Gfyuki

I am having troubles understanding utilitarianism a little bit, and have posed this question to a number of people and been met mostly with bafflement about how I cannot see the error in my proposed claim. But, when they explain against it, I cannot see the soundness of their argument. So, I am willing to accept that there is an essential error I am making in my reasoning, and am making this post in the hopes that someone will be able to point it out.

People like to say against utilitarianism the idea of inalienable rights. We believe people should have them, not because they will increase pleasure/decrease pain in the aggregate, but for some other given reason. Despite the fact that 30 people being run over by a bus is a much more unpleasurable result than one person being run over, we still (some of us) do not think it right to push that person in front of the bus to save the 30. Not advocating for this, just as a proposed counter-argument.

My question is: if we say that inalienable rights are valuable, are we not just simply choosing a different kind of pleasure that we place value on? People should have inalienable rights, and the value of a society which upholds these rights (with that value being determined by the consummate pleasure that comes with having inalienable rights, as compared to not having them) we consider to be a greater point value (+100 points of pleasure) versus the 30 people surviving the bus crash (+50 points of pleasure).

Or, if I refuse to torture one person to save two people from being tortured. Some might call me a Kantian, or some other thing, but not a utilitarian. But am I not just saying that the point value of the displeasure that comes from taking it upon myself to torture the one person (perhaps I believe that humans do not have that right, only God does) is -1 trillion versus the (granted) still very large point value of saving the other 2 (-1 billion)?

I had someone say, ok, well that is no longer about the aggregate. That is about the one person saving their self the -1 trillion points value. But for the person making this decision, isn't the idea that a society in which these decisions are made by people (and not God, say) substantially worse than even half of that society getting killed off? Like, if I think there are personal moral laws that absolutely cannot be transgressed, I only think that because I believe acting in a contrary way will be extremely unpleasurable (be it spiritually, emotionally, or for the greater society). And perhaps I believe that a society of people that have license to kill off the one for the many is damaged in a way that is way worse for the aggregate than half of its population dying.

I almost wonder if this can't be distilled to: for any value claim, is there not a normative claim attached necessarily? I believe this is the is/ought debate, right? If I refrain from doing something that I think is bad, is it not always because I also believe that everyone doing that thing would also be bad, which means utilitarianism can't be escaped? Any normative belief I have is also a belief that the aggregate is better off (i.e. experiences more pleasure or less displeasure) for having this.

The difference is that a utilitarian who endorses inalienable rights can conceive of a world in which that endorsement ends up morally wrong, even if our actual world endorses inalienable rights. By contrast, deontologists about rights say such a world is quite literally inconceivable. Indeed, on a basic utilitarian analysis, we can imagine a case in which inalienable rights are unjustified, even if such a case never obtains. In a world in which the enforcement of a right led to negative utility in the aggregate, it would have to be admitted that the prescription of utilitarianism in this case would be not only that violation of the right was permissible but obligatory. The deontologist about rights says such a situation is quite literally inconceivable: there is no possible world in which it is morally permissible to violate the right of another. Hence, talk of inalienable rights in utilitarianism reduces to shorthand for talk about utility. The deontologist would argue that this is unacceptable: rights are valuable not for their utility but because they, say, preserve human dignity.

Now you might want to then pose the question: why do we want to preserve human dignity in the first place? And you might want to argue: we want to preserve human dignity because societies that preserve human dignity tend to lead to greater aggregate utility. This would be a particular theory, but you can't simply assert that this is what's going on, you'd have to argue for that claim.

My sense is that you are confusing ethical and psychological hedonism. A psychologist, for example, might be able to collect data to support the claim that---as a matter of empirical fact---most people reason in a hedonist-utilitarian fashion about moral matters, even if they don't explicitly hold utilitarianism as a moral theory or even if they explicitly hold some competing moral theory (such as deontology or virtue ethics). In other words, it may be that what in fact motivates us psychologically is pleasure and pain. Hence, it may be that, statistically speaking, the reason most people end up behaving in such a way that endorses inalienable rights is based on utilitarian considerations. But that is a separate matter from whether utilitarianism can actually give us a theory that grounds the value of inalienable rights.

Hence, this quote:

Like, if I think there are personal moral laws that absolutely cannot be transgressed, I only think that because I believe acting in a contrary way will be extremely unpleasurable (be it spiritually, emotionally, or for the greater society).

...is the kind of hanging chad in your case. You claim that the only reason you believe in a moral law is because you in turn believe that acting in a way contrary to that law will lead to negative utility. But have you really separated out psychological from ethical hedonism here? Do you just take it that your behaviors are motivated by pleasure and pain? if so, that means you're a psychological hedonist. But ought your actions be motivated by pleasure and pain? Well that's a different question, and to jump from psychological to ethical hedonism is simply begging the question in favor of utilitarianism. First you need to clearly separate in your mind the question of how people psychologically deliberate about things, from the question of moral value. You would need to make the case that moral laws are grounded in utility, rather than just argue that people in fact reason in utilitarian ways. Indeed, Mill tries to do this himself when he claims that all Kant's derivations of moral duties from the categorical imperative implicitly rely on reasoning about the aggregate consequences of an action on the resulting world in which such moral laws were implemented globally and without exception.