Utilitarianism Is the Ethical System of a Psycho
The ruling ethical approach of our age has flaws.
George Orwell was right on the three biggest political questions of his day, namely imperialism, communism and fascism. He was an imperial policeman in what was then Burma, a British colonial possession; and wrote vividly of his experience in essays like ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’, as well as novels like Burmese Days. Orwell lost friends on the left over his views on communism in particular, but he was of course right that it was deeply immoral. As for fascism, it was so obvious to Orwell that it was a mad system that was doomed to destroy itself that he scarcely wrote anything about it.
One thread that ran through his attacks on these three political systems was that brutal conditions do not just harm the victim of that brutality: they brutalise (ie, desensitise) the perpetrator, too, thus harming him psychologically and making him more liable to do wrong in future. Seeing this process take place within himself during his time in Burma, he felt compelled to leave. He left in 1927 wracked with guilt, sure that if he had stayed he would have been not just an agent of a system he deemed oppressive but someone who compromised his principles and had lost his sense of humanity.
Orwell left in 1927 wracked with guilt, sure that if he had stayed he would have been not just an agent of a system he deemed oppressive.
I mention this because it neatly illustrates what seems to me to be of the main problems with utilitarian moral thinking, by which I mean the belief that what is good is good because it issues in something useful. Utilitarianism reduces the complexity of experience for a simple train of cause and effect, eliminating the basic interiority of morality and putting in its place externalities that are, in theory at least, neater, tidier and easy to measure — even if they leave a great deal out of the overall equation, such as the effect of an action or actions on the one who carries it out.
According to such a belief, it seems to me, a mother whose child falls from a window by accident is more to blame than a mother who tries to harm her child and fails to do so. After all, in the first case the outcome is worse, even if there was no intention on the part of the mother to do harm. The person who intends to poison another is less culpable than the one who does so accidentally. It outrages our deepest intuitions about right and wrong. But it seems to follow from the basic principle of utilitarian thinking.
A mother whose child falls from a window by accident is more to blame than a mother who tries to harm her child and fails to do so.
It is, I think, rather telling that utilitarianism has been linked to a set of traits that we would not commonly think of as particularly virtuous or desirable: less of an aversion to harming others, lower empathy, higher psychoticism, a greater sense of meaninglessness of life, greater Machiavellianism … Indeed all the great political crimes of the 20th century were justified by reference to the world the perpetrators, from the architects of Nazism to the Bolsheviks to Chairman Mao, sought to bring about: a superior future. The how was always connected to the why. (On the other hand, those great souls who defended Jewish people at enormous personal risk, as detailed in Matthieu Ricard’s book Altruism, did so for no other reason than because it was the right thing to do.)
And so we find Eric Hobsbawm, a great historian who remained a member of the Communist Party long after it had lost its perceived moral authority, telling Michael Ignatieff in a 1994 interview that the ‘loss of fifteen, twenty million people’ would have justified the creation of ‘the radiant tomorrow’ of which the communists dreamed. This was in 1994 — long after we had read The Gulag Archipelago and The Captive Mind; long after we had learned of the Great Purge, forced collectivisation and the Holodomor; long after we knew that the victims of the Soviet regime stood at 10 million at the least and probably more than 20 million. I have no reason to think that Eric Hobsbawm was a bad man, and he was certainly a very clever one. But to see human life in these terms strikes me as appalling.
It draws our attention to another feature of utilitarianism: that we can predict the consequences of our actions. It would be terribly dull to overemphasise Hume’s ‘problem of induction’ here: we can’t even know for certain that the sun will rise tomorrow! We can (and must) predict certain things with a reasonable degree of confidence. But in the realm of morality, mistakes in prediction are far more grave than they would be if, for example, I ordered a dessert thinking I would like it and turned out not to. (This, incidentally, has yet to happen.) The sort of thought experiments that philosophers dream up to explore utilitarianism, such as the famous ‘trolley problem’, are undermined by this belief in certainties. In case you are not familiar: imagine a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. We are on a bridge under which it will pass. We can stop the trolley by putting something heavy in front of it. It happens that there is a very large man next to us. We can stop the trolley by pushing him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him but saving five. Should we?
The sort of thought experiments that philosophers dream up to explore utilitarianism, such as the famous ‘trolley problem’, are undermined by this belief in certainties.
As Iain McGilchrist writes:
‘How do we know what guilt the person who pushes the fat man will feel later — perhaps for years? What if the man does not die, and does not even stop the trolley, but ends up horribly injured? It’s no good stipulating certainties here — that he must die, and that he must stop the trolley — and then hoping to deduce what our responses would be were such an unlikely situation to arise in real life. One reason that most people tend to look askance at utilitarian views of morality is that things are intrinsically uncertain in this world.’
In Kevin Dutton’s The Wisdom of Psychopaths, the author notes that those with many psychopathic traits ‘solve’ the trolley problem almost instantly, and indeed cannot really comprehend any other point of view. He mentions another problem that follows a similar logic: a doctor has five patients, each needing a different organ. A healthy man happens to come by. Ought the doctor to kill the man and harvest his organs, saving five people by doing so? McGilchrist’s response remains sound. We simply cannot know how things will play out. It is no use saying ‘assuming you knew that it would work’, etc. You could never know.
Those with many psychopathic traits ‘solve’ the trolley problem almost instantly.
There is a science-fiction short story called ‘The Cold Equations’ which deals with the delivery of medicine from an interstellar cruiser to a planet that humans have colonised. The ship only has enough fuel to carry the two pilots and the cargo, but half-way through the flight, a stowaway is discovered. She is an eighteen-year-old girl who wanted to visit her brother. It is explained to her that if she is not jettisoned, they will all die, as will those who need the medicine. The girl voluntarily climbs into the airlock and is ejected from space.
There are, indisputably, cases in which a utilitarian approach is the best one. ‘The Cold Equations’ is, in my view, one of the best explorations of it. (Interestingly, the story was shaped and re-shaped countless times, because the author, Tom Godwin, kept coming up with ways to save the girl.) But it surely cannot be the only one, or the best one, or the ruling one.
