As written the Martian case actually has a wrinkle that may actually sneak in some extra game-theoretic moral intuitions: the sixth Martian is avoiding the lever, choosing to allow five of its fellows to die that it might live. So it’s morally culpable (if to an understandable degree!) in a way that “punishing” it feels less bad, perhaps especially to a certain kind of traditional deontologist, but also (as in the transplant case) game-theoretic considerations that may be considered by utilitarians. In the other direction there may be hesitancy in interfering with a (literally) alien cultural practice whose purposes you don’t understand.
Of course if you specify the sixth Martian has not awoken either the punishment intuition presumably disappears, and if you specify the ritual sacrifice came about for some bad reason (a cruel Martian emperor decreed it for its amusement, or whatever), then these might disappear, so this is all a quibble that doesn’t detract from your main point.
Sure, feel free to tweak the details as you please! (I expect most deontologists wouldn't consider it obligatory for the sixth to sacrifice himself, so I included that detail to make it clear that he doesn't consent to the sacrifice in this case--if he did consent, many deontologists would no longer consider the sacrifice to be impermissible.)
For most of my life I've been a (partially conflicted) believer in natural rights, but lately I've been pushed more and more toward utilitarianism and am now teetering on the brink -- and this post of yours contributed greatly to bringing me to this point.
However, there are a couple topics about which I am having trouble embracing the utilitarian viewpoint, which I would love to see you write a post about:
1. Just Deserts: (This example is from Huemer) You have a tasty cookie that will produce harmless pleasure with no other effects. You can give it to either serial killer Ted Bundy, or the saintly Mother Teresa. Bundy enjoys cookies slightly more than Teresa. Should you therefore give it to Bundy?
I suppose utilitarians might say that you could give the cookie to Teresa to avoid incentivizing serial killing, or because other people might see you give the cookie to Bundy and derive dissatisfaction from their sense of justice being violated (even if their conception of justice is incorrect), but these responses would dodge the point -- most people have the intuition that giving the cookie to Ted Bundy is fundamentally wrong beyond any downstream consequences simply because Ted Bundy doesn't *deserve* the cookie.
2. Restitution: Consider Abe, Bob, and Cindy. Abe owns a bike. However, Bob would get more utility from the bike than Abe. Bob steals the bike from Abe (with no intention of using the bike to aid in committing more crimes). Cindy is wealthy and could buy Abe a new bike with minimal utility loss to herself.
Putting aside the important deterrent effects of having laws against stealing and the fact that stealing is usually wrong, utilitarianism would seem to call for letting Bob keep the stolen bike and having Cindy buy Bob a new bike. Yet, this strikes most people as unfair -- Bob stole the bike so he should be required to return the bike to Abe (or buy him a new one that is just as good).
While I can appreciate that in other alleged counter-examples such as Organ Harvester we cannot so easily set aside our intuitions about the broader implications and our status quo and other biases, I'm not confident that response would be satisfactory in this example. Or is it?
Would you say that property rights are just a social construct and so Abe in fact had no greater moral claim to the bike than Bob did? Would our intuitions or the morally justified resolution change if we stipulated that Bob first asked Abe politely for the bike and Abe refused and only then did Bob take it?
^ I would be eager to read a post of yours addressing these two topics!
Lastly I would also be interested in reading your thoughts on a utilitiarian legal framework -- is private ownership of the means of production justified, and if so to what extent? What should the law require with respect to redistributive justice? I am aware that many utilitarians embrace common sense moral norms in many cases (https://utilitarianism.net/utilitarianism-and-practical-ethics/#respecting-commonsense-moral-norms), but I need more detail!
re: 1. Yeah, I'm sympathetic to a desert-adjusted view of some kind. We should count all *innocent* interests equally, but it hardly seems reasonable to impose costs on an innocent person merely in order to protect someone else from an entirely self-inflicted harm, for example (even if the latter harm would be greater, in utilitarian terms). So I do think that's an important exception to strict utilitarianism, as I argue here:
re: 2. I should write a new post on this sometime! I do think that property rights are a valuable social institution, so there are strong reasons to support enforcement mechanisms in general. But in a one-off case, if we can somehow stipulate that "all else (really!) is equal", and Bob wasn't ill-willed or reckless (suppose a 100% reliable Oracle told him that it really would do more good for him to have the bike, and no ill-effects would result from the theft besides Abe temporarily lacking the bike)... then, I guess I don't really see the problem?
On broader legal/institutional frameworks, the following (very) old post may offer at least a rough sense of how I'd approach such questions:
This is great! I've been thinking about this issue a lot, and thinking that we need to do a better job of drawing real-world cases where the stipulations actually line up with our intuitions, but I suppose that making the case alien can help too!
For what it's worth, I always felt that step (2) of your recipe was only ever in there because utilitarians insisted ("insisted"). Roughly: the non-consequentialist says "ah, but what about a transplant case?" and the utilitarian replies "well, it would have bad downstream consequences, etc." and thus the non-consequentialist sighs and adds, in order to continue the discussion with the utilitarian, "yes, but it would be a one-off, it would never get out, etc."
What the non-consequentialist should instead say is "but what explains why it's wrong—I'm quite certain—is nothing to do with the downstream consequences, whatever they might be, but instead that it does something terrible TO the healthy patient."
Put differently, for the non-consequentialist, step (2) is, intuitively, an irrelevance—they might also concede that it happened on a Tuesday and that the healthy patient's name was Jeff.
So why not just pick a case to begin with (like Martian Harvest) where it is much *clearer* that the act doesn't risk deleterious downstream consequences? As I suggested, committed deontologists may still insist that they're "quite certain" the act is wrong. But others may disagree. (Outright majorities tend to endorse killing the one as a means to saving five in the Trolley Loop case, for example. So strict deontic constraints are far from universally accepted, in the way that "don't kill healthy patients in everyday life" *is* pretty much universally accepted.)
Why not pick a case where that’s clearer? Hard to find them, I suppose.
Why not pick Martian Harvest? For my part, the more alien a case, the less useful my intuitions about it—and that one is alien in every way. (Although, in this case—and to the extent that I understand these blobs that can swap their life essence around at the press of a button—I don’t feel any differently than in Transplant. Not sure why anyone would. I don't imagine I would press the button.)
As written the Martian case actually has a wrinkle that may actually sneak in some extra game-theoretic moral intuitions: the sixth Martian is avoiding the lever, choosing to allow five of its fellows to die that it might live. So it’s morally culpable (if to an understandable degree!) in a way that “punishing” it feels less bad, perhaps especially to a certain kind of traditional deontologist, but also (as in the transplant case) game-theoretic considerations that may be considered by utilitarians. In the other direction there may be hesitancy in interfering with a (literally) alien cultural practice whose purposes you don’t understand.
Of course if you specify the sixth Martian has not awoken either the punishment intuition presumably disappears, and if you specify the ritual sacrifice came about for some bad reason (a cruel Martian emperor decreed it for its amusement, or whatever), then these might disappear, so this is all a quibble that doesn’t detract from your main point.
Sure, feel free to tweak the details as you please! (I expect most deontologists wouldn't consider it obligatory for the sixth to sacrifice himself, so I included that detail to make it clear that he doesn't consent to the sacrifice in this case--if he did consent, many deontologists would no longer consider the sacrifice to be impermissible.)
Richard,
For most of my life I've been a (partially conflicted) believer in natural rights, but lately I've been pushed more and more toward utilitarianism and am now teetering on the brink -- and this post of yours contributed greatly to bringing me to this point.
However, there are a couple topics about which I am having trouble embracing the utilitarian viewpoint, which I would love to see you write a post about:
1. Just Deserts: (This example is from Huemer) You have a tasty cookie that will produce harmless pleasure with no other effects. You can give it to either serial killer Ted Bundy, or the saintly Mother Teresa. Bundy enjoys cookies slightly more than Teresa. Should you therefore give it to Bundy?
I suppose utilitarians might say that you could give the cookie to Teresa to avoid incentivizing serial killing, or because other people might see you give the cookie to Bundy and derive dissatisfaction from their sense of justice being violated (even if their conception of justice is incorrect), but these responses would dodge the point -- most people have the intuition that giving the cookie to Ted Bundy is fundamentally wrong beyond any downstream consequences simply because Ted Bundy doesn't *deserve* the cookie.
I've heard of "desert-adjusted" utilitarianism (DAU) (https://utilitarianism.net/near-utilitarian-alternatives/#desert-adjusted-views), which seems to address the issue head-on. Do you think DAU is the correct framework?
2. Restitution: Consider Abe, Bob, and Cindy. Abe owns a bike. However, Bob would get more utility from the bike than Abe. Bob steals the bike from Abe (with no intention of using the bike to aid in committing more crimes). Cindy is wealthy and could buy Abe a new bike with minimal utility loss to herself.
Putting aside the important deterrent effects of having laws against stealing and the fact that stealing is usually wrong, utilitarianism would seem to call for letting Bob keep the stolen bike and having Cindy buy Bob a new bike. Yet, this strikes most people as unfair -- Bob stole the bike so he should be required to return the bike to Abe (or buy him a new one that is just as good).
While I can appreciate that in other alleged counter-examples such as Organ Harvester we cannot so easily set aside our intuitions about the broader implications and our status quo and other biases, I'm not confident that response would be satisfactory in this example. Or is it?
Would you say that property rights are just a social construct and so Abe in fact had no greater moral claim to the bike than Bob did? Would our intuitions or the morally justified resolution change if we stipulated that Bob first asked Abe politely for the bike and Abe refused and only then did Bob take it?
^ I would be eager to read a post of yours addressing these two topics!
Lastly I would also be interested in reading your thoughts on a utilitiarian legal framework -- is private ownership of the means of production justified, and if so to what extent? What should the law require with respect to redistributive justice? I am aware that many utilitarians embrace common sense moral norms in many cases (https://utilitarianism.net/utilitarianism-and-practical-ethics/#respecting-commonsense-moral-norms), but I need more detail!
Thank you.
Thanks, interesting questions!
re: 1. Yeah, I'm sympathetic to a desert-adjusted view of some kind. We should count all *innocent* interests equally, but it hardly seems reasonable to impose costs on an innocent person merely in order to protect someone else from an entirely self-inflicted harm, for example (even if the latter harm would be greater, in utilitarian terms). So I do think that's an important exception to strict utilitarianism, as I argue here:
https://www.philosophyetc.net/2021/03/appeasing-anti-vaxxers.html
re: 2. I should write a new post on this sometime! I do think that property rights are a valuable social institution, so there are strong reasons to support enforcement mechanisms in general. But in a one-off case, if we can somehow stipulate that "all else (really!) is equal", and Bob wasn't ill-willed or reckless (suppose a 100% reliable Oracle told him that it really would do more good for him to have the bike, and no ill-effects would result from the theft besides Abe temporarily lacking the bike)... then, I guess I don't really see the problem?
On broader legal/institutional frameworks, the following (very) old post may offer at least a rough sense of how I'd approach such questions:
https://www.philosophyetc.net/2006/05/institutional-rights.html
This is great! I've been thinking about this issue a lot, and thinking that we need to do a better job of drawing real-world cases where the stipulations actually line up with our intuitions, but I suppose that making the case alien can help too!
For what it's worth, I always felt that step (2) of your recipe was only ever in there because utilitarians insisted ("insisted"). Roughly: the non-consequentialist says "ah, but what about a transplant case?" and the utilitarian replies "well, it would have bad downstream consequences, etc." and thus the non-consequentialist sighs and adds, in order to continue the discussion with the utilitarian, "yes, but it would be a one-off, it would never get out, etc."
What the non-consequentialist should instead say is "but what explains why it's wrong—I'm quite certain—is nothing to do with the downstream consequences, whatever they might be, but instead that it does something terrible TO the healthy patient."
Put differently, for the non-consequentialist, step (2) is, intuitively, an irrelevance—they might also concede that it happened on a Tuesday and that the healthy patient's name was Jeff.
So why not just pick a case to begin with (like Martian Harvest) where it is much *clearer* that the act doesn't risk deleterious downstream consequences? As I suggested, committed deontologists may still insist that they're "quite certain" the act is wrong. But others may disagree. (Outright majorities tend to endorse killing the one as a means to saving five in the Trolley Loop case, for example. So strict deontic constraints are far from universally accepted, in the way that "don't kill healthy patients in everyday life" *is* pretty much universally accepted.)
Why not pick a case where that’s clearer? Hard to find them, I suppose.
Why not pick Martian Harvest? For my part, the more alien a case, the less useful my intuitions about it—and that one is alien in every way. (Although, in this case—and to the extent that I understand these blobs that can swap their life essence around at the press of a button—I don’t feel any differently than in Transplant. Not sure why anyone would. I don't imagine I would press the button.)