(intro music)
Hi, I'm Julia Markovits,
and I'm an associate professor of philosophy at MIT.
Today, I'm going to talk about utilitarianism.
We can break the utilitarian thesis up into two parts:
a theory of what is valuable, and a theory
of right action given what's valuable.
First, the theory of what's valuable.
It says that the only thing that's valuable in its own right
is happiness and the absence of suffering.
Second, the theory of right action.
The right action is the one that maximizes,
produces the most of, what's valuable, or if that's uncertain,
that produces the most expected value.
If you put those two pieces, the theory of what's valuable
and the theory of right action given what's valuable,
together, you get utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism has a lot going for it.
It's a very simple, theoretically elegant theory
that has universal application.
It's built on a value, happiness,
that is at least extremely widely shared.
Almost everyone, in fact, values happiness.
In a way, it's completely egalitarian.
In the utilitarian calculus, each person's happiness
counts for as much as anyone else's.
There's something very intuitive about
the thought that happiness is valuable,
and the more we make of what's valuable, the better.
And as we've seen, embracing these thoughts
led Bentham, at least, to important moral insights
at a time when many around him were blind to those insights.
But both parts of the utilitarian thesis
also raised some worries.
One set of worries concerns the utilitarian theory of value.
A lot of people have disputed that only
happiness is valuable and only suffering disvaluable.
Couldn't we be happy even though
we're massively deluded about our lives?
Maybe the people we think are our friends
really despise us, and the work we think
is a success is really widely derided.
In that case, we might still be happy,
but surely our lives would be lacking much that is valuable.
These worries can be avoided to some extent
by revising the utilitarian theory of value.
Maybe it's not just happiness, but well-being
more broadly understood, that's valuable.
It's a tricky problem to figure out exactly what's valuable,
but I will set that problem aside here.
I want to focus instead on a problem facing
the second half of the utilitarian thesis,
the theory of right action.
This part of the thesis looks particularly hard to question.
Once we've agreed on what's valuable,
how could we deny that it's better morally
to secure more of what's valuable?
This looks very plausible, but it's proved
to be surprisingly problematic.
Consider this example, due to the philosopher T. M. Scanlon.
Suppose that Jones has suffered an accident
in the transmitter room of a television station.
Electrical equipment has fallen on his arm,
and we can't rescue him without turning off
the transmitter for fifteen minutes.
A World Cup match is in progress,
watched by many people, and it will not be over for an hour.
Jones's injury won't get any worse if we wait,
but his hand has been mashed,
and he's receiving extremely painful electrical shocks.
Should we rescue him now or wait until the match is over?
Does the right thing to do depend
on how many people are watching,
whether it's one million or five million or a hundred million?
To put a finer point on the problem, in fact,
over one billion people watched the last World Cup Final.
Must a utilitarian conclude that poor Jones
should be left to his fate?
Consider this.
>From a utilitarian perspective,
preventing one death is a very good thing,
but surely preventing very many severe mutilations
can relieve more suffering and so produce
more value than a single life.
And surely preventing a much larger still number
of somewhat less severe mutilations is more valuable
than preventing the comparatively smaller
number of severe mutilations, and so on.
Following this reasoning, we'll eventually arrive
at comparatively minor harm, a headache, say,
that if suffered by a vast enough number of people
will be worse than a comparatively much smaller,
but still vast, number of somewhat more serious harms,
maybe sprained ankles.
But notice that "less valuable than" is transitive.
If A is less valuable than B, and B is less valuable than C,
then A is less valuable than C.
So we seem to have arrived at the conclusion
that preventing a vast enough number of headaches
can produce more value than saving a life,
and to get back to poor Jones,
that avoiding fifteen minutes of frustration
for one billion soccer fans may be more valuable
than preventing an additional hour of pain for Jones.
If the second half of the utilitarian thesis,
the theory of right action, is correct,
and the morally right action is the one
that maximizes value, it seems we're morally obligated
to leave poor Jones to suffer.
Can that possibly be right?
It sounds wrong, but it's worth noting
that we in fact make tradeoffs like this all the time.
We raise the speed limit for the sake of
minor convenience for millions of people,
even though it means more deaths on the highway.
We fund research into athlete's foot treatments
when we could instead pay for research into
the cure of some very fatal but very rare disease.
We direct some aid money into programs
that target deworming, which benefits
a lot of people a little, rather than programs
that prevent death for a much smaller number of people.
But in spite of this, many people will feel that
utilitarianism has advised us wrongly in the Jones case.
There are some things, they will think,
which we may not do or allow to happen to people,
even for the sake of maximizing total value.
In other words, people have a right not to have
their interests sacrificed for the greater good
in some circumstances.
Such people might also object, for example,
to the use of torture to get
potentially life-saving intelligence.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community