Rawls, Williams, and Utilitarianism Rawls Distribution Separateness Nozick s Experience Machine Williams Critique of Utilitarianism Doing v. Allowing Agential Integrity For Next time: Read Kant Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (first section)
Rawls Recap One criticism against Classical Utilitarianism is aimed at the goal of impartially maximizing good consequences If providing a benefit to group A provides a greater benefit (2) than providing the same benefit to group B (1) the Utilitarian s answer is clear The Utilitarian is not concerned with inequality
Separateness of Persons Rawls criticizes Classical Utilitarianism because it ignores the separateness of persons The model of impartiality built into Classical Utilitarianism requires imparting harms on some to benefit others without compensating those who are harmed Based on the wrong model of rationality Da Vinci Vetruvian Man (1487)
A Potential Response We seem to make moral decisions frequently that requires balancing the interests of different persons against one another The Trolley Problem, for example, asks us to balance the lives of several persons against one another to make a moral decisions Morality seems to require these kinds of judgments
Robert Nozick Critiques the Classical Utilitarian conception of the good Nozick is doubtful that the good can be analyzed in terms of purely subjective mental states The Experience Machine is meant to support this claim
The Experience Machine Nozick argues that you would not agree to live inside the experience machine even if you could program it to have any experiences you wanted Would you choose to live in the experience machine? Would this be a concern for Bentham? Mill?
More than (mere) Experience If we recoil, as Nozick thinks we would, from a lifetime lived in the Experience Machine then Nozick thinks we learn something important about our conception of the good The Experience Machine can perfectly simulate any experience and can deliver any kind of pleasure we can imagine Nozick claims that we want to actually do things and not merely feel as if we have. Goodness, according to Nozick, cannot consist purely in subjective mental states
Bernard Williams Utilitarianism is an unacceptable moral theory It is incapable of recognizing the moral difference between doing/allowing Utilitarianism fails to recognize that individual lives require integrity Utilitarianism is therefore alienating
Doing/Allowing While on vacation, you stumble into a government crackdown of minority political dissidents Ten dissidents have been taken prisoner by members of the military and, in a sadistic twist, the military captain gives you a choice: A: If you kill one of the dissidents then the other nine will be spared B: If you refuse, the captain kills all ten Francisco Goya Third of May 1808 (1814)
Doing/Allowing (2) Williams argues that the Utilitarian has a very clear answer to this problem Williams is less interested in our specific answers (because he thinks either answer may be correct) and instead wants us to focus on something that the Utilitarian analysis appears to ignore about this situation: There is a moral difference between acting (to kill a dissident) and not acting (so that the military captain kills all the dissidents)
Doing/Allowing (3) Because the Utilitarian cares only about producing the end result with the best consequences the Utilitarian is not concerned with moral distinctions like doing/allowing Williams thinks that the situation is even worse than this: the Utilitarian should find it irrational for us to feel guilty about having to make a decision like this When we are doing the right thing, we do not feel guilty! After all, we are doing the right thing! A self-effacing response seems possible here
Doing/Allowing and Negative Responsibility You are a recent Ph.D. in chemistry and badly need a job to support yourself and your family The job is at a Bioweapons facility and you are morally opposed to such research If you refuse the job your replacement will excel at this job and produce very dangerous weapons
Negative Responsibility Like the previous example, the Utilitarian has a clear answer to this question The Utilitarian would find it irrational to feel guilty about this choice What these two examples show us, Williams argues, is that the Utilitarian not only fails to recognize the doing/allowing distinction but that she also holds us responsible for all of our omissions These two complaints are related
Negative Responsibility (2) In the dissident example you are responsible for the deaths of ten people if you refuse the captain s command Although you have not acted (the captain acts in this case) you will be responsible because your refusal to act resulted in worse overall consequences This problem is potentially quite large (think of how many actions you are not doing right now that you could be doing)
Williams Diagnosis Williams believes that these problems in Utilitarianism stem from the fact that Utilitarianism ignores the Integrity of persons Like Rawls, Williams thinks that it is a mistake that the guiding principle of a moral theory should fail to recognize the value of individual lives (and not just positive and negative states of those lives) What makes individual lives go well, Williams argues, is that they have Integrity
Integrity What makes our lives our lives (a particular life, mine) is that we all have projects, goals, life-plans etc that serve to unite all of our day-to-day (and year-to-year) actions and choices Williams criticism is that Utilitarianism asks to always be at the ready to abandon our life projects whenever it would produce better consequences to do so The criticism isn t just that this is a bad consequence that should be added to the Utilitarian list
Alienation It is to alienate him in a real sense from his actions and the source of his action in his own convictions. It is to make him into a channel between the input of everyone's projects, including his own, and an output of optimific decision; but this is to neglect the extent to which his projects and his decisions have to be seen as the actions and decisions which flow from the projects and attitudes with which he is most closely identified. It is thus, in the most literal sense, an attack on his integrity. Bernard Williams A Critique of Utilitarianism
For Next Time Read Kant Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (first section)