Wherein Jockeystreet Changes His Mind About Things

So, I've changed my mind on Utilitarianism.

I would call it a nuanced shift in position rather than a drastic one.

My Utilitarianism, I would say, is now descriptive rather prescriptive.

I would be saying it wrong. Those aren't exactly the right words for it.

Here's what Utilitarianism is, for those who are not entirely familiar:

Utilitarianism is the ethical philosophy that says that what is "good" or "right" is that which causes pleasure, and that what is "bad" or "wrong" is that which causes pain.

If your immediate reaction is to say "well, that sounds like a pig's philosophy," then you are wrong, but you are not alone. That is precisely what people said when John Stuart Mill wrote his very good and very short book, Utilitarianism.

They were wrong because they had a sad, perhaps piggish, idea of what constitutes "pleasure." They objected because they imagined that this was a philosophy that reduced the moral life to "sex, good; work, bad."

But pleasure, we more sophisticated types know, is more complex than that.

"Work, bad," maybe, but work pays the bills, and I like having a roof over my head, food in the cupboards, and a little spending money on the weekend, so really, in the end, "work, good."

The un-piggish, Mill pointed out, find great pleasure in conversation with their peers, in reading good books, in walks along the river, in taking good care of their bodies, and so on.

I have for a long time considered myself a Utilitarian. It makes sense to me. It provides the math that solves moral dilemmas. What choice brings the most pleasure (good) to the most people, and brings the least pain to the least people? Choose that. Sometimes it's hard to get exact figures, but it's not physics, it's moral theory; inexact figures are considered acceptable.

But then a couple of weeks ago I was on a long drive, listening to the radio, and heard an interview with the moral philosopher Michael Sandell. I'd never heard of him before, and the interview wasn't exactly riveting, but there was some stuff that stuck with me, and I'm not a Utilitarian any more.

Sandell started talking about Dick Cheney and torture. Cheney, as he noted, has made the case for torture (it sometimes feels strange to be saying that American leaders are making the case for torture) on Utilitarian grounds. Torture was the right thing, Cheney says, because it worked. Torture helped us catch bad guys. Torture helped prevent lots of bad things from happening.

Cheney's embrace of torture on Utilitarian grounds isn't what has turned me off of Utilitarianism. There are many bad Utilitarians. There are many people who use Utilitarian arguments without all the math, all the factors. Cheney is one of them. "It worked" is only part of the math that goes into the Utilitarian argument. One might also want to think about the national character, the sense of self, the ability of the people to trust the government, the effect of torture on our standing and reputation in the world, the reliability of any confession given under torture, the likelihood of getting equally useful information by less torturous means, and so on and on and on.

Sandell went on, though. In order to refute Cheney's claim that torture was right because it worked, Sandell painted a "what if" scenario that got to me.

Sure, he said (or didn't say exactly, but I'm getting his point here, if not his words), it's tough for many of us to shed tears over the torture of a Really Bad Terrorist if torturing that terrorist kept a bomb from going off and killing school children and grandmothers.

But what if torturing that terrorist didn't work? What if he was so tough and committed to our annihilation that he wouldn't talk under the roughest treatment?

What if he had a daughter? A little girl? What if he had a little girl who was nine years old? A sweet, innocent, regular little girl? And what if the way to get him to talk was to torture her? What if the way to get him to talk was to rape her? To hurt her? To do unspeakable things to her?

What if no one would ever know? It wouldn't damage the country's standing in the world. It wouldn't disgust the people at home. It wouldn't be used as a terrorist recruiting tool. No one would know. And it would save lives. It would stop that bomb from going off.

Would it be right? Or is there something other than Utility that we should be talking about? Can wrong be wrong even when it works, even when it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain?

The hard math of Utilitarianism says that the kid would have to be tortured. I'm sure there are better Utilitarian philosophers than me out there (Peter Singer, maybe) who could look at that and find the hole, see the factors that I'm missing. But when I look at it, I don't see it. The math of Utilitarianism says the little girl gets the rack.

And, of course, I can't accept that. That doesn't work for me.

And now Utilitarianism doesn't work for me. It's a moral philosophy I've clung to pretty tightly for close to 20 years now. I don't yet have another moral philosophy ready to take it's place.

As I said at the start, it's a nuanced shift, not a drastic one.

I would still say that Utilitarianism is descriptive of what is good and right. In the vast majority of cases, Utilitarian math will accurately tell you what is right. But it isn't why it's right, and there are cases where the math will get it wrong.

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Here's another one:

Abortion.

That's a more exciting one than Utilitarianism, right? I mean, you rarely go to a popular blog and see people leaving hundreds of comments in an argument over Utilitarianism, you know?

But I don't have much to say about this one.

I don't think I've ever been an avid, enthusiastic supporter of abortion. It's not something that's really ever sat well with me. One of those uncomfortable, awkward things that you support, but you don't really pat yourself on the back for supporting.

What I've enthusiastically said, often, is that many members (not all, nearly) of the anti-abortion crowd are idiots, are dishonest, are not nice people. I'll stand by that.

But my unenthusiastic moral support of abortion has dried up. Completely.

There are exceptions. There are always exceptions. There's exceptions to the "don't push anybody down the stairs" rule. There are exceptions to the "don't run over Steve with your car" rule. There are always exceptions.

But I am inclined to think that those exceptions are rare, and that those exceptions do not justify the very wide open laws that we have on the books right now.

That will make me unliberal, I guess. And unfeminist. To some.

I credit two sources with this change.

One, again, is an interview I heard on the radio. Don't remember who it was, don't remember when it was, don't remember what station. It was a while back. Over the summer. I won't try to go into the details much, but the guy talked about miscarriages. He talked about the sympathy we show when a woman miscarries, about the sense of loss. He asked if that sense of loss was only in the family's mind. If the sympathy was only for the loss of a potential, of a hope, or if it was sincerely for the loss of something tangible.

I played with that thought for a while. Then I came across a post at Queen of Green. Queen of Green is a Christian vegetarian whose blog I check out once in a while. She put up a post called Let The Images Speak over the summer. It had lots of pictures. The pictures bothered me.

And there you go.

Done with Utilitarianism.

Done with abortion.

Summer of Change.