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

[CIN]

So I believe that my calculus is based on an objective concept - the concept of un/pleasantness having the property of meriting a positive/negative response.

Sure - your reason for saying we should act to maximize utility (I.e. maximise pleasantness and minimise unpleasantness) is that utility merits a positive response.

The question was instead whether, in your conception of it, knowing the utility of the consequences of an act is a matter of consulting the preferences of individuals.

Not in my conception of it, no. My conception of knowing utility is that some being capable of understanding utility has some direct or indirect way of making some broadly quantitative judgment that bears some non-random resemblance to actual utility. If people don't consider that to constitute knowledge of utility, then my response will be that in that case I do not consider knowledge of utility to be required by my theory. Consulting preferences is not what constitutes knowing, but consulting preferences can be one route towards knowing.

Suppose the managers of an airport have the choice between playing Mozart or playing Beethoven over the sound system when they're not using it to make announcements. What is the moral choice ?

Given that people experience various degrees of pleasantness or unpleasantness when hearing the music of one or the other, maximizing utility would seem to involve asking a representative sample of airport users for their preference and the strength of that preference, and basing the decision on that.

Do you agree ?

I dont believe we can maximise utility simpliciter, because every action has unforeseen future ramifications. But if you mean maximising it in the restricted context of people using the airport, then it may well be that the only way we currently have of resolving the Mozart/Beethoven issue is to ask people their preferences.

Is any other moral decision any different in kind ? People vary. Including for example, having different levels of risk-aversion.

Yes, other decisions are different in kind. The reason the Beethoven/Mozart decision currently can't be made, at least not easily or conveniently, without asking people their preferences is that this is the best way we currently have of discovering which composer gives them a more pleasant listening experience. (When I say 'we' here, I mean ordinary humans; for all I know, scientists or telepaths or God or aliens may have better ways.) I know that I generally find Beethoven more pleasant to listen to than Mozart (as do all right-thinking people), but your easiest way of finding that out is simply to ask me. You could also probably find it out by observing some of the things I do, such as switching to another channel when some of the boy Wolfgang's more trite offerings are played, or turning the volume up when the radio is playing a Beethoven symphony. But asking me is quicker.

This isn't the case with a lot of moral decisions. Nobody needed to go round Ukraine with a clipboard asking the Ukrainians whether they would prefer to be bombed and shelled by the Russians or left alone; we know enough about human beings to know the answer without asking. Similarly, no-one needs to interview tigers to find out whether they would rather be kept in a tiny enclosure at the zoo for years or left to roam the wild. We know enough about tigers to work that one out for ourselves.

unless there are good reasons to the contrary, all deserve equal consideration and treatment. This, in my view, is the first principle of morality...
... I don't think the above amounts to 'a sense of justice'.

In the example you gave, having weighed up all the consequences and expressed them in utils, you thought an outcome of -50 to Bill and -50 to Fred was to be preferred to an outcome of -95 to Bill and 0 to Fred. Despite the net difference of 5 meeting a positive attitude....

Four comments/questions in reply:

1. I take it that you're not advocating that the guilty and the innocent should be punished equally. So that you're not advocating equal outcomes for the sake of equality, but because your unstated premise is that Bill and Fred are equally innocent, equally deserving, so that it is just that they be treated equally.

You cover this by saying "unless there are good reasons to the contrary".

I was careful not to say what the good reasons might be (or indeed whether there were any at all).

Do I think the guilty and innocent should be punished equally? In general, no. Is this because the guilty deserve to be punished and the innocent don't? No, that's a retributive theory, and I don't hold to it because it is inconsistent with consequentialism. I hold to the reform and deterrence theories, according to which the only good reasons for punishing the guilty are to persuade them to change their ways and to deter people from committing similar crimes.

2. "Equal consideration" doesn't cover it. If your ethic is indifferent to whether it is Fred or Bill who gets the -95 then it considers them equally, gives them equal status under the moral law. You might, for example, consider that flipping a coin and giving the loser the -95 gives both of them a better expected outcome than -50.

I said 'equal consideration and treatment'. Flipping a coin and giving the loser -95 would not give them equal treatment.

3. It's not clear whether it's your sense of justice or their sense of justice that is relevant. If Bill says to you, "Fred is my brother. I'd rather suffer 95 units of unpleasantness myself than suffer 50 and see him suffer 50", would you reply that it would be morally wrong of you to comply with his request ?

Yes, I would. If I'm the one doling out the unpleasantness, then it's my action, and my action should be governed by my moral principles, not by someone else's. Therefore it should be my sense of justice that counts, not Bill's.

4. Some utilitarians would get around this by including in their utility calculation the unpleasantness of knowing an outcome unjust and being powerless to change it. You took a different approach, treating distributional justice as a separate principle....

It's not entirely separate, it's related to un/pleasantness, but not in the way utilitarians usually say. I think their way of relating them is a bodge. Here's how I reason:
a. Morality is about how we treat beings to whom it matters how they are treated.
b. It matters to a being how we treat it iff that being is capable of experiencing un/pleasantness.
c. Therefore morality is about how we treat beings that are capable of experiencing un/pleasantness. In effect, it is about treating each such being as a moral end.
d. To treat one such being A better than another such being B without good reason would be to treat B as less of a moral end than A, which would be ex hypothesi immoral.
e. Therefore, unless there is good reason to do otherwise, all such beings should be treated equally.

[Ecurb]

It's not entirely separate, it's related to un/pleasantness, but not in the way utilitarians usually say. I think their way of relating them is a bodge. Here's how I reason:
a. Morality is about how we treat beings to whom it matters how they are treated.
b. It matters to a being how we treat it iff that being is capable of experiencing un/pleasantness.
c. Therefore morality is about how we treat beings that are capable of experiencing un/pleasantness. In effect, it is about treating each such being as a moral end.
d. To treat one such being A better than another such being B without good reason would be to treat B as less of a moral end than A, which would be ex hypothesi immoral.
e. Therefore, unless there is good reason to do otherwise, all such beings should be treated equally.

I haven't read the entire thread, but cannot agree. Have you ever read George Orwell's famous essay "Reflections on Gandhi"?

https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/m ... ndhi-1.pdf

The essay begins with the justly famous sentence, "Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent..." Gandhi refrained from having sex with his wife for the last 20 years of their marriage because he (correctly) thought that such physical intimacy could lead to prejudice -- favoring some people over others.

Orwell agrees that saints (among whose number Gandhi is included) are required to love everyone equally. However, he argues that most people do not aspire to be saints. For most of us, loving someone MEANS favoring that person over others and being loved means we are favored. Orwell goes on to say:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek
perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push
asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end
to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other
human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but
sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

I'm not sure what you think constitutes a "good reason" for treating people unequally. Marriage? Having children? Having friends? However, I cannot agree that your list enumerates "eternal moral truths", or, indeed, that there ARE eternal moral truths. Non-moral truths, after all, are situated in a time and place. They are not "eternal". There is a beginning and an end.

[CIN]

So I believe that my calculus is based on an objective concept - the concept of un/pleasantness having the property of meriting a positive/negative response.

What about acts of selflessness that are supposedly carried out based on a sense of morality alone? The corresponding experience could be highly unpleasant or even painful and yet, the individual finds motivation to get through it.

I'm not sure what you're asking me. If you're asking whether my theory precludes people being selfless in the way you describe, then no, it doesn't. My theory doesn't talk about motivation. It's purely about the rightness and wrongness of actions, not about what actually motivates or can possibly motivate people to perform them.

If you're suggesting that my calculus is wrong because it only takes into account the pleasantness caused by the selfless action and not the unpleasantness suffered by the selfless agent, then let me put you right: both need to be included in the calculation.

If you're asking whether I think selflessness is a good thing or a bad thing, I'd say it's a bad thing. Imagine two people, A and B, having tea together. Suppose A and B both like chocolate cake equally, and there's only one piece of cake. Suppose A selflessly offers to let B have the cake, and B accepts. Then B has done a bad thing, because he failed to treat A as a moral end on the same footing as himself. And since it was A who enabled B to do the bad thing, A has also done a bad thing. So selflessness is bad. The moral thing to do is to cut the cake in half and have half each.

Generally, if there are objective moral truths, as I believe there are, then people can be mistaken about what those truths are. Therefore doing something from a sense of morality, which is subjective, is no guarantee that the action is objectively moral.

[CIN]

It's not entirely separate, it's related to un/pleasantness, but not in the way utilitarians usually say. I think their way of relating them is a bodge. Here's how I reason:
a. Morality is about how we treat beings to whom it matters how they are treated.
b. It matters to a being how we treat it iff that being is capable of experiencing un/pleasantness.
c. Therefore morality is about how we treat beings that are capable of experiencing un/pleasantness. In effect, it is about treating each such being as a moral end.
d. To treat one such being A better than another such being B without good reason would be to treat B as less of a moral end than A, which would be ex hypothesi immoral.
e. Therefore, unless there is good reason to do otherwise, all such beings should be treated equally.

I haven't read the entire thread, but cannot agree. Have you ever read George Orwell's famous essay "Reflections on Gandhi"?

https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/m ... ndhi-1.pdf

I hadn't, but I have now. Thank you for pointing me to it.

The essay begins with the justly famous sentence, "Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent..." Gandhi refrained from having sex with his wife for the last 20 years of their marriage because he (correctly) thought that such physical intimacy could lead to prejudice -- favoring some people over others.

Orwell agrees that saints (among whose number Gandhi is included) are required to love everyone equally. However, he argues that most people do not aspire to be saints. For most of us, loving someone MEANS favoring that person over others and being loved means we are favored. Orwell goes on to say:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek
perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push
asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end
to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other
human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but
sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

I don't think Orwell thought this through properly. The essence of being human is not failing to seek perfection, being willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, and all the other stuff he lists: the essence of being human is having human DNA, and there is no meaning other than this to the phrase 'essence of being human'. What Orwell is really saying is that he, and perhaps most other people, prefer humans to behave in the ways he describes, rather than seek perfection and strive to be impartial to all other beings. He is making a value judgment and pretending it is a description. And in fact his value judgment is absurd, because if it really is true that not committing sins for the sake of loyalty etc. constitute perfection, then by definition one ought to strive for them - that is what 'perfection' means. To that extent, he is really exhorting people to be less than moral and be content with being less than moral.

At one point he says, "To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others." But firstly, since when has the behaviour of ordinary human beings been the gold standard for morality? Secondly, he overlooks the very obvious fact that people who love other people are more strongly motivated and much better placed to understand them and help them have pleasant lives than strangers are, so on good consequentialist grounds it's generally a good thing for people to love a few people and try to make their lives better: they probably create more net pleasantness that way than by not loving anyone at all.

I'm not sure what you think constitutes a "good reason" for treating people unequally. Marriage? Having children? Having friends?

In my point e., what I meant by 'should be treated equally' was 'should be treated equally as moral ends'. I don't think it is morally defensible to treat beings one is not married to or who are not one's children or friends less as moral ends than one's wife, children or friends. One should try to treat everyone equally as a moral end; but as I've just said, one is in a much better position to understand what that requires and therefore do it well with people one is close to.

However, I cannot agree that your list enumerates "eternal moral truths", or, indeed, that there ARE eternal moral truths. Non-moral truths, after all, are situated in a time and place. They are not "eternal". There is a beginning and an end.

Some non-moral truths, such as the truths of mathematics, are eternal. It must always be true that 2 and 2 make 4.

I'm a hedonistic ethical naturalist. I think there are moral truths which hold in any world that contains beings that experience un/pleasantness. I think 'any world' qualifies these truths as eternal.

[psyreporter]

Morality involves meaning beyond value (a priori or "before value").

Morality is the result of addressing the simple question "What is good?.

Surely morality is a human value judgement? It is not "before value", it is (the assignment of) value, IMO.

For valuing (assignment of value) to be possible, something is required and that something provides morality with substance (meaning).

And surely that 'something', in the context of this discussion, is a human being?

No, it is 'good'. The human being is the one asking the question 'What is good?' which results in a value judgement or ethical notion, of which it can be said that it is moral but that would depend on making a case that the question "What is good?" is answered accurately for all parties involved, which is ethics. Morality itself is solely in addressing the question.

There is evidence that also plants consider the question 'What is good?' in their interaction with their environment.

(2009) Can a plant be altruistic?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 092047.htm

(2013) Plants are altruistic, too, new study finds
https://phys.org/news/2013-02-altruistic.html

(2019) Once considered outlandish, the idea that plants are moral is taking root
Some plants appear to move leaves, roots and share resources to help other plants prosper.
https://www.science.org/content/article ... aking-root

That something cannot be objective since then it would need to have been valued, which is a logical impossibility.

Something that is 'objective' - meaning "universal", or perhaps "eternal", I assume? - can surely be assigned value by a human being?

The indicated 'good' cannot logically be assigned value by a human being since it is the origin of value itself.

[Belindi]

psyreporter wrote:

For valuing (assignment of value) to be possible, something is required and that something provides morality with substance (meaning). That something cannot be objective since then it would need to have been valued, which is a logical impossibility.

The subjective benefits of religion are political in the wider sense of binding people together in cooperative groups. Cooperative grouping pertains to all living things and is therefore biological, and so cooperative grouping is favoured by natural selection. In the absence of sexual or parental relations humans 'groom ' each other by means of religious cooperation.

How religion works is twofold. One, it feels nice to believe a higher power, which is often accessed during pleasant states of consciousness, can help you. Two, rulers and ruling elites use this social- psychological mechanism to ensure that people are obedient.

[Pattern-chaser]

For valuing (assignment of value) to be possible, something is required and that something provides morality with substance (meaning).

And surely that 'something', in the context of this discussion, is a human being?

No, it is 'good'.

But 'good' is not a thing, it simply expresses the result of a human value judgement. There are no reservoirs of 'goodness' or 'evil' out there in the universe, waiting to be tapped. If you ask me how the weather has been, I might respond "miserable". That word expresses the result of the value judgement I made in order to answer your question. But 'miserable' is not a thing, it simply expresses my opinion, and that opinion is my value judgement.

'Good' is not a "something".

[Ecurb]

I don't think Orwell thought this through properly. The essence of being human is not failing to seek perfection, being willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, and all the other stuff he lists: the essence of being human is having human DNA, and there is no meaning other than this to the phrase 'essence of being human'. What Orwell is really saying is that he, and perhaps most other people, prefer humans to behave in the ways he describes, rather than seek perfection and strive to be impartial to all other beings. He is making a value judgment and pretending it is a description. And in fact his value judgment is absurd, because if it really is true that not committing sins for the sake of loyalty etc. constitute perfection, then by definition one ought to strive for them - that is what 'perfection' means. To that extent, he is really exhorting people to be less than moral and be content with being less than moral.

At one point he says, "To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others." But firstly, since when has the behaviour of ordinary human beings been the gold standard for morality? Secondly, he overlooks the very obvious fact that people who love other people are more strongly motivated and much better placed to understand them and help them have pleasant lives than strangers are, so on good consequentialist grounds it's generally a good thing for people to love a few people and try to make their lives better: they probably create more net pleasantness that way than by not loving anyone at all.

Exactly. Orwell thinks that being "impartial to all other beings" is both a mistake and "inhuman" (not, of course, in the biological sense, as you suggest). Of the four Greek loves (eros, phylia, storge, agape), only agape is (or can be) "impartial". Partiality is involved in the very essence of eros. "Out of all the world he has chosen me," go the words of a Jerome Kern song. Indeed, those who love everyone equally are castigated as cads and bounders, are divorced, and are reviled as cheaters. Gandhi solved this problem by not having sex with anyone -- instead of the other solution of having sex with everyone. OK -- but, perhaps, "inhuman" (as Orwell uses the word).

Everyone admires saints. But are they the "gold standard of human behavior"? Orwell and I think they are not. We think that love often means clinging to one person more than others. We don't think everyone should either abandon sex or be utterly promiscuous. Unlike saints, we are not capable of loving everyone equally. We can only do what we can do -- and we do not aspire to be saintly instead of "human".

It is true, of course, that "man was born to trouble as the sparks fly upward". The result of such human loves (instead of saintly ones) is always tragic. Lancelot tumbled the towers of Camelot for Gueneviere; Roland went mad due to Angelica; Anna Karenina threw herself under the wheels of a train. All human loves end in tragedy; if we love one person more than others, when that person dies we are bereft. For saints, perhaps, there is no tragedy. Death is just a new birth. The sun is the Saint's (Francis's) brother; the moon his sister, because they are part of God's creation. That's the saintly prerogative, but, as Orwell suggests "inhuman".

I'm not sure what you think constitutes a "good reason" for treating people unequally. Marriage? Having children? Having friends?

In my point e., what I meant by 'should be treated equally' was 'should be treated equally as moral ends'. I don't think it is morally defensible to treat beings one is not married to or who are not one's children or friends less as moral ends than one's wife, children or friends. One should try to treat everyone equally as a moral end; but as I've just said, one is in a much better position to understand what that requires and therefore do it well with people one is close to. [/quote]

So if someone to whom you are not married wants to have sex with you, you should go for it? After all, denying her would be treating her "unequally". Honor suggests we have certain duties to out spouses and children. If we treat all children "equally" the resources (financial and emotional) remaining for our own children would be (to say the least) limited.

I'm a hedonistic ethical naturalist. I think there are moral truths which hold in any world that contains beings that experience un/pleasantness. I think 'any world' qualifies these truths as eternal.

"Pleasantness" seems a faint goal on which to base one's philosophy. What about "joy"? Or "ecstacy"? Far be it from me to minimize the ecstatic joy Saint Francis felt when contemplating God's creation, and even when suffering from stigmata. But for those of us less saintly than Francis, we can only approximate that joy by loving our wives or our children. We are not capable of extending that love to the sun and moon.

The flip side of joy is "sorrow", or even "misery". The greater the joy, the greater the misery. It is perhaps true that the Saints, through their faith, can experience the joy without the misery. That's why they are "inhuman". For us mortals, great joy is inevitably tragic because it must come to an end. That's the "human condition".

[Leontiskos]

The thing is, I am having trouble situating your claims regarding things such as the surgeon scenario without positing at least a quasi-collective end. For example, rather than being concerned with the individual per se, you are per se concerned with a set of individuals (or collective pleasure, or somesuch thing).

The surgeon treats all six individuals alike, as individuals, not as a set. He assigns just the same moral consideration to the healthy patient as he does to each of the five unhealthy ones. At no stage is he thinking that the patients constitute a collective which has interests over and above the individual interests of the six patients; he merely calculates that by killing the healthy patient and giving his organs to the five unhealthy ones, he alters the outcome from one living person with a life assumed to be pleasant to five such living persons.

To me this is the same as saying that the healthy individual is being sacrificed for the sake of collective pleasure, which is a collective end. Morally speaking collective pleasure is the end, and until other axioms are introduced all means are justified in reaching this end. In this case the individual is not an end in themselves, but is rather a necessary node in calculating the collective end. Clearly if individuals can be sacrificed for the sake of some greater end, then there must be some greater end beyond the individual. This is much different from a system where individuals are ends in themselves and cannot be sacrificed for the sake of collective ends.

What would you say your end is in the surgeon case? Maximal collective pleasure?

Maximising experienced pleasantness across all six patients, the five unhealthy ones and the one healthy one.

Aggregate pleasure is a function whose object is a collection, not an individual. The aggregate pleasure of a collection of individuals is a collective end.

I hope I am not forgetting parts of our conversation after this long lapse of time, but part of my point with the bee hive analogy is that the maximization of pleasure seems like something quite different from the colloquial understanding of morality. Most people would say that seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is intuitive but not specifically moral. "Do good and avoid evil" is a moral principle, but good and evil collapse into pleasure and pain then again, it would not strike the average person as specifically moral.

I think most people would probably say that seeking pleasure and avoiding pain for oneself was not specifically moral; but what about doing these things for other people? I think they might consider that to be moral.

Okay, sure. Still, I don't think pleasure and pain are sufficient to track the colloquial understanding of morality. I'm not sure we disagree on this:

But in any case, is it reasonable to insist that a theory in moral philosophy should conform to the moral views of the average person, who is unlikely to have ever studied philosophy and is also unlikely to have thought about the matter very deeply? Is there any other field in which you would expect theories to conform to the opinions of the uneducated?

I agree in some ways and disagree in others, but we can table this for now to try to cut down on the length.

I should probably take more time to think on this, but at present I would say that when we are talking about interpersonal moral systems what we are really talking about is justice, and that the positive role of societal justice is to rectify moral debts (injustices).

You snuck in the word 'societal' before the second occurrence of 'justice', and hence I think you are using the word 'justice' in two different senses. You go on to talk about legitimacy residing with a public authority, a notion which fits reasonably well with the idea of societal justice, but not with a notion of justice that makes it co-terminous with morality as as whole; morality includes such matters as whether I should keep my promise to my wife to pick her up from the hairdresser, something that is hardly going to be of interest to the public authorities. Since your view of morality here seems to depend on 'justice' meaning the same throughout, I think your view cannot be correct.

It follows from this that any legitimate or justified harm can only be meted out by the public authority in the rectification of an injustice. For example, we can only fine individuals who have broken the law; we cannot fine individuals who are innocent of any transgression.

But if, as I have suggested, morality is broader than societal justice, these constraints do not necessarily apply to the whole of morality.

Okay, let me try to clarify. I would say that societal justice is a subset of justice, but that it represents the central principles of justice in a paradigmatic way which can be more clearly seen and then applied to justice simpliciter. I would say that justice and morality are not coterminous, and that justice is a subset of morality.

The key, though, is that injury pertains to justice, so when you inquire about harming the innocent you are within that subset of morality that pertains to justice. Further, you are talking about justifying harm to innocents on the basis of a supra-individual order, namely a governmental or pseudo-governmental body acting for the sake of your collective end. This is societal justice.

Finally I think it comes back to my point about the bee hive. If the individual is the ultimate end then the individual cannot be sacrificed for the sake of some other end, such as the end of collective pleasure. Harming an individual who is innocent (and therefore does not merit harm) is an act of injustice, and is precisely the sort of act that the just moral order is meant to prevent. If, as you seem to believe, the individual is not the end of morality, but instead collective pleasure is, then I suppose innocent individuals can be harmed in any way we like if this serves our end. In that case harming the innocent is justified as a means to an end, which is very close to the definition of immorality.

(I should add that red flags should go off in our heads when folks start questioning such basic moral principles as "do not harm the innocent," and at some point your practice and your theory will have to confront one another.)

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

But then why would you kill the one to save the five?

For the same reason that you would give food to five thousand rather than to just one; because it benefits more sentient beings and creates more net pleasantness. The concept of a collective is irrelevant. Were the five thousand that Jesus fed a collective?

Yes, they were, and the reason they needed so much food is because the collective hunger was so great.

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.

Well, your consequentialism strikes me as being rather compatible with the denial of moral responsibility, in a way that classical moral systems are not.

I think any moral system has to be centrally concerned with 'oughts', and since 'ought' implies 'can', a denial of moral responsibility undermines my consequentialism just as much as any other moral system. I keep my thinking about morality and freewill in separate compartments; when thinking about morality I assume that we have freewill, otherwise there is no point thinking about morality at all; when I think about freewill I ignore the fact that my belief that we have no freewill destroys morality except as a metaphysical fantasy. In reality, one or other of these has to go, but I pretend that this isn't the case in order to be able to talk about both of them.

That is a rather significant inconsistency.

I suppose I was thinking that because bare consequentialism cannot support objective fault (which you agree to below), then moral responsibility would not be needed to support blame. Perhaps a more straightforward sense of 'ought' independently requires moral responsibility, but it is notable that here you are relying on the colloquial moral consensus that you questioned a moment ago.

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.

So you think that individuals deserve, in justice, to have their pleasure maximized? And if someone fails to maximize another's pleasure (or the collective pleasure) then that person would incur a debt? This is a strange, seemingly controversial claim, apparently much more controversial than my claim that innocents should not be harmed.

The logic of hedonistic consequentialism is inescapable: to the extent that each of us has the ability to push our fellow sentient beings farther up the stair that leads from the basement of misery to the attic of happiness but fail to do so, we are to blame. I'm as guilty as anyone in this regard. Well, no, not anyone. I'm a better human being than Vladimir Putin, I think. But that's not saying much.

The nice thing about classical justice is that one can know with reasonable certainty whether they have incurred a debt against their neighbor, for unjust injury can be established in a way that failure to benefit cannot.

But I should note that the inescapable thing is not simply altruism or helping others, but rather helping others on those occasions when doing so would improve overall happiness. What is needed, then, is not merely ability, but also an effort-reward calculation.

I can't help but wonder if you are here reintroducing classical moral reasoning in an ad hoc way. Everything will depend on how powerful Hitler is perceived to be. For example, if Hitler is strong and the war looks unwinnable, then clearly the consequentialist should surrender to Hitler and let the Jews die.

Well, okay, let's go along with this. Hitler is bound to win. The world population in 1939 is 2300 million. If we surrender, then once the 6 million Jews are out of the way, the other 2294 million people in the world are going to have reasonably pleasant lives. But if we fight on, 70 million, let's say, will die, not just 6 million. So these are the guaranteed outcomes, and it's a clear binary choice - 2294 million reasonably happy people and 6 million dead, or 2230 million reasonably happy people and 70 million dead. As a hedonistic consequentialist, I say we should surrender and accept the loss of the 6 million, as the lesser of two evils. What do you, as a non-consequentialist, think we should do, and why?

The difference is that the non-consequentialist can conceive of Hitler's act as evil in a non-relative way. That is, he can think of the act as something that is impermissible and can never be countenanced, regardless of the good consequences that Hitler envisioned. He can then say that Hitler ought to be justly punished for his evil act, and he can go on to wage war against Hitler with a righteousness that is not possible for the consequentialist. For the non-consequentialist Hitler cannot tip the moral scales by sheer power. Further, the non-consequentialist can defend against attacks on innocent life as attacks which are intrinsically evil. That is, he can both fight Hitler and defend the innocent with a strength and conviction that the consequentialist cannot.

Practically this means that retributive or vengeful responses--words which are now sadly pejorative, but which regain their meaning in light of Adolf Hitler--are available only to the non-consequentialist. The same is true of his defense of victims of intrinsic evil: acts which are intrinsically evil regardless of the consequences. These sorts of considerations will also mean that he can still fight battles, even if there is no hope of winning, for his moral code does not reduce to mere pleasure or winning.

"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.

I don't deny that such an attitude is appropriate and merited by the ice cream. What I deny is that when we say, "This ice cream is good," we are talking about how one ought to relate to the ice cream.

I deny that too. Saying that something merits a positive attitude is evaluative, but attributing a value to something is not the same as prescribing any attitude or action relating to it. We are saying that the ice cream merits a positive attitude, but we are not making the further assertion that it is incumbent on anyone to adopt that attitude.

I would claim that you are here moving into some direct self-contradictions. You are waffling on your earlier claims that your system is normative and involves 'oughts', and you are involving yourself in the contradiction that to say that X merits an attitude does not prescribe a normative attitude with respect to X. This is a fairly straightforward contradiction given the meaning of "merit."

In that case we are saying something much more immanent and 'sensate', "I am enjoying this ice cream," "This ice cream delights me," "This ice cream brings me pleasure." I suppose, riffing on your pleasure-end, we would say that pleasure is a positive attitude/experience, not that pleasure merits a positive attitude.

But you are now conflating three distinct things - pleasure, attitude, and experience. Pleasure is neither an attitude nor an experience, it is a property of an experience, which is why we talk of the pleasure of eating ice cream, the pleasure of listening to Bach, etc., and which is why I prefer to call it pleasantness; and an attitude is neither pleasure not an experience.

You're losing sight of my point with unnecessary distinctions. To say that some thing is currently bringing me pleasure is not the same as making the broader, more abstract claim that the thing merits a positive attitude. Nothing in your response touches on what I was saying. I don't really agree with your definitions, but they don't affect my point. I could therefore rephrase that last sentence according to your own terms, "I suppose, riffing on your pleasure-end, we would say that pleasure is a positive property of an experience, not that pleasure merits a positive attitude." Is it possible on your system to talk about the experience of pleasure (or an experience which includes the property of pleasure) without at the same time making a normative merit-claim? Because we do that all the time.

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.

This sort of contemporary philosophy strikes me as an inheritance from Hume, and I doubt I will agree with much of it. I see the difference between 'good' and 'courageous' as a matter of degree and abstraction, but not kind. As an example, a civil engineer might go around the country inspecting bridges for possible repairs. He may well call the bridges that require no repairs "good bridges." It seems to me that such a use is descriptive (as well as evaluative). To give a parallel, an army recruiter might go around the country searching for courageous men and women, and he would be wielding that quality in much the same way that the civil engineer wields 'good'.

On reflection, I am going to distance myself from the thin/thick distinction, but in the opposite direction from you. I now think that 'courageous' is not evaluative, but merely descriptive; any evaluative content it may seem to have is the result of a shared background assumption by the speaker and his audience that courage is good, an assumption which does not find its way into the words uttered.

Again, I don't think these Humean inheritances are helpful or accurate, but courage is good qua military and structurally sound bridges are good qua the definition of bridge. These are not extrinsic considerations, they are built into the nature of a military or the nature of a bridge. And again I would say that good is an abstract concept insofar as one must designate the object of goodness before knowing the precise meaning of goodness in some particular utterance, but there is also a common meaning across objects.

That is the problem with your examples: both the civil engineer and the army recruiter are making incomplete statements which are completed by unstated assumptions they share with their audience. When the civil engineer says 'this is a good bridge' to another civil engineer, they share an idea of the properties a bridge must have for them both to call it 'good'; it is that unstated idea that has the descriptive content, not the phrase 'good bridges'.

Er, no. Everyone knows what a good bridge is. It is the sort of bridge that does its job. It is the sort of bridge that carries you from one side to the other without collapsing. Civil engineers just have more intimate knowledge of how good bridges come into being and persist in being.

'Good bridges' tells you nothing about the bridges except that they merit a positive attitude (which is always false, for the same reason as the ice cream; bridges are just lumps of concrete or stone, which don't in themselves merit any kind of attitude).

I skipped over your ice cream claim since this is getting so long, but it is also mistaken. You attempt to claim that ice cream is not good or bad, it's just the sensation that ice cream causes that it good or bad. But this is deceptive, because the pleasurable sensation is caused by nothing other than the ice cream, which is why we call ice cream sweet. There is nothing wrong with the colloquial usage of calling ice cream sweet. It is much more accurate than your implicit claim that ice cream and sweetness have no intrinsic connection.

Regarding bridges, your claim that "bridges are just lumps of concrete or stone," is simply false. Go grab a dictionary if you want to know what a bridge is. It is much more than a lump of stone.

Note that these self-contradictions and straightforwardly false definitions are signs that your consequentialist theory is breaking down, and I welcome them as a good thing and as progress in the conversation.

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.

But you've more or less conceded my point when you say, "...because people often give their own interests far greater weight than the interests of others." If their weighting were correct their act would be good.

It would; but I'm suggesting that people can sometimes choose evil knowing it's evil, because they want to do evil, as Satan does in Paradise Lost:
"Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my Good: by thee at least
Divided empire with Heaven’s King I hold."
Satan knows the difference between good and evil, but chooses evil anyway.

No, I don't think so, and I think Milton better captured the truth when he placed these words in Satan's mouth, "Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n." Satan makes his choice because he sees service as evil and kingship/reigning as good. Even on your theory no one chooses something which they believe merits a negative attitude.

[Objective fault]

In which case you would be required to say that the individual has weighted their own interests in an objectively incorrect way. In order to say that, you would have to be able to identify--at least vaguely--the correct way as well as the discrepancy. Anticipating some further argument, this sort of objectivity is going to require a number of moral axioms, and I don't see how a number of those axioms could ever be self-supported by consequentialism. For example, the equality principle whereby one person's interests must be weighted equally to another person's interests. It isn't clear to me how consequentialism in itself could ever hope to justify that principle.

I agree, it couldn't. Since consequentialism is merely the view that an action's rightness is determined by its consequences, it will always have to be supplemented by some view as to what those consequences should be. So yes, there have to be further axiom(s).

Okay, agreed.

This seems to merely be the claim that the units are unequal, or that they have not been measured correctly, or that pain tolerance is not linear. None of this strikes me as a substantial critique of utilitarianism.

No, I'm assuming that the units are equal and have been measured correctly. I'm saying that in asserting that it does not matter to whom the units are given, utilitarians are ignoring the possibility that giving n units of pain to each of two people may be morally better or worse than giving 2n units of pain to one person.

Er, but when you tried to explain why you implied that the units are being measured incorrectly. To say that it is less painful for two people to share a load is at the same time to say that the painfulness of the load increases when it is placed upon just one person, and that is the explanation that you already gave. If you want to offer a new explanation, feel free. That new explanation would begin, "Although the pain suffered in both cases is identical, nevertheless it should be distributed evenly because..."

Why think that your second principle is any more consequentialist than it is utilitarian? It strikes me as an egalitarian principle that is altogether separate from consequentialism, and it is just the sort of thing that would be required to establish objective fault, which I referred to above.

I agree that it isn't a consequentialist principle. I shouldn't have said that it was.

Okay, we are in agreement on this.

The precise target that pi approximates is not a numerical quantity, it is a ratio, namely the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Pi is the numerical quantity that approximates this ratio.

Well, no, pi is not an approximation to the ratio, pi is the ratio, though it is equivalently expressed as a number by taking the diameter to be 1 and then not bothering to mention it:

"The number π (/paɪ/; spelled out as "pi") is a mathematical constant, approximately equal to 3.14159. It is defined in Euclidean geometry as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter... As an irrational number, π cannot be expressed as a common fraction, although fractions such as 22/7 are commonly used to approximate it." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi)

And the point here is that the ratio is unknowable even in principle:

"We have known since the 18th century that we will never be able to calculate all the digits of pi because it is an irrational number, one that continues forever without any repeating pattern." (https://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/ar ... enpatterns)

Thus when we use 22/7 or 3.1459 or somesuch as an approximation for the ratio of circumference to diameter, we are using a rule of thumb to approximate something unknowable in principle, which makes it a counter-example to Good Egg's thesis.

Even if we want to call the thing approximated "pi", my point is still decisive. The ratio is not unknowable, it is merely unable to be represented by rational numbers. Again the thing approximated is well-known: it is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. This is altogether different from Good Egg's hypothetical of an approximation without a thing approximated. The thing approximated with respect to pi is the ratio. Just because it cannot be known in the medium of rational numbers does not mean that it cannot be known.

The reason the Beethoven/Mozart decision currently can't be made, at least not easily or conveniently, without asking people their preferences is that this is the best way we currently have of discovering which composer gives them a more pleasant listening experience.

Eh, when it comes to things like music there is really no better way than asking them their preference. It seems to me that the core problem here is that, at the very least, pleasure and pain fork into two subsets: universal and idiosyncratic. Some things are naturally pleasurable or painful, and some are only so because of past experience or conditioning. The latter sort will always be bound up in subjectivity and preference. This latter set is also precisely where utilitarianism becomes most difficult (because this is where moral evil resides).

Here's how I reason:
a. Morality is about how we treat beings to whom it matters how they are treated.
b. It matters to a being how we treat it iff that being is capable of experiencing un/pleasantness.
c. Therefore morality is about how we treat beings that are capable of experiencing un/pleasantness. In effect, it is about treating each such being as a moral end.
d. To treat one such being A better than another such being B without good reason would be to treat B as less of a moral end than A, which would be ex hypothesi immoral.
e. Therefore, unless there is good reason to do otherwise, all such beings should be treated equally.

The problem is that the bolded presupposition carries your entire argument, and you don't justify it in any way. You admit that this 'moral equality principle' does not follow from consequentialism. Where, then, does it come from?

[Ecurb]

Okay, let me try to clarify. I would say that societal justice is a subset of justice, but that it represents the central principles of justice in a paradigmatic way which can be more clearly seen and then applied to justice simpliciter. I would say that justice and morality are not coterminous, and that justice is a subset of morality.

The key, though, is that injury pertains to justice, so when you inquire about harming the innocent you are within that subset of morality that pertains to justice. Further, you are talking about justifying harm to innocents on the basis of a supra-individual order, namely a governmental or pseudo-governmental body acting for the sake of your collective end. This is societal justice.

Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum. "Let justice be done though the heavens fall."

[Good_Egg]

One should try to treat everyone equally as a moral end;

I struggle to make sense of this..

Almost nobody these days is self-sufficient. We work for money and then exchange money for the goods and services we want. Many of our encounters with other people are purely transactional; our purpose in these encounters is to get what we want - the money or the goods - and we use the other party to the transaction as a means to that end. And that may be the whole purpose and extent of the relationship.

So the notion that morality demands that we treat others as an end seems to me inaccurately-formulated.

Treat as a human being, yes. What morality does demand is that trade is between consenting participants.

And "equally" doesn't really come into it. Treating all people as well as you should is what morality demands (by definition - this is what "should" means). If you choose to treat some better than that, to go the extra mile for somebody in a moment of altruism, then well done you.

(Unless you're acting in a role which requires impartiality. If you're given power for the purpose of serving a group of people - the members of a club, for example, or the citizens of a nation - then it would be wrong to use that power to disproportionately benefit your friends).

[Leontiskos]

One should try to treat everyone equally as a moral end;

I struggle to make sense of this..

Note that this quote came from CIN, not Ecurb. A formatting mistake veils this fact.

And "equally" doesn't really come into it. Treating all people as well as you should is what morality demands (by definition - this is what "should" means). If you choose to treat some better than that, to go the extra mile for somebody in a moment of altruism, then well done you.

How does one go about determining how well people should be treated?

[EricPH]

What morality does demand is that trade is between consenting participants.

You don't see people like Bill Gates trading fairly. His philosophy is to overcharge his customers and underpay his production workers in third world countries. So I don't see trading as a moral truth, it can lead towards greed.

[Good_Egg]

Trade doesn't lead to greed; greed comes out of the hearts of men.

And monopoly power undermines the notion of consensual trade. Who would object to Bill Gates if his products competed with others on their merits ?

[psyreporter]

But 'good' is not a thing, it simply expresses the result of a human value judgement. There are no reservoirs of 'goodness' or 'evil' out there in the universe, waiting to be tapped. If you ask me how the weather has been, I might respond "miserable". That word expresses the result of the value judgement I made in order to answer your question. But 'miserable' is not a thing, it simply expresses my opinion, and that opinion is my value judgement.

'Good' is not a "something".

You are correct that the reference something is invalid. As an aspect for consideration that cannot be valued, it cannot be said to be a thing.

The nature of a value judgement requires 'good (per se)' or 'truth' to be of substance a priori. When one values, one does not choose between good and bad but one values solely on behalf of what can be considered 'good'.