 There's just something I really enjoy about being in a heavily wooded place. It appeals to my inner lord of the rings. So we're dealing with utilitarianism. The last video was an explanation of utilitarianism. Now we're going to ask some serious questions about utilitarianism. What are some of the issues? What are some of the problems? So remember that utilitarianism has two real main key components. Consequences and consequences. So what matters for moral action, the only morally relevant reasons for utilitarianism, are the consequences of action and whether the action produced happiness. So for utilitarianism, the moral act is the act that produces the most happiness. Now this sounds really great up front, but actually utilitarianism runs into a host of problems. Utilitarianism has two main components, happiness and consequences. The first real kind of issue that comes up with utilitarianism is what does it mean to be happier? What is happiness? Some real kind of ready or early answers as to happiness is just to equate happiness with pleasure. And again at first glance it seems right because we really like pleasure. It's fun. It feels good. Why? What's the problem here? Well, you know there's lots of things that cause pleasure which we don't equate with happiness. I mean if the point is just to experience pleasure all the time, the most intense amount of pleasure all the time, well we can do that. It's called heroin. You might have worries about coming down and getting addicted to heroin, well the answer is just to have some more heroin. Your life will be short, okay, but for that period of time you can have a really intense pleasurable life. Marijuana is another case. There's a reason why people really like marijuana. It feels good. I'm not saying I know this by experience, right? The reason why I know is because I've known people who really enjoyed their marijuana. And you know, it's not like they were evil people or I wouldn't even necessarily call them weak, right? You know it's kind of a fallback position to think of people who are addicted to drugs to be weak. It's like no. So I've known several counselors who work with people with addictions and one of the things that they told me is that it's not a matter of whether you can be addicted to something. It's just a matter of what. So again, we're real tempted to say that all addiction can be explained by weakness. It's just not true. Or unless you're willing to say that we're all weak, in which case, okay, I guess maybe you can go that route, but then it's just kind of a trivial answer. There's a reason why people like their drugs is because they feel good. If happiness just is pleasure, then for the utilitarian, they're doing the right thing, but it doesn't look like it. And not all utilitarians agree upon this. I mean, one of the classic distinctions when we deal with utilitarians and when we deal with happiness are different kinds of pleasure, okay? So yeah, there are the bodily kinds of pleasure and yeah, these are good things, you know? You know, food is good. Physical intimacy is good. Intimacy is good. You know, having fun, these things are good. But the question comes up when these things start interfering with what are called higher pleasures. So intellectual knowledge, contemplating the universe, reflecting on your own self and understanding your relationship to other things. Now this is, yeah, this does feel good in a sense. It's not like, you know, it's not like the all-you-can-eat buffet, right? It's a different kind of pleasure. But there's still something there that, you know, we call this pleasure, this feeling good. Now the question then becomes then, it's like, well, okay, if there are different kinds of pleasures, is there one that's better and why? And this can raise some serious questions. Now to be fair, utilitarianism is not the only one that's stuck with this problem. We saw this problem pop up with virtue ethics and we saw this problem pop up even with the ethics of care. We're dealing with what's the good, what's the happiness. And we saw how there were some kind of like circular issues about that and you say, well, so we start off with say, well, what's goodness? It's happiness. Well, what's happiness? It's pleasure. Well, what's pleasure? Well, we've got physical pleasure and then we've got higher pleasures. Well, how are they both pleasure then? Because they both feel good. Okay, well, what's good? It's happiness. And we kind of start all over again. This is one issue that utilitarianism has to deal with and like I said to be fair, utilitarianism is not the only one that has to deal with this. Now a question of trying to answer what is happiness? Really old, really old. We've been asking that question for a long time. You might wonder, you might ask yourself, suppose we do finally answer this question of what is happiness, you might wonder then what might actually be the significant difference between views like utilitarianism and virtue ethics and ethics of care. So the first issue really dealt with trying to figure out what happiness is and utilitarianism has two main parts. That's the happiness and the consequences. Now for utilitarianism, the moral act is the one that produces the most happiness. Well this has an interesting consequence, namely there is no minimum amount of happiness that you produce in order for your action to be good. You produce only the most amount of happiness in order for your action to be moral. That's really extreme, you know? If you're going to apply this to yourself, that means that you have to be absolutely giddy every day, right? Or at least you're striving for that, that you're striving for this happiness every day. If you don't produce that, you're not doing something that's moral. Relatedly to, you know, this kind of ties in with the next problem as well. The next problem about utilitarianism, we're dealing with consequences, is that it doesn't matter whose happiness is produced. Doesn't matter whose happiness is produced, it doesn't matter if it's your happiness or other people's happiness. What matters is whether happiness is maximized for all. Well that means that, you know, since you have to produce the most happiness, that means that every action you perform can't just be for yourself, right? It has to be for everybody. So, you know, think about this when you go to lunch, right? Typically when you go to lunch, we think that you're doing something perfectly permissible if you go to the counter and you select pizza, because you're hungry and pizza has at least some nutrition to it and, you know, it tastes good and it's your favorite. It's like, okay, we don't think there's anything wrong with that decision. Well utilitarianism will step in and say, no, no, wait, wait, wait, you have to think about this. Sure, you want pizza, but what about other people, right? And I'll not talk about whether they want you to have pizza, although that could absurdly enough be an issue. For some reason it might take offense to you having pizza as pizza, who knows. But the issue is that, you know, pizza for what you get is kind of expensive, right? You can be spending that money on, you know, purchasing and supplying food to people who are starving. So when you're doing this calculus for your lunch, you're considering not just what you want, but you're also considering what you can do with the money for everybody. Well, you're trying to think, well, what does this mean? So what big deal? Well, hold on. You know, for, and this is, you know, it's looking at a lot of consequences here, right? For the money that you spend on the pizza, let's say, I don't know, I don't know what they charge for the pizza in the food court, but let's say it sounds like nine dollars. That's for bread, cheese, tomato sauce and meat. Well, that's pretty expensive for the resources that are being used. A lot of resources were devoted to producing meat. Lots of grain, lots of land, lots of water, lots of feed was devoted to producing that meat. So you can get, you know, here the utilitarian comes in and says you can get the same and better nutrition when you deal with products that are not meat, right? So soy, right? Soy is remarkably cheaper to produce compared to meat. A few resources are devoted to it. And you get all the protein. You can, you can, you know, there are other vegetables and fruits that you eat, which provide better nutrition to where you, to where you, you know, all your nutritional needs are met with foods that require less to produce them. So the utilitarian would say, look, you bought that pizza, yeah, sure, you enjoy it, but you could be purchasing, you know, a soy patty with a salad and a cider fruit, all raw, right, all raw, spend less money on that. Let's say you spend six bucks on that and you take the remaining three dollars and you devote, you, you spend it on a charity, right? You make sure that there are people who are starving out there and, you know, they actually get some food. And to push the point even more, when you consider their hunger versus your satisfaction with that, with that meal, you can be satisfied. You have to kind of balance it out. You got this person with extreme hunger and you with that meal, right? If we're going to start balancing it out, if we start comparing food to food, well, then you should probably go a little hungry to ensure that they get enough to avoid that abject, abject starvation, that complete emptiness of the belly and the disastrous health consequences that go along with that. So utilitarianism in demanding this really high standard for moral action that you have to maximize happiness means, you know, we're not just dealing with you, we're dealing with all people and animals, anything that can experience pleasure or happiness to an end degree. And your actions have to make sure that it produces the most happiness for all. And if you do anything less than that, you've done something immoral. That's a really high standard. Now kind of on a related note, when we're dealing with this really high standard with utilitarianism, it's not just your happiness that matters. It's also not just, for instance, your family. With utilitarianism, you cannot consider your family and your friends to be more important than other people, right? So what matters is producing overall greatest happiness. Well, not only, you know, this means that not only should you deny yourself pizza and have a soy patty with some fresh fruits and vegetables, water, no Coke, maybe not even juice, right? Because all the nutrition from juice you should get from eating the raw vegetables and the fiber, a lot of resources go into producing juice. So you should probably just have water, probably no milk, right? Because that, again, takes a lot of resources to produce milk. And you know, you should go a little hungry in favor of making sure that other people who are just absolutely starving, you know, should get some food. Not only does this apply to you, it applies to your kids. It applies to your friends. So all dinner parties, I mean, you can still have dinner and you can still get together, but you all should probably go a little bit hungry. You should be soy patties with fruits and vegetables. And you should take the balance of that money. And all of you take the balance of the money that you would have spent on that and make sure that other people are eating. So this high demand is not only just for yourself, but for your personal relationships. In effect, your personal relationships have no relevance at all when you're, well, it might have relevance when you're dealing just with one-on-one and the consequences of how you interact with each other. It's like, okay, that's when relationships matter. When we talk about things like food, we're talking about how you spend your resources, your family gets no special preference, right, not to your friends. Another problem or issue, yeah, maybe it's a problem, maybe it isn't, that comes up with the utilitarianism is this issue of conflicting values. So since we're dealing with consequences and we're dealing with happiness, it's not easy to think of scenarios where the consequences of an act are done in a way that conflict with other values such as honesty, such as justice, such as rights, right? So we're dealing with the poor, and we're talking about the people who are starving across the world. I'm not saying any utilitarian is necessarily committed to this idea, but a utilitarian wouldn't necessarily be opposed to it either. You suppose, you know, we say, look, and this is just a very real fact of the world where something like 85% of the world's resources are concentrated in something like 15% or 10% of the world's population. You know, the numbers I think are off, but you get the idea where the overwhelming majority of the world's resources are concentrated in one very small group of people. Well, a utilitarian, you know, wouldn't necessarily be opposed to the idea of, say, you're just redistributing all that wealth, taking it from the people who own the wealth, who have that concentrated wealth and resources, and giving it and distributing it to everybody else. Now, if we're dealing strictly with a numbers game, right, we're looking at something like this, say, yeah, that small group of people would be really pissed. Now, we're not going to just leave them in misery and poverty, right? We're going to redistribute the wealth to make sure that everybody has at least a minimal amount of food and shelter and clothing, and they can be with one another, and they can have happiness with one another. So, the idea is that, you know, the people that you take the money away from the resources away from them, they'll be pissed, and that's kind of a negative in the happiness calculus. But all these people, the vast majority of people across the planet who are living in abject poverty, who are starving, who are freezing, who are dying of heat exhaustion, the dying of malnutrition and dehydration, those people will be happier, right? So, everything will even out more. Yeah, yeah, the small majority will be pissed, but you have the vast majority now. The small majority will be pissed, but the vast majority now will be happy, and the calculus will even out. Now, we very quickly say that this conflicts with justice because we're taking property away from people and we're giving it to others for no, you know, for reasons that don't have to deal with giving a person what's due to them. Now, again, that's not necessarily what a utilitarian would argue, but, you know, you can construct a utilitarian argument that way. Utilitarianism can conflict with justice. Utilitarianism can conflict with honesty. We all know this happens a lot, telling the truth sometimes hurts people's feelings, right? And there are plenty of times where we just simply lie in order to make people feel good. Well, I suppose we did that all the time. Well, you probably have some real issues there. You know, you could think of, you know, so we talk about friends, you might think, well, that's a harmless case of lying. Well, consider government cover-ups, right? We talk about the phenomenon of government cover-ups all the time. Well, it's a very real reason why the government cover-ups because you're less upset when the truth is hidden from you. Why bother telling everybody the truth if it's just going to make them angry? You know, for the utilitarian, that it's probably a reasonable argument, and you have to make sure all the causal relationships are right, but, you know, that's a possibility. And so, yeah, the consequences of the act would outweigh, would outweigh the, you know, the consequences of the act, namely happiness produced, would outweigh this value if there isn't any value for the utilitarian, but this is value of being honest. We can start, you know, we can start thinking about more, and we can start constructing really bizarre examples where the utilitarian, and it might be bizarre, right? But the utilitarian would say, yeah, there's just no problem in that case. So, this is another significant problem for utilitarianism is that this idea of the consequences, and only consequences matter, conflicts with some of the other values that we have, justice, rights, honesty, and so on. So, some utilitarians try to solve this problem of consequences by slightly modifying utilitarianism. They modify it by appealing to rules. Now, these rules are not like the absolute moral rules that we talked about in early chapters. There's some similarities, but there's some significant difference. They're still trying to appeal to consequences, but the idea is with real utilitarianism is you follow those rules such that following the rules would produce the most happiness. So, remember one of the problems with the consequences was this really high-demanding standard for all of your actions, and there still would be a high demand, but at the very least, you wouldn't have to think about it all the time, and hopefully everybody else is doing the same thing. So, with real utilitarianism in place, likely if you go to the food court, there wouldn't be the pizza. There would just be a selection of soy patties. Maybe they're seasoned with fresh fruits and vegetables and the various kinds of, maybe different kinds of water, something like this. But that would be a rule that everybody's following, and it would be easier for all people to be fed. Same thing with rules regarding family, regarding personal relationships. So, if everybody followed these rules to maximize happiness, the idea is like, yeah, nobody's personal relationship necessarily gets any special treatment, but everybody's taking care of, because we're all following these rules that produce the greatest overall happiness. And some of the same things apply when we're talking about the conflicting values, the utilitarian things, that following these rules actually would result in these values just for perhaps a different reason. So, the idea with real utilitarianism is that they're trying to avoid this problem of consequences by saying instead of doing the act that produces the greatest overall happiness, you follow the rules that produce the greatest overall happiness. So, while real utilitarianism is not the same thing as the absolute moral rules that we looked at before, they encounter some of the same problems. It's just not hard to start thinking of cases where we're gonna wanna have exceptions to these rules. As much as the utilitarian might like to, the rule utilitarian might like to think that these rules would allow us not to worry about personal relationships so much, well, just as a matter of fact, you're gonna. You know, you're gonna want to be the exception to the rule when you're trying to care for your own family and friends. So, there's always the problem of exceptions. And the solution might be to try to build the solutions and build the exceptions into the rules. So, you know, you shouldn't. So, if we're talking about the painkiller case, we're talking about the two children, or we're talking about children with the painkiller case. And, you know, the rule is that you give the painkiller to the child who can handle the pain the least, right? Well, the question is whether, you know, the question of the situation is dealing with my children or somebody else's children. And, you know, if we're gonna formulate the rule this way, what we still want to take care of our own children first, you might try to modify the rule and say, well, you give the painkiller to the child who can handle the pain the least, except when it's your children and you can give it to your children over somebody else. All right, so that's where you start trying to build in these exceptions. Well, by the time you start building in all the exceptions, there's no real difference between rule utilitarianism and act utilitarianism. It looks like there are exceptions all over the place and you have a very long and complicated set of rules. So that's gonna be a real huge issue. Another problem is, is it's just not hard to start building rules such that they're gonna conflict. So, you know, we're talking about the case where, you know, we're talking about redistributing the wealth and we're talking about, you know, taking away from the portion of the people on the planet who have the most wealth and redistributing it. One, you know, that seems to be a rule that rule utilitarianism would endorse is that we should redistribute wealth to ensure that all people have a minimum standard of health and comfort. But also a rule would be not to take resources away from other people because you get really upset about that. Well, now you have a conflict of rules. And again, you might try to avoid the conflict by building in the exceptions, but before long, you've got something that's just, you start loading an exception after exception, after exception, after exception. There's no real difference between rule utilitarianism and act utilitarianism, and you have the same issues all over again. So for what we've seen so far, looks like there's, you know, there are these issues with utilitarianism. But one way to kind of cast all these issues is to say that the problem with utilitarianism is that it conflicts with common sense. We don't think that all pleasure, all the time is really what leads to happiness. We don't think that consequences, greater happiness can override concerns about justice and rights and honesty. We don't think that, what are some of the other issues? You know, we had these problems, we actually had the problem in general with talking about consequences as justifying actions. We have that great phrase, the ends do not justify the means. And this is actually the complete opposite position of utilitarianism. In fact, the ends do justify the means. If the greatest happiness is produced overall, then that's what justifies however you're gonna go about doing it. You know, common sense is, well, utilitarianism is really demanding. And you know, replying on part of the utilitarian, some utilitarians look at these complaints and say, well, utilitarianism conflicts with common sense. And their answer is, well, too bad for common sense. Too bad for common sense. If common sense was really, if we're really thawed it out in terms of common sense, then in fact, common sense would reach the same conclusions as a utilitarian. And now we might think, wow, that's kind of a strong position. And you know, an initial reply might be something like this. Or you know, initial question for the utilitarian would say, well, look, hold on a second. We just got finished saying that happiness is not the only thing that really matters. I mean, excuse me, pleasure, or even happiness is not the only thing that really matters. What really matters are some of these other values like justice and rights and honesty. A utilitarian might say, well, no, of course, happiness overrides all of these. Because the reason why you care about justice and rights and honesty is because you care about happiness. What justifies these values, namely justice and rights and honesty, is happiness. This reply might sound a little familiar. The ethical egoist took the same approach before where we're talking about common sense morality. The ethical egoist says, well, the reason why common sense morality is in place is because we're really concerned about fulfilling our own interests. Utilitarian is taking kind of a similar approach. And say, well, the reason why common sense is in place is because we really care about happiness. Another issue we have with utilitarianism is how it handles some of these unusual cases. So, even just something like the painkiller case with your kids, right? It's just gonna be a highly unusual circumstance in which you have to choose between giving painkillers to your kids and giving painkillers to some other children that belong to some other parents. That's a really unusual situation, especially around here when we, in fact, most people carry at least some kind of painkiller with them at some time, to deal with headaches and things like that. So, the utilitarian says, yeah, it's an unusual case. And you may now think our answer is the right one that you ought to consider who has the greatest amount of pain or who can handle the pain the least and give the painkiller to that person. You haven't considered that using common sense because it is so unusual. But if you sit down and you look at the reasons, then yeah, the utilitarian answer is correct. And just imagine the situation where there are two kids in front of you and your kid has a headache and there's another child with another parent who has a headache. And you can tell that this other child is suffering more. Are you sure you wouldn't be attempted at all to give the painkiller to this other child? You know, there's room to think that you would, in fact, give painkiller to the other kid. And the reason why you would be tempted to do that is because you're worried about happiness overall. So, so far the utilitarian is trying to handle these replies. I mean, the first reply is that, you know, the first reply in talking about conflict with common sense, the utilitarian says, well, what justifies common sense, the reason we have common sense is because it produces overall happiness. So we gotta listen to the utilitarian. The second deals with these unusual cases. And the utilitarian says, yeah, common sense can't handle the unusual cases because they're unusual. Common sense deals with the usual situations. Another complaint we can have with the utilitarian is, you know, this emphasis on consequences. This is emphasis on consequences. So when we're dealing with redistributing wealth, right, we don't agree with the utilitarian with common sense. We just think, well, you know, I earned this money. I've earned these resources. So I'm the one that keeps it. You know, I've earned it. This is a matter of justice. So the utilitarian would say, well, the reason why you reached that conclusion is because you haven't considered all the consequences and you haven't considered it in other situations. You know, there are cases now, you know, just within our own country where we do think that the wealthiest should help support the poorest, right? There's already this attitude and the reason why we had this attitude is because of the consequences. When we've looked at situations in the past where there is such a gap between the rich and the poor, then it led to the crumbling of the society. So you should consider the consequences. The utilitarian will say, if you think that the consequences don't really matter in this case, well, you haven't thought them through enough. You haven't seen all the consequences. So at the end of the day, the utilitarian looks at these complaints from common sense and says so much the worst for common sense, right? Common sense, isn't that sensible? If you really thought it through, if you follow the consequences all the way through, if you looked at what justifies consequences, if you thought about these unusual situations, then you would side with the utilitarian. In fact, Rachel's comes out, comes right out and agrees with the utilitarian and says, common sense can't be trusted. Now he isn't necessarily endorsing utilitarianism, but he is agreeing with the utilitarian on this point that common sense can't be trusted. You might wonder about that. After all, it's common sense that led us to think about ethics to begin with.