ in a ledger somewhere and take no further action, it would be no worse than the fact that some inattentive official got my brother-in-law’s name wrong on his death certificate (yes, really).

...but it also has the effect of an infinite regress. If it isn't possible for anything to be evil in the here and now, then it also isn't possible for anything to be evil in the (consequent) future.

After thinking over this I realize I've flubbed the consequentialist position by assuming that an act cannot be its own consequence. For example, the consequentialist would say that the pain of torture is a (negative) "consequence" of torture, despite the fact that the act of torture is itself the act of eliciting pain.

Granted, this same conflation was present in your examples to some extent. For example to convict someone of a crime goes hand in hand with the fact that they will receive a sentence; and contrariwise, to privately write down "Fred is guilty of murder" is not to legally accuse Fred of anything.

In any case, feel free to ignore the "infinite regress" argument.

[Good_Egg]

CIN

My consequentialist wellbeing argument is that a society where people worry that their organs could be whipped out at any time without their consent would be fearful, untrusting, unstable, and likely to collapse, losing all the other benefits of living in that society. People would be unlikely to cooperate when you came for them or their loved ones, hospitals would have to be akin to prison camps, and trust between the state and the citizen would be unsustainable.

You put it better than I could.

The consequences of stranger-rape or mugging, for example, are not only the suffering of the victim, but also the impacts on those who as a result are afraid to walk the streets at night.

This it seems to me is the consequentialist argument for having clear moral rules.

And it's entirely conceivable that a society with clear rules results in more predictability, and thus less anxiety, and thus greater wellbeing, than a society in which every act is judged as right or wrong on its individual consequences.

Does that make consequentialism self-defeating ?

2. If something is a part of some person, that person, and only that person, has the right to choose to bestow that something.
...
What reason is there to believe that 2. is true?

It seems logically incoherent to suggest that two people can have the right to bestow the same item in different directions. If you and I choose differently, both choices cannot prevail.

Perhaps so, but that only deals with the ‘only that person’ part of 2. If I omit that, we get:
2. If something is a part of some person, that person has the right to choose to bestow that something.
What I do not see is any reason to suppose that this is true. How do we know that there really are such rights?

I think the logic of your stated position is that your surgeon, about to commit murder for the sake of saving 5 patients, is morally obliged to stand aside in favour of someone else who intends to use the same carcase to save 6 patients ?

In other words, you agree that the right to the body can only belong to one person, but disagree as to who that person is ?

Now I don't believe that you live by that ethic. Which would require you to abstain from breakfast each morning until you'd ascertained whether there was anyone else on the planet who would benefit from that breakfast more than you would.

If the idea of rights appears in enough distinct cultures, is that evidence that such a concept is formed as a response to something in human nature rather than being a cultural construct?

For all I know, yes. But how does something being a response to something in human nature turn it into a moral imperative?

Where moral imperatives come from is the hard question we're trying to address.

It clearly doesn't come from social agreement, because if it did then dissent from social norms could never be moral.

[Belindi]

There is one eternal moral truth that may possibly be consistent with morals' being subjective.

A moral is somewhere on a continuum ranging between concrete physical behaviours at one pole, and psychological intentions at the other pole.


Morals are subjective and so no particular moral precept can be known to be eternally true. When morals are not particular behavioural precepts but lack differentiation, one from another , people may still value abstract good, truth, and beauty. Nobody knows whether or not these exist in some Platonic mode of existence. However one candidate for eternal good that we all subscribe to is wishing there were such a thing as eternal good(or eternal truth, or eternal beauty). Even some person who seeks to be or do evil can't do so without implicit reference to not wishing to do or be good.

[CIN]

If taking a life has a moral weight or value distinct from its consequential value, by virtue of what does it have that extra value?

Apparently we have two different foundational conceptions of human society. On your conception human society is like a bee hive, where the organism is found in the collective and the individuals are merely accidental parts of an organic whole. On this conception just as I might amputate my foot in order to avoid a deadly infection, we might kill members of society in order to avoid dangers to the societal organism. Or just as I might graft skin from one part of my body to another, we might kill individual parts of the organism in order to shore up another, more important, part of the organism (say, by redistributing healthy bodily organs).

If I have given the impression that I think the collective can have interests of its own and therefore be a moral end deserving our moral concern, then I have clearly been doing my job here rather badly. I hold that the only objects that can be moral ends are sentient individuals capable of finding their experiences pleasant or unpleasant (hereafter to be typed un/pleasant, because I am fed up of typing these long words). This rules out as moral ends not only collectives, but also inanimate objects, robots that are conscious but lack the ability to find their experiences un/pleasant, and pre-sentient foetuses (which means I am pro-choice before the foetus becomes sentient, and pro-life afterwards).

On my conception the individual human person is the organism, and the societal whole is an accidental collection of organisms/persons.

Agreed, though I don’t much like the word ‘organism’, it’s a metaphor, and I think metaphors in philosophical discussions can tend to obfuscate rather than clarify.

From this comes the classical conception of morality as a set of rules that govern the interactions between autonomous organisms/persons.

Well and good, but then the problem is that since there are an indefinitely large number of possible rules, there has to be a reason to choose some and not others. Your next few sentences begin to address this problem, but I'm not happy with them.

One of the most basic rules, then, is that an innocent person cannot be harmed, and anyone who does harm an innocent person incurs a debt (both to that person and to the societal order which they have disrupted). The reason "You shall not harm the innocent" is a hard and fast rule of morality is because it is presupposed by and necessarily linked with the entire moral paradigm. To undo this rule would be to undo and undermine all of morality. We could call it a first principle of moral reasoning.

I agree that a wrong action incurs a debt. This is where the idea of moral obligation comes from: ‘ought’ is cognate with ‘owe’. Oddly, we now locate the debt immediately prior to the wrong action, and say ‘you ought not to do X’, when in fact it is doing X that incurs the debt; ‘ought’ has become a warning that we will owe if we perform the action. I don’t agree that there is any debt to the societal order, for the same reason that society cannot have interests; the debt is to the individuals that make up that society.
However, I don’t see where innocence comes in. You seem to have introduced that idea without preamble or any kind of supporting argument. You say that “You shall not harm the innocent” is ‘presupposed by and necessarily linked with the entire moral paradigm’, but I fail to see why this should be the case. Perhaps you can expand on this.

It is interesting to ask whether your consequentialism should be considered a moral system at all--whether it involves real normativity of any kind. This is especially true if I am right in my supposition that it is coming from a place of materialism/determinism/moral skepticism. Even if we could measure utils in principle, why should anyone agree with you that the collective is the organism, or that the util you have identified should be maximized?

As I've indicated above, I don’t in fact hold that the collective is a moral end.

As regards materialism and determinism, I am sceptical as to whether there is free will in the sense that moral responsibility requires (i.e. that in any given situation we could have done differently), but I continue to talk as if humans had moral responsibility because to keep qualifying my every statement with ‘of course this may all be a mere metaphysical fantasy’ would become tiresome.

In theory, utils should be maximised because to the extent that we don’t do that,we incur a debt to those individuals who would have experienced them had they been maximised. However, since I also hold that distribution should be equitable, there is the possibility of conflict between two principles (see further below).

After all, consequences are within human control, and this is precisely what makes consequentialism so enticing.

Really? How can they be within human control when they are so often beyond our ability to predict? And for me, what makes consequentialism enticing is simply that I believe it to be true.

The more threatening and powerful Hitler becomes, the more plausible is his claim that Jews must be exterminated, at least for the consequentialist. This is because insofar as Hitler is powerful, the consequences of denying his claim become bad indeed.

I don’t think I agree with this. The more powerful Hitler becomes, the more people he will kill, and the more will have to be killed to stop him. You have a graph with two rising curves, and the right thing to do, for the consequentialist, is to stop him as soon as you can, to keep the numbers killed as low as possible.

So I think you need to either abandon your arguments from moral skepticism and accept your own burden of proof for normativity, or else bite the bullet and forfeit any real claim on normativity or morality.

I’m only sceptical about our ability to follow the theoretical prescriptions of hedonistic consequentialism in practice. I don’t think that disqualifies the theory from being normative, but perhaps you disagree.

What bothers me about hedonism isn't the "fact-value gap." It is the reduction of good to pleasure. The idea that pleasure is good seems uncontroversial to me.

Well, I’m not actually reducing good to pleasure, I’m identifying pleasantness as the only intrinsic good. But perhaps that doesn’t help you.

"Good" is a concept that bridges sensate and intellectual objects, and your definition falls on the intellectual side.

I don’t see this. If, as I hold, ‘good’ means ‘merits a positive attitude’, then surely there are attitudes appropriate to sensate objects just as there are for intellectual objects. In the case of the ice cream, an appropriate attitude is appreciation of the sensory experience of eating the ice cream – of its taste and texture.

Similarly, "good" is a concept that bridges descriptive and normative judgments, and your definition falls on the normative side, because the claim that something merits a positive attitude is the claim that someone should respond to it with a positive attitude.

I think the current orthodox view is that ‘good’ is a ‘thin’ evaluative term without descriptive content, rather than a ‘thick’ term such as ‘courageous’ or ‘generous’, which both evaluates and describes (https://iep.utm.edu/thick-co/). This sounds right to me. If you can think of an example of ‘good’ being used not merely to evaluate but also to describe, perhaps you could post it, together with an explanation of what you consider the descriptive content to be.

I think deontological prohibitions, which may seem on the surface to be absolute, are often disguised consequentialist rules. Why do we think it so terrible to convict someone of a crime they did not commit? Because if we convict them, we send them to jail (or even, in some countries, execute them). If all we ever did was write down ‘Fred is guilty of murder’ in a ledger somewhere and take no further action, it would be no worse than the fact that some inattentive official got my brother-in-law’s name wrong on his death certificate (yes, really).

Let's suppose you know Fred is innocent and yet you accuse him of murder. This leads to his conviction, his imprisonment, and his execution. Now the consequentialist is committed to the claim that at each step nothing per se evil is occurring, but only something that will likely lead to bad consequences.

No, because his imprisonment is unpleasant for him, and his execution terminates his pleasant existence prematurely, and so both are intrinsically evil.
.

Is anything morally wrong on your view? I'm still not sure whether you're positing a moral skepticism/descriptivism, or whether you really are committed to a normative moral theory.

I certainly intend my theory to be normative. If a state of affairs merits a negative attitude, then it is bad, and if it’s bad, we ought not to bring it about. The difficulties are:
a) because the effects of actions widen out into the future like ripples on a pond and become unpredictable, we often cannot discover in practice whether the consequences of an action will be good or bad, and
b) there can be apparently unresolvable conflicts between the imperative to maximise net pleasantness and the imperative to distribute un/pleasantess fairly (see further below).

If we follow Thomas Aquinas we would say that every act is subjectively considered to be good by the actor. In consequentialist terms we would say that the agent, in the moment of acting, believes their act will produce more good consequences than bad consequences, and that this is a necessary condition for acting.

I don’t see why people should not sometimes deliberately do things they think will have more bad consequences than good. In fact I should think it’s pretty common, because people often give their own interests far greater weight than the interests of others. Anyone who beats an animal must be aware that the animal’s pain outweighs their own pleasure, but they don’t care because at that moment the only being they care about is themselves.

If that psychological account is correct then if no external objective reality can be brought to bear on the individual's subjective valuations, no moral evil can exist. Since consequentialism is so mired in subjectivity I'm not sure how this can be overcome.

I think the objective reality is that many actions do produce actual un/pleasantness, and I think this is enough to refute the charge of subjectivity.

I’m not really a utilitarian anyway, because as I’ve said to Belindi, I believe that it’s a mistake to think that it makes no moral difference how pleasantness and unpleasantness is distributed; distributing it unevenly (without good reason) amounts to treating some beings as more valuable ends than others (without good reason), and that isn’t rational.

I have some memory of your response to Belindi, but I cannot find it. In any case, I don't follow your reasoning here. Presumably the utilitarian reason for an equal or unequal distribution is precisely more aggregate happiness (or pleasantness). I don't know of any utilitarians who would propose to distribute it unevenly apart from that justification.

I’m a hedonist and a consequentialist, but I don’t think I’m a utilitarian, for the following reason:

An agent could face a choice between two actions, A and B; A will minimise total pain but the distribution will be unfair, B will result in more total pain but the distribution will be fair. Which is the right choice? The traditional utilitarian would say A, but I think this is not always the case.

Suppose A results in 50 units of pain for both Fred and Bill, whereas B results in 95 units of pain for Fred and no pain at all for Bill. Which should the agent choose, A or B? A totalist utilitarian would say B, because 95 is less than twice 50; an averagist utilitarian would agree, since an average of 47.5 is less than an average of 50.

I think both are wrong, by which I mean that is it not clear, as they think, that B is the moral choice. By focusing only on total or average pain, utilitarians ignore the fact that 2n units of pain experienced by one person is not the same as n units of pain experienced by each of two people. They are not entitled to ignore this fact, because in so doing, they ignore the morally relevant fact that Fred and Bill count equally as moral ends. My current view is that the fact that there are sentient beings capable of experiencing un/pleasantness gives rise to two consequentialist moral principles not one: the principle that we should aim to maximise pleasantness and minimise unpleasantness where possible, and the principle that we should aim to distribute pleasantness and unpleasantness equally. Conflicts can arise between these two principles, and at present I am not aware of any way of resolving the conflicts other than making a subjective choice.

[Good_Egg]

... I would therefore accept that utils are measurable in principle, though I have no idea whether they ever will be in practice. I also take the view that we can judge differences in intensity of pleasantness and unpleasantness, not merely for a single human (or animal sufficiently biologically similar to humans) but between different humans (ditto) to be able to make rough judgments on some occasions about total happiness or unhappiness. For instance, I think it is clear that Ukrainians being bombed and fleeing their homes are suffering more unpleasantness than Russians who are not being bombed or having to flee theirs. I think judgments like these are sufficient to make a consequentialist hedonist morality workable.

Seems to me that the data you are using are data about preferences. Either the preferences that others express, or that you imagine, by mentally putting yourself in their place, that they hold.

And yes there is a level of consensus about the relative weight of some pleasures and pains. If you were to ask 100 people if they'd rather break a leg or break a little finger, there might be a clear majority preferring to keep their leg intact. So it's tempting to think that one could construct a felicific calculus (?) by some sort of market research that asks people what trade-offs they'd make between various good or bad things that might happen to them.

What's not clear is how you propose to measure utility where there is no such consensus.

Do you take an average value that doesn't correspond with the preferences of the individuals concerned ? Do you tell a young man with a broken leg that there is a moral imperative for him to give up his seat to a 70-year-old marathon runner, because having younger people standing maximizes human happiness in general ?

Or do you allow for individual preferences ? In which case how do you compare the strength of one person's preference with the strength of another's ?

[CIN]

2. If something is a part of some person, that person, and only that person, has the right to choose to bestow that something.
...
What reason is there to believe that 2. is true?

It seems logically incoherent to suggest that two people can have the right to bestow the same item in different directions. If you and I choose differently, both choices cannot prevail.

Perhaps so, but that only deals with the ‘only that person’ part of 2. If I omit that, we get:
2. If something is a part of some person, that person has the right to choose to bestow that something.
What I do not see is any reason to suppose that this is true. How do we know that there really are such rights?

I think the logic of your stated position is that your surgeon, about to commit murder for the sake of saving 5 patients, is morally obliged to stand aside in favour of someone else who intends to use the same carcase to save 6 patients ?

Correct.

In other words, you agree that the right to the body can only belong to one person, but disagree as to who that person is ?

I wouldn’t say that the surgeon has a right to the body, because he derives no benefit from it. He has a duty to use it.

Now I don't believe that you live by that ethic. Which would require you to abstain from breakfast each morning until you'd ascertained whether there was anyone else on the planet who would benefit from that breakfast more than you would.

No, I don’t live by it. “Mr. Sampson pointed out that I could write a preface explaining that I did not live up to my own principles! This exhilarating programme I am now carrying out.” (C.S.Lewis, preface to The Problem of Pain)

Where moral imperatives come from is the hard question we're trying to address.


It clearly doesn't come from social agreement, because if it did then dissent from social norms could never be moral.

I think moral imperatives come from the fact that pleasantness is an intrinsic good and unpleasantness an intrinsic evil. If something is an intrinsic good, we ought to try to bring it about, and if it’s an intrinsic evil, we ought to try to prevent it.

CIN

My consequentialist wellbeing argument is that a society where people worry that their organs could be whipped out at any time without their consent would be fearful, untrusting, unstable, and likely to collapse, losing all the other benefits of living in that society. People would be unlikely to cooperate when you came for them or their loved ones, hospitals would have to be akin to prison camps, and trust between the state and the citizen would be unsustainable.

You put it better than I could.

The consequences of stranger-rape or mugging, for example, are not only the suffering of the victim, but also the impacts on those who as a result are afraid to walk the streets at night.

This it seems to me is the consequentialist argument for having clear moral rules.

And it's entirely conceivable that a society with clear rules results in more predictability, and thus less anxiety, and thus greater wellbeing, than a society in which every act is judged as right or wrong on its individual consequences.

Does that make consequentialism self-defeating ?

No, it means that consequentialism leads to the conclusion that deontological-style rules should be obeyed for consequentialist reasons, rather than for any other reason that the deontologist might suggest.

I do not in fact believe that surgeons should be allowed to go around cutting up healthy people to distribute their organs to people who will die without them. It has all the downsides that Gertie identifies. Often the best way to be a consequentialist is to appear to be acting contrary to consequentialism. But in this forum we’re trying to get at the truth. We’re not make the world a better place: that’s not what philosophers do.

[Good_Egg]

In other words, you agree that the right to the body can only belong to one person, but disagree as to who that person is ?

I wouldn’t say that the surgeon has a right to the body, because he derives no benefit from it. He has a duty to use it.

According to some writers, a right is the flipside of a duty. So that to say that the surgeon who can save most lives with the body has a right to it is to say that everyone else - including the person whose body it is - has a duty to let him.

I think moral imperatives come from the fact that pleasantness is an intrinsic good and unpleasantness an intrinsic evil. If something is an intrinsic good, we ought to try to bring it about, and if it’s an intrinsic evil, we ought to try to prevent it.

What I was asking was how you operationalize the "felicific calculus" that weighs up pleasant consequences to some people against unpleasant consequences to others.

You seem to be arguing, for example, that rape is wrong if and only if the unpleasantness to the victim outweighs the pleasure to the rapist.

And paying taxes is only a duty if the total pleasantness of what the government spends the money on outweighs the total pleasantness of what the taxpayers would otherwise spend the money on.

No, it means that consequentialism leads to the conclusion that deontological-style rules should be obeyed for consequentialist reasons, rather than for any other reason that the deontologist might suggest.

But then sometimes you seem to be advocating a conventional rules-based ethic, for consequentialist reasons.

We’re not make the world a better place: that’s not what philosophers do.

Even though making the world a better place is according to you, a moral duty. In fact, if I understand you rightly, the very source of moral duty.

[Gertie]

CIN

In outline, my thesis depends on these two statements both being true for some value of X:
1. ‘Good’ means ‘has property X’.
2. Pleasantness intrinsically has property X.

This would enable us to say that pleasantness is intrinsically good, and would be enough to bridge the supposed gap between fact and value. What exactly X is, is less of a concern to me, though I prefer not to tie X to some unreasonably narrow property which would make it easy for people to say ‘but we call this good, and it doesn’t have X’. Desirability is pretty broadly applicable, and so is pretty good, though I don’t think it gets first prize.

If you're just looking for a form of words and definitions which are logically impregnable as a theory of morality, you don't have to worry about real world consequences or the nature of experience.

If you want to capture what morality is really about, then that's a bigger task which involves wrangling difficult realities which don't give tidy answes the way physics problems do.

You ignore the messy awkwardness of dealing with the inherent private and qualiative nature of experience, in order to believe you can publically/objectively quantify 'utils' as standardised units of pleasure. Whereby 1 passing an exam util = 87 ice cream utils, or 1 rape = -192 unpleasant utils for the victim and +33 pleasant utils for the rapist - assuming rape ''merits a desirable attitude'' to the rapist.

You make the claim that units of pleasure are in principle objectively identifiable without being able to say how in principle they could be. And when there is an in principle reason to believe that the private and qualiative nature of experience means it isn't objectively quantifiable in the way your theory requires.

And even if we could develop the technology to precisely measure say the C fibre firings correlated with pain in comparable ways between members of the same species, you still need to address the issues like multiple realisability (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_ ... l%20states.), of comparing different 'flavours' of experience like loving music and having a headache using the same units, and the way experience manifests as a unified field of conscious with an overall sense of wellbeing but a continually shifting focus, enveloping every interacting subsystem simultaneously affecting the other from moment to moment, and in specific different ways from individual to individual.

You ignore such objections in order to pursue a tidy, formulaic theory which is only philosophically sound as a logical set of words, effectively defining morality into having objectively quantifiable attributes when it's rooted in the experiential nature of being a subject. What's the point of such wordplay as anything but a personal pet project?

Alternatively if you begin with the foundation that morality is grounded in having a stake in the state of affairs, the real life implications of having that stake, in all its messiness, should always be your guiding principle in creating a moral theory. And if that theory has to be untidy and imprecise, then that reflects the nature of morality. That doesn't mean we can't do better or worse, rather that terms like 'maximising' should be abandoned in favour of 'promoting', and viewing rule of thumb principles grounded in our foundation as something which can be contextually reviewed in light of real life consequences by referring back to our touchstone foundation in view of new info.

[CIN]

So it's tempting to think that one could construct a felicific calculus (?) by some sort of market research that asks people what trade-offs they'd make between various good or bad things that might happen to them.

What's not clear is how you propose to measure utility where there is no such consensus.

Do you take an average value that doesn't correspond with the preferences of the individuals concerned ? Do you tell a young man with a broken leg that there is a moral imperative for him to give up his seat to a 70-year-old marathon runner, because having younger people standing maximizes human happiness in general ?

Or do you allow for individual preferences ? In which case how do you compare the strength of one person's preference with the strength of another's ?

I think these would be telling questions if I was suggesting that we try to make everyday moral decisions using calculations of actual consequences as our guide, but I don't think we can or, in most cases, should do that. My view is that the rules we currently have - don't murder, don't steal, etc - are pretty good guides in practice to what will maximise pleasantness and minimise unpleasantness across society. Maybe some day we will have the ability to judge accurately what people are subjectively experiencing by observing their brain activity, but until then, consequentialism is just a theory. I think it's the right theory, but it's not a practical guide to how we should live.

[CIN]

In other words, you agree that the right to the body can only belong to one person, but disagree as to who that person is ?

I wouldn’t say that the surgeon has a right to the body, because he derives no benefit from it. He has a duty to use it.

According to some writers, a right is the flipside of a duty. So that to say that the surgeon who can save most lives with the body has a right to it is to say that everyone else - including the person whose body it is - has a duty to let him.

But then, if the surgeon has a duty to use the body, does that mean that everyone else has a right to let him? Does that even make sense?

Maybe the flipside theory isn't quite right.

What I was asking was how you operationalize the "felicific calculus" that weighs up pleasant consequences to some people against unpleasant consequences to others.
You seem to be arguing, for example, that rape is wrong if and only if the unpleasantness to the victim outweighs the pleasure to the rapist.

That's what I would argue, yes. Isn't it precisely because rape is almost always very unpleasant for the victim that we think it is wrong? For what other reason could it be wrong?

And paying taxes is only a duty if the total pleasantness of what the government spends the money on outweighs the total pleasantness of what the taxpayers would otherwise spend the money on.

Yes. In fact if a government can't justify a tax rise on the ground that it will make life more pleasant or less unpleasant for most of the sentient beings in the country, then I'd want to ask what justification they think they have for introducing it.

No, it means that consequentialism leads to the conclusion that deontological-style rules should be obeyed for consequentialist reasons, rather than for any other reason that the deontologist might suggest.

But then sometimes you seem to be advocating a conventional rules-based ethic, for consequentialist reasons.

Yes, that is in practice what I advocate. I think we should distinguish very clearly between two questions: what is the correct moral theory? and the prescriptions of which moral theory should be followed in practice? The answer to the first will determine the answer to the second.

We’re not make the world a better place: that’s not what philosophers do.

Even though making the world a better place is according to you, a moral duty. In fact, if I understand you rightly, the very source of moral duty.

Yes. But it's still not what we're doing here, is it?