Two more counterexamples to utilitarianism

It’s an innocent and pleasant pastime to multiply counterexamples to utilitarianism even if they don’t add much to what others have said. Thus, if utilitarianism is true, I have to do so. :-)

Suppose you capture Hitler. Torturing him to death would appal many but, given fallen human nature, likely significantly please hundreds of millions more. This pleasure to hundreds of millions could far outweigh the pain to one. Moreover, even of those appalled by the torture, primarily only Nazis and a handful of moral saints would actually feel significant displeasure at the torture. For being appalled by an immoral action is not always unpleasant except to someone with saintly compassion—indeed there is a kind of pleasure one takes in being appalled. Normally in the case of counterexamples to utilitarianism one worries about making people more callous, the breakdown of law and order, giving a bad example to others, and so on. But the case of Hitler is so exceptional that likely the negative effects from a utilitarian point of view would be minimal if any.

One might think that an even better thing to do from the utilitarian point of view would be to kill Hitler painlessly, and then mark up his body so it looks like he was tortured to death, and publically lie about it.

Yet it is wrong to torture even Hitler, and it is wrong to lie that one has done so (especially if only for public pleasure).

Deontology and the Spanish Inquisition

1. If a person acts in a way that would be right if their relevant non-moral beliefs were correct, they are not subject to moral criticism for their action.

2. If consequentialism or threshold deontology is correct, then inquisitors who tortured heretics for the good of the heretics’ souls acted in ways that would be right if the inquisitors’ relevant non-moral beliefs were correct.

3. The torture of heretics is subject to moral criticism.

4. So, neither consequentialism nor threshold deontology is correct.

Let me expand on 2. The inquisitors had the non-moral beliefs that heretics were bound for eternal misery, and that torturing the heretics had a significant chance of turning them to a path leading to eternal bliss and generally increasing the number of people receving eternal bliss and avoiding eternal misery. If these non-moral beliefs were correct, then the inquisitors would have been acting in a way that maximizes good consequences, and hence that would have been right if consequentialism is true. The same is true on threshold deontology. For while a threshold deontologist has deontic constraints on such things as torturing people for their beliefs, these constraints disappear once the stakes are high enough. And the stakes here are infinitely high: eternal bliss and eternal misery. Infinitely high had better be high enough!

Another way to put the argument is this: If consequentialism or threshold deontology is correct, then the only criticism we can make of the inquisitors is for their non-moral beliefs. And yet surely we should do more than that!

If we are to condemn the inquisitors on moral grounds, we need genuine absolute deontic prohibitions.

Yet another argument against artifacts

1. If any complex artifacts really exist, instruments of torture really exist.

2. Instruments of torture are essentially evil.

3. Nothing that is essentially evil really exists.

4. So, instruments of torture do not really exist. (2 and 3)

5. So, no complex artifacts really exist. (1 and 4)

One argument for (3) is from the privation theory of evil.

Another is a direct argument from theism:

6. Everything that really exists is created by God.

7. Nothing created by God is essentially evil.

8. So, nothing that is essentially evil really exists.

The pace of reception of goods

Suppose I know that from now on for an infinite number of years, I will be offered an annual game. A die will be rolled, I will be asked to guess whether the die will show six, and if I guess right, I will get a slice of delicious chocolate cake (one of my favorite foods).

Intuitively, I rationally should guess “Not a six”, and thereby get a 5/6 chance of the prize instead of the 1/6 chance if I guess “Six”.

But suppose that instead of the prizes being slices of chocolate cake, there is an infinite supply of delightful and varied P. G. Wodehouse novels (he’s one of my favorite authors), numbered 1, 2, 3, …, and each prize is the opportunity to read the next one. Moreover, the pleasure of reading book n after book n − 1 is the same regardless of whether the interval in between is longer or shorter, there being advantages and disadvantages of each interval that cancel out (at shorter intervals, one can make more literary connections between novels and remember the recurring characters a little better; but at longer intervals, one’s hunger for Wodehouse will have grown).

Now, it is clear that there is no benefit to guessing “Not a six” rather than “Six”. For whatever I guess, I am going to read every book eventually, and the pace at which I read them doesn’t seem prudentially relevant.

At this point, I wonder if I should revise my statement that in the cake case I should guess “Not a six”. I really don’t know. I can make the cake case seem just like the book case: There is an infinite supply of slices of cake, frozen near-instantly in liquid helium and numbered 1, 2, 3, …, and each time I win, I get the next slice. So it seems that whatever I do, I will eat each slice over eternity. So what difference does it make that if I guess “Not a six”, I will eat the slices at a faster pace?

On the other hand, it feels that when the pleasures are not merely equal in magnitude but qualitatively the same as in the cake case, the higher pace does matter. Imagine a non-random version where I choose between getting the prize every year and getting it every second year. Then on the every-second-year plan, the prize days are a proper subset of the prize days on the every-year plan. In the cake case, that seems to be all that matters, and so the every-year plan is better. But in the Wodehouse case, this consideration is undercut by the fact that each pleasure is different in sort, because I said the novels are varied, and I get to collect one of each regardless of which installment plan I choose.

Here is another reason to think that in the cake case, the pace matters: It clearly matters in the case of non-varied pain. It is clearly better to have a tooth pulled every two years than every year. But what about varied torture from a highly creative KGB officer? Can’t I say that on either installment plan, I get all the tortures, so neither plan is worse than the other? That feels like the wrong thing to say: the every-second-year plan still seems better even if the tortures are varied.

I am fairly confident that in the novel case—and especially if the novels continue to be varied—the pace doesn’t matter, and so in the original game version, it doesn’t matter how I gamble. I am less confident of what to say about the cake version, but the torture case pushes me to say that in the cake version, the pace does matter.

Is wrongdoing an evil?

In my previous post, I said that murder is a counterexample to the privation theory of evil. For a murder is an evil, but a murder is not a privation. It may be that what makes a murder be an evil is a privation—say, the privation of justice in the agent—but the murder itself is not a privation.

But I wonder if one could save the privation theory of evil by severely narrowing the scope of what counts as an evil, so that instances of sin, suffering, error, natural disasters, etc. are not actually evils. Instead, the real evils are what I called “evilmakers” in earlier post. Thus, a murder is not an evil, but the privation of justice in the agent is the evil. An erroneous belief is not an evil, but the evil is its erroneousness, which is a privation of truth.

I don’t think I like this. It departs too far from ordinary language to say that murder or torture aren’t evils, but the privations of justice are. Here is one reason not to like it. Some evils cause direct harm to their victim, and torture is a paradigm example. But when we think of the paradigm harms of torture—namely, intense suffering as well as psychological and psychological damage—then these harms are not caused by the privation of justice. They are caused by the electric shocks, etc. So on the view that it is only the privation of justice that is an evil, the stuff that actually causes most of the suffering isn’t an evil. And while sometimes something can cause suffering without being an evil (e.g., when your well-meaning friend’s advice annoys you), torture doesn’t seem to be a case like that. It’s the torture as a whole that seems to be evil, not simply its injustice. Thus, it seems to me to be truer to say that the injustice is an evilmaker (and evilmakers are also evils), and the torture is an evil.

Dignitary harms and wickedness

Torturing someone is gravely wrong because it causes grave harm to the victim, and the wickedness evinced in the act is typically proportional to the harm (as well as depending on many other factors).

But there are some wrongdoings which are wicked to a degree disproportionate to the harm. In fact, torture can be such a case. Suppose that Alice is caught by an evildoer who in a week will torture Alice by one second for every person who requests this by email. About a hundred thousand people make requests, and Alice gets over a day of torture. Each requester’s harm to Alice is real but may be quite small. But each requester’s deed is very wicked, disproportionately to the harm. The case is similar to a conspiracy where each conspirator contributes only a small amount of torment but collectively the conspirators cause great torture—the law would be just in holding all the conspirators guilty of the whole torture.

Here’s another way to see the disproportion. Suppose that someone is deciding whether to request torture for Alice or to steal $100 from her. Alice might actually self-interestedly prefer an extra second of torture to having $100 stolen. Nonetheless, requesting the torture seems much more wicked than stealing $100 from Alice (unless Alice is destitute).

Similarly, the evildoer could kill Alice with probability 1 − (1/2)ⁿ where n is the number of requesters. Given sad facts about humanity, everyone might know that the probability that Alice will die is going to be nearly certain, and no one requester makes any significant difference to that probability. So the harm to Alice from any one requester is pretty small, but the wickedness of making the request is great.

Another case. It is wicked to fantasize about torturing someone. And to be thought of badly is indeed a kind of harm. But if one can be sure that that the fantasy stays in the mind—think, maybe, of the sad case of a dying woman who spends her last twenty minutes fantasizing about torturing Bob—one might self-interestedly prefer the fantasy to, say, a theft of $100. Hence, the harm is relatively small. Yet the wickedness in fantasizing about torture is great, in disproportion to the harm.

Yet another case. Suppose that with science-fictional technology, someone destroys my heart, while at the same time beaming into my chest a pump of titanium that is in every respect better functioning than my natural heart. I think I have been harmed in one respect: a bodily function, that of pumping blood by my heart, is no longer being fulfilled. But blood is still being pumped, and better. So overall, I may not be harmed. (I may even be benefited.) Yet it seems that to destroy someone’s heart is to do them a grave harm. I am least confident about this case. (I am confident that the deed is wrong, but not of how wrong it is.)

In all these cases, there is a dignitary harm to the victim. And even if it is self-interestedly rational for the victim to prefer this dignitary harm to a modest monetary harm, imposing the dignitary harm is much more wicked. This is puzzling.

Solution 1: Imposing the dignitary harm causes much greater harm to the wrongdoer, and that’s what makes it so much more wicked.

But that seems to get wrong who the victim is.

Solution 2: Alice and Bob are mistaken in preferring not to be robbed of $100. The dignitary harm in fact is much, much worse.

Maybe. But I am not sure. Is it really much, much worse to have ten thousand people request one’s death rather than five thousand? It seems that dignitary harm drops off with the numbers, too, and each individual harmer’s anti-dignitary contribution is small.

Solution 4: Wrongdoings are not a function of harm, but of irrationality (Kant).

I fear, though, that this has the same problem of dislocating the victim from the center of the wrong, just as Solution 1 did.

Solution 3: Dignitary harms to people additionally harm God’s extended well-being, by imposing an indignity on the imago Dei that each human being constitutes. Dignitary harms to people are dignitary harms to God, but they are either much greater when they are done to God (because God’s dignity is so much greater?) or else they are much more unjust when they are done to God (because God deserves our love so much more?).

Like Solution 1, this may seem to get wrong who the victim is. But if we see the imago Dei as something intrinsic to the person (as it will be in the case of a Thomistic theology on which all our positive properties are participations in God) rather than as an external feature, this worry is, I think, alleviated.

I am not extremely happy with Solution 4, either, but it seems like it might be the best on offer.

Consent is not sufficient for permissibility of sex

Rape isn't just wrong, but it is historically among the handful of the very worst types of crimes, sharing that unhappy position with murder, torture and treason. I take it that every instance of rape is very seriously wrong.

But now consider a spectrum of sexual acts: on one of the spectrum is a sexual act motivated by the man threatening the woman with death; on the other end of the spectrum is a sexual act motivated by the man threatening the woman that if she doesn't have sex with him, he won't take her out to the movie that they planned to go to. In the death case, the sex is non-consensual and hence rape. In the no-movie case, the sex is consensual and hence not rape: the threat is way too mild to invalidate consent.

Somewhere in that spectrum is a transition--be it vague or not--between non-consent and consent and hence between rape and non-rape. But every instance of rape is very seriously wrong. When we have continuously transitioned away from a very serious wrong, we shouldn't expect to immediately land in the territory of moral innocence. Rather, we should expect to land either in the territory of another wrong, either another very serious wrong or a "merely" serious wrong. If we start with an act of torture and continuously reduce the degree of pain, eventually we will get an act that isn't torture--but an act that falls somewhat short of the amount of pain needed for it to count as torture is still a serious battery.

Thus we should expect there to be sexual acts that are consensual, but seriously wrong because they are neighbors to rape. Moreover, we should expect that these acts will still wrong for reasons connected to their sexual nature, just as rape is very seriously wrong for reasons connected to its sexual nature. Consent, thus, is necessary but not sufficient for sexual integrity.

Here's a different way to put the argument. If one thinks that consent is the only condition needed for the permissibility of sex (with respect to sexual integrity--of course, there are other conditions, such as whether promises are broken, etc., but they aren't properly sexual), then one has to think either that (a) we have a transition from a very seriously wrong act to a completely innocent act in the above spectrum without any intermediate cases that are wrong but not seriously so, or (b) there are cases of rape that are non-seriously wrong. I think (a) is implausible and (b) is clearly false.

The spectrum I generated above was based on a spectrum of threats. But one can also generate a spectrum based on degrees of sobriety, degrees of understanding, clarity of expression (consent is a speech act), etc.

This has an important consequence particularly relevant to college judicial policies: If acts that aren't rape but are close to rape are seriously wrong, then in cases where it cannot be shown that a rape occurred, but it can be shown that either a rape occurred or a serious wrong close to rape occurred, it can still be just to levy serious punishment. Of course, this would require due process, and hence a way to operationalize the notion of such acts close to rape.

Note 1: None of my argument is meant to give aid or comfort to those who want to narrow the definition of rape. Rather the point is to widen the scope of wrong acts, for instance in the way that the "enthusiastic consent" movement does.

Note 2: The argument I am giving is not a sorites. Vagueness complicates the argument, but does not, I think, destroy it.

Torture

I'll take for granted three things:

1. Long-term incarceration for serious crimes is permissible
2. Income tax, at roughly the level of taxation in the U.S., is permissible (though there may be particular features of the present U.S. tax code that are unjustifiable)
3. Torture is wrong.

The last claim is a rough-and-ready claim. I do not mean it to exclude the possibility that there are extremely rare circumstances (such as where there is literally a time bomb placed in a populous area that cannot be evacuated) where torture is impermissible, but I mean the claim in the same sense in which people say to their kids "You need to keep your promises"—they do not intend to exclude the possibility of rare occurrences where promises should not be kept. (On the basis of divine revelation—as expressed in the documents of Vatican II—I take it that torture is literally always wrong, but I am not assuming this strong claim.)

Let's add some further, plausible claims. Some things may be wrong to do due to some complex moral reasoning which shows that even though the action does not prima facie seem to harm anybody, nonetheless the action is wrong (contraception is like that). But some things are wrong for a very straightforward reason: they are wrong because of the clear and obvious harm they impose on the victim. Torture seems to be one of those things:

4. Torture is wrong because of the harm imposed on the victim.

The following claim is also plausible:

5. If an action is wrong because of the harm imposed on the victim, then an action which imposes a greater harm under the same circumstances on the same victim will also be wrong.

Finally, add the following two claims:

6. If a self-interestedly rational and well-informed person would prefer B to A, where B is harmful, then it would be more harmful for her to receive A instead of B.
7. Some self-interestedly rational and well-informed persons would prefer some (perhaps moderate) instances of torture to a lifetime of taxation (at the level of U.S. income taxes) or to long-term incarceration.

But now we have a paradox. By (6) and (7), together with the fact from (4) that torture is harmful, for some people life-long taxation or long-term incarceration would be worse than some kinds of torture. But then by (5), life-long taxation and long-term incarceration is wrong in the case of these people. And this is in tension for (1) and (2) (I am assuming it is possible for one of these people to be guilty of a serious crime).

I think (1)-(3) are correct. I also think (7) is true. We would not think that someone who endured severe pain for, say, 15 minutes in the course of escaping from a twenty-year jail sentence was self-interested irrational. According to some stuff I found online, the average American in 2004 paid $9377 in income taxes. If this amount were annually invested at 8% (which is I think fairly conservative for such a long-term investment), in 40 years, it would yield $2.4 million. We would not think that someone who ran through non-life-threatening but very painful flames in order to get to a treasure chest containing $2.4 million, even if the chest could only be opened in 40 years, would be irrational in so doing.

So, we need to reject (4), (5) or (6) to get out of the difficulty. Of these claims, I find (5) the most plausible. So that leaves (4) and (6) as candidates for rejection. I think (6) is a bit more plausible than (4), though I am suspicious of the whole concept of self-interested rationality. If so, then (4) should be rejected.

But if torture is not wrong because of the harm inflicted to the victim, what makes it wrong? I am inclined to say the following: It is wrong because to torture someone is unloving, and the duties of love are the whole of the moral law. And it is unloving not just because of the harm inflicted on the victim, because there is more to being loving than providing benefits and more to being unloving than inflicting harms. Love is a unitive relationship, and acts that are innately counter-unitive, such as torture, marital contraception, or lying (I am not putting them all on an equal moral footing—equally, they are wrong, but they are not equally wrong, if you get my drift), are also wrong.

A different way of rejecting (4) might be given by a Kantian.