Utilitarianism.net Updates

Lots of exciting news from utilitarianism.net:

(I) We now offer expert-translated versions of the website in Spanish and German (with Portuguese coming soon).

(II) We’ve just published four new guest essays covering important topics:

1. Moral Psychology and Utilitarianism, by Lucius Caviola & Joshua Greene, explores the psychology behind common anti-utilitarian intuitions, and the normative and practical implications of empirical psychology. As they conclude, “A deeper understanding of moral psychology won’t, by itself, prove utilitarianism right or wrong. But it can help us assess utilitarianism in a more informed way.”
2. Utilitarianism and Voting, by Zach Barnett, offers a timely examination of the instrumental value of voting well. (Spoiler: it can be very high!)
3. Expected Utility Maximization, by Joe Carlsmith & Vikram Balasubramanian,^[1] aims to convey an intuitive sense of why expected utility maximization is rational, even when it recommends options with a low chance of success. (I’ll definitely be using this in my teaching.)
4. Welfare Economics and Interpersonal Utility Comparisons, by Yew-Kwang Ng, argues that objections to interpersonal utility comparisons are overblown—luckily for us, as such comparisons are thoroughly indispensable for serious policy analysis.

(III) An official print edition of the core textbook is now available for preorder from Hackett Publishing. (All author royalties go to charity.) The folks at Hackett were absolutely wonderful to work with, and I deeply appreciate their willingness to commercially publish this print edition while leaving us with the full rights to the (always free and open access) web edition. The print edition includes a Foreword from Peter Singer and Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, and sports high praise from expert reviewers. Instructors considering the text for their classes can request a free examination copy here (before Nov 1).

Here I’ll just share the conclusion, to give you a sense of the book’s framing and ambitions:

Conclusion (of the textbook)

In this book, we’ve (i) laid out the core elements of utilitarian moral theory, (ii) offered arguments in support of the view, (iii) highlighted the key practical implications for how we should live our lives, and (iv) critically explored the most significant objections, and how utilitarians might respond.

Utilitarianism is all about beneficence: making the world a better place for sentient beings, without restriction.

As a consequentialist view, it endorses rules only when those rules serve to better promote overall well-being. Utilitarianism has no patience for rules that exist only to maintain the privilege of those who are better off under the status quo. If a change in the distribution of well-being really would overall be for the better, those who stand to lose out have no veto right against such moral progress. Many find this feature of the view objectionable. We think the opposite. Still, we recognize the instrumental importance of many moral rules and constraints for promoting overall well-being. The best rules achieve this by encouraging co-operation, maintaining social stability, and preventing atrocities. In principle, it could sometimes be worth breaking even the best rules, on those rare occasions when doing so would truly yield better overall outcomes. But in practice, people are not sufficiently reliable at identifying the exceptions. So for practical purposes, we wholeheartedly endorse following reliable rules (like most commonsense moral norms)—precisely for their good utilitarian effects.

As a welfarist view, utilitarianism assesses consequences purely in terms of well-being for sentient beings: positive well-being is the sole intrinsic good, and negative well-being is the sole intrinsic bad. Everything else is good or bad only instrumentally through its effects on well-being. And as an impartial view, it gives equal moral weight to each individual’s interests: no matter where, when, who, or what species they might be. For those who find utilitarianism’s focus on impartial well-being to be too narrow, we saw that there are many “near-utilitarian views” that expand the theory of value (or add a moderate degree of partiality) while continuing to share utilitarianism’s most important practical implications.

Many of those implications stem from the aggregative nature of the theory. However good it is to save one life, it’s twice as good to save two. So, given that we have limited time and resources, it’s important that we use these effectively, to do more good rather than less. Rather than settling for whatever half-decent idea first springs to mind, utilitarian beneficence directs us to prioritize between competing causes and interventions with an eye to getting the best moral return on our efforts. Like most reasonable theories, it implies that we would do well to engage in effective altruism—the project of finding the best ways to help others, and putting them into practice. This might involve donating, working, or conducting outreach aimed at effectively improving the well-being of the extremely poor, factory-farmed animals, and future generations.

We saw that there are powerful arguments in favor of utilitarianism. Some draw upon concrete intuitions about what fundamentally matters; others upon abstract principles like ex ante Pareto, made vivid by the “Veil of Ignorance” thought experiment. Yet other arguments seek to undermine non-consequentialist alternatives, highlighting disturbing structural features of deontology such as its built-in status quo bias, its reliance on the doubtful distinction between “doing” and “allowing”, and its tendency to require acts that diverge from what an ideal observer would want to see done.

Finally, in Part II of this book, we surveyed the challenges for utilitarian theory. We saw that many powerful objections have been levied against utilitarianism over the years. But we also saw that none were decisive, or left utilitarians with nothing plausible to say in response. We shared a toolkit of strategies that can be employed, time and again, to help utilitarians defang various objections. The force of these responses may help to explain utilitarianism’s enduring influence and appeal to many, long after critics predicted its demise.

That’s not to say that everyone will be convinced. Philosophy is not a discipline that lends itself to universal assent or convergence, and moral philosophy least of all. We trust that debates over the plausibility and appeal of utilitarianism will continue to rage. But we hope that this text helps to shed light on the current state of the debates, and will help even staunchly anti-utilitarian partisans to at least better understand the utilitarian moral perspective. And if some who were previously undecided come to share our sense that there are important moral insights to be found in utilitarian ethics—especially when it comes time to put our ethics into practice—all the better!

We close this text by offering (in the appendix) a study guide to Peter Singer’s (1972) essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Singer’s famous paper nicely illustrates our key theme that the most important practical implications of utilitarian beneficence can be shared by many other views. While written from a broadly utilitarian perspective, the actual premises of Singer’s argument are much more modest, and prove notoriously difficult for any moral agent to deny. We hope our readers enjoy and benefit from grappling with Singer’s ideas, as we ourselves have.

1. ^{^}

   Vikram adapted Joe Carlsmith’s original essay series, with permission, for utilitarianism.net.