Comments
While I see the intuitive appeal of this idea, it honestly seems a bit ad hoc. The physics analogy is interesting, yes, but we should be careful not to mistake the practical usefulness of local level deontology or virtue ethics for an actual normative difference between levels. If we just accept the local heuristics as useful for social cohesion etc. without critically assessing whether we could do better, we run the risk of not actually improving sentient experience - just rationalizing standards that mainly exist because they were evolutionarily expedient, or maintain some power structure.
To be more specific, it's very much an open question whether trying to be a "good" friend/family member, in ways that significantly privilege your friends/family over others, actually achieves more good in the long run. It seems very unlikely to me that, say, (A) buying or making a few hundred dollars' worth of presents for people during holidays (reciprocated with similar presents, many of which in my experience honestly haven't been worth the money even though I appreciate their thought) makes the world a better place than (B) spending that money/time on the seemingly cold utilitarian choice.
The usual objection to this is that B weakens social bonds or makes people trust you less. But: (1) from the perspective of the people or animals you'd be helping by choosing B, those bonds and small degrees of weakened trust would probably seem paltry and frivolous by comparison to their suffering. There also doesn't seem to be much robust evidence supporting this claim anyway, it's just an intuition I've seen repeated without justification. (2) It's possible that this is one of several social norms that we can change over time by challenging the assumption that it's eternal; in the short run, perhaps people think of you as cold or weird, but if enough people follow suit, maybe refusing to waste money on trivialities for holidays could become normal. Omnivores have argued that veganism threatens social bonds and the (particularly American) culture of eating meat together; c.f. this article. I think that that argument is self-evidently weak in the face of great animal suffering, so analogously it isn't a stretch to suppose that deontological norms we currently consider necessary for social cohesion are disposable, if we challenge them.
I like the general thrust of your argument and would like to point out that within moral philosophy there is already an (in my view) satisfactory way to incorporate judgements associated with deontology and virtue ethics within a utilitarian framework—by going from “single-level utilitarianism” to “multi-level utilitarianism“:
I'm currently writing a text on this topic and will copy an excerpt here:
"Utilitarians believe that their moral theory is the appropriate standard of moral rightness, in that it specifies what makes an act (or rule, policy, etc) right or wrong. However, as Henry Sidgwick noted, “it is not necessary that the end which gives the criterion of rightness should always be the end at which we consciously aim”.
Most, if not all, utilitarians discourage the use of utilitarianism as a decision procedure to guide all their everyday actions. Using utilitarianism as a decision procedure means always calculating the expected consequences of our day-to-day actions in an attempt to deliberately try to promote overall wellbeing. For example, we might pick what breakfast cereal to buy at the grocery store by trying to determine which one best contributes to overall wellbeing. To try and do so would be to follow single-level utilitarianism, which treats the utilitarian theory as both a standard of moral rightness and a decision procedure. But using such a decision procedure for all our decisions is a bad and fruitless idea, which explains why almost no one ever defended it. Jeremy Bentham rejected it, writing that “it is not to be expected that this process [of calculating expected consequences] should be strictly pursued previously to every moral judgment.” Deliberately calculating the expected consequences of our actions is error-prone and takes a lot of time. Thus, we have reason to think that following single-level utilitarianism would itself not lead to the best consequences, which is why the theory is often criticized as “self-defeating”.
For these reasons, many advocates of utilitarianism have instead argued for multi-level utilitarianism, which is defined as follows:
Multi-level utilitarianism is the view that, in most situations, individuals should follow tried-and-tested heuristics rather than trying to calculate which action will produce the most wellbeing.
Multi-level utilitarianism implies that we should, under most circumstances, follow a set of simple moral heuristics—do not lie, steal, kill etc.—knowing that this will lead to the best outcomes overall. To this end, we should use the commonsense moral norms and laws of our society as rules of thumb to guide our actions. Following these norms and laws will save time and usually lead to good outcomes, in part because they are based on society’s experience of what promotes individual wellbeing. The fact that honesty, integrity, keeping promises and sticking to the law have generally good consequences explains why in practice utilitarians value such things highly and use them to guide their everyday actions."
Thanks, Darius. I would advise the OP to read up on this literature. As stated, this has been extensively discussed.
I like Aaron's recent reply here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mG6mckPHAisEbtKv5/should-you-familiarize-yourself-with-the-literature-before#gKYcFEXGtQZLmjzM7
I am glad this post way made, and glad for Darius's comment.
Thanks Darius! I agree that this is probably one of the strongest arguments against my model; what I gather from your reply is that we don't need other moral theories since everything can already be explained by utilitarianism.
I agree with you that some sort of a consequentalist moral theory probably underpins the other moral theories (why should we be virtuous if it didn't have a good consequences?). However - I think this is not giving enough credit to those theories, since if their moral prescriptions are correct according to utilitarianism, the theories themselves should be considered correct.
To take another example from physics: of course we know that quantum mechanics is more fundamental than classical mechanics (classical mechanics is the limit of quantum mechanics at large scales). This doesn't mean that people consider classical mechanics "just quantum mechanics with some heuristics" - it is considered to be a field in its own right. The reason is that at the physical scale at which classical mechanics becomes useful, quantum mechanics becomes too cumbersome to use. Students who are asked to calculate the motion of a ball down an inclined plane don't start with quantum mechanics, they go directly to classical mechanics, which is infinitely more useful for solving problems at that scale.
My argument is that at certain scales, virtue ethics and deontology should be considered emergent moral theories, either from utilitarianism or some other theory. But this doesn't mean that they are "just utilitarianism with some heuristics". They should be studied and practiced in their own rights, since the insights they give are more useful for how to live our daily lives or how we should structure a society. If utilitarianism + heuristics is just virtue ethics at some scale, why not just call it virtue ethics and use utilitarianism to justify why it is correct at that scale?