Utilitarianism as a Resolution to Ethical Disagreements

Many disagreements are factual in nature. Both sides of a debate usually share some common ethical principles and merely aim to determine how best to further those principles. For instance, socialists and free-market economists generally agree that poverty is bad; they just have different ideas of how best to combat poverty. But what happens when two sides disagree over the ethical principles themselves? What do we do when, e.g., Alice believes that suffering is bad, while Bob believes that suffering is good? I propose one solution below.

Example 1. First consider a universe in which no life exists. There are no feelings, sentiments, or experiences. Only stars and desolate planets fill the void of space. It seems intuitively clear that nothing matters in this universe. As there are no organisms around to care about anything, ethics does not apply.

Example 2. Consider a second universe that contains exactly one organism, named Chris. In Chris's mind, the only thing that matters is carrying out his ethical obligation to build domino towers. Since this is the only ethical principle that exists, there's some quasi-universal sense in which it's ethical for Chris to stack dominoes.

Example 3. What if we now complicate the situation and consider a universe with two organisms: Chris (from before) and Dorothy? Suppose that Dorothy's only goal is to prevent the construction of domino towers. Thus, Chris can only act in a way that he considers ethical if he abridges Dorothy's ethical belief. The same is true for Dorothy with respect to Chris's ethical belief. How do we resolve the dispute?

Recall that ethics only began to apply in the universe once Chris existed. Suppose Chris holds his belief twice as strongly as Dorothy does. Then, in some sense, Chris's belief "exists" twice as much, and so the quasi-universal ethical stance is to give Chris's belief twice as much consideration. In this particular example, then, it is more ethical that domino towers to be constructed.

If we apply the intuition from these examples to any finite number of organisms, all with finitely strong ethical beliefs, the result is a form of utilitarianism--namely, utilitarianism which maximizes fulfillment of things that organisms care about, weighted in proportion to the strength with which they care about them. Call it "care-about utilitarianism."

What shall we do with organisms that don't explicitly recognize what they care about? For instance, what if the universe consisted entirely of a single mouse that was in pain? We can suppose for the sake of argument that the mouse doesn't conceive of itself as an abstract organism enduring negative sensations. The mouse doesn't think to itself, "I wish this pain would stop." Yet I think the intuition that motivates our concern for the interests of other beings rests not upon the ability of those beings to explicitly state their wishes--rather, it comes from an empathetic recognition that those wishes exist and matter. Clearly the mouse's pain is a real event that matters to the mouse, even if the mouse can't articulate that fact. So care-about utilitarianism does give consideration to implicit preferences--whether held by human or non-human animals.

Readers may wonder whether care-about utilitarianism is any different from ordinary classical utilitarianism, which aims to maximize "net happiness"--the sum total of pleasure minus pain. It's true that care-about utilitarianism gives heavy weight to pleasure and pain, because these emotions constitute strong implicit hedonic preferences. Yet there are a few situations in which care-about utilitarianism differs from its classical counterpart.

To take an example, imagine that a pig is the only organism in the universe. The pig has a single overriding desire--to be brutally tortured. This preference is not mistaken or transitory: while being tortured, the pig's desire only grows stronger. But neither does the preference stem from great hedonic satisfaction during the process; the pig's desire is a nonaffective one. In this case, classical utilitarians would reject torturing the pig, but care-about utilitarians may endorse it. Of course, it's not very often that we come across pigs wishing to be tortured; this example points out a theoretical distinction between classical and care-about utilitarianism, but for all practical purposes, these two camps will share essentially the same agenda.

I am not defending the objectivity of ethics in the traditional sense. Ethical truths are not written into the fabric of the universe: to that extent the subjectivist is correct. If there were no beings with desires or preferences of any kind, nothing would be of value, and ethics would lack all content. On the other hand, once there are beings with desires, there are values that are not only the subjective values of each individual being. The possibility of being led, by reasoning, to the point of view of the universe provides as much "objectivity" as there can be.

--Peter Singer, "The Escalator of Reason," 1995