So your critique of Utilitarianism is that it reduces a Hard Problem (ethics) to an impossible problem (knowing and summing happiness)?
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In all fairness, utilitarians do have a relatively straightforward criterion of happiness, it is pleasure and the absence of pain. Hard to measure? Probably, but surely easier than pretty much anything else ethics might be plausibly concerned with.
Of course, it then gets more complicated, because it turns out that according to them reducing pain should weigh more heavily in moral reasoning than increasing pleasure (sensible enough but… how heavily exactly?) and unless you’re Bentham utilitarians allow qualitative difference between pleasures which pretty much throws the scale out the window.
Oh, I agree. Impossible to measure, but still more measurable than any other ethical criterion.
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Another thing I find very strange is that as far as I know none of these theories of morality takes into consideration the motivation of an act.
I feel there is a difference between someone who helps a particular person because they have measured helping them against helping others and come to the conclusion that helping this person is more fruitful than helping someone else—versus someone who sees another person suffering and feels inclined to help because they feel compassion for them.
The first is very rational, with no emotional involvement, while the second is driven by emotion, and if it is done well also includes reason in deciding on the best and most effective way to help.
The Buddha includes motivation when he says we should give where our heart feels inspired, and he may be the only one to do so.
Added:
I was pointed to this by a student of philosophy who was also interested in Buddhism. She said, “This is strange that none of those philosophies of ethics that I learn at university speaks about the motivation of an action. This really distinguishes Buddhist ethics”.
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To me, this is a rather circuitous way of saying there’s a problem of knowledge. Utilitarianism requires omniscience for its logic function properly, which makes it kind of useless as a solution to real world situations. A person can believe that doing x will be more happiness-producing than y, but they can be mistaken. And in many cases, it will never be known by anyone whether it was mistaken or not after the fact, but everyone will have their opinions about it.
In this situation, in real world society, there are people who don’t care about what they should do, they just want to do what’s good for them, or just whatever they want in general. That often involves hurting other people, which ordinarily brings bad consequences. So, the moral problem for this particular set of people (let’s call them “evil people,” the ones with antisocial personality disorder, mainly) is how to convince people that hurting them is okay.
Utilitarianism unfortunately lends itself to rationalizing immorality by arguing that an apparently evil act can be the best choice if we can analyze its consequences as good. How many evil people are going to play loose with auditing “good and bad” consequences in order to support their rationalizations? It’s the perfect way to obfuscate immorality. Many people are easily blinkered by lots of pseudo-logical hand waving, after all.
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I tried to check whether this was actually so, given the rather wide range of metaethical theories, and I think you’re right.
Motive isn’t mentioned on the Wikipedia page:
And in the Stanford essay on moral motivation is talking about something different.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-motivation/
This is about how, if something is good, we are motivated to do it, rather than saying that the goodness is determined by the motivation.
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I don’t think this is quite accurate. Kantian deontology is (famously) all about intention, however it is also all about rationality and therefore unpalatable for other reasons. Even utilitarianism can be turned into something mostly concerned with the intention to do good once you factor in moral luck, although that could be construed as muddying the waters. However mixed theories such as David Ross’ prima facie duties definitely integrates these considerations. Lastly, virtue ethics is about taking the ethical problem from the viewpoint of what an ethical person would be like, and most of these theories would hold that doing the right thing for the right reason is part of what makes a good person good.
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Do you have any links to these? It’d be interesting to compare what they say with the suttas.
Kant’s theory is exposed in the Critique of Practical reason but the “more popular” account can be found in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, available here: EMT - Immanuel Kant . No need to read the third section, which connects this text to the Critique. Pay special attention to the footnote distinguishing maxim and motive. 
On ‘moral luck’ the locus classicus are papers by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel of the same name.
David Ross’ theory of prima facie duties is described in his “The Right and the Good” and developed (weirdly) in Foundations of Ethics. I’d stick to the first. 
So-caleld “rule” utilitarianism seems to be able to pay better attention to moral luck than so-called “act” utilitarianism (the SEP article on utilitarianism would explain the difference between the two) but there’s nothing in principe keeping either from accounting for it.
Most virtue ethics ground themselves in Aristotle, in particular the Nicomachean Ethics (which is somewhat unfortunate, the Eudemian is also very interesting). The relevant parts to this discussion would be mostly book 2 and the beginning of book 3 (and many other little tidbits too numerous to mention.) Of course it could just as well be grounded in stoicism, which bids us (as determinists cannot keep themselves from doing ) to ensure our intentions are in conformity with Nature and our duties. (If I were to look for textual support, Epicetus’ Discourses would probably be the best place). And all of this goes back to Socrates, who famously holds (at least according to Plato) that nothing should be done to injure one’s soul by committing injustice (cf. Apology). Doing this requires reflection on what moral principles could bring this about and the courage to stick to whatever principles one has found until better ones have been found instead (cf. Crito). The SEP article on virtue ethics gives a pretty good lay of the land of the modern attempts to revitalize Aristotelian ethics. I personally prefer the old stuff.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/
Obviously I could go on and on but there is grading to do. Hope this is helpful Bhante @sujato. If you’d like to chat about this later down the line I’d be honoured.
Oh addendum: a lot of bad history of philosophy about this is premised on the idea that the ancients had no concept of the will, hence cannot have a real concept of intention. The same people will usually attribute the “invention” of the will to Descartes, as if he didn’t get it from Augustine who definitely (!) didn’t get it from Plotinus, etc. etc. Obviously this is historically illiterate and, even if it were true, stupidly assumes that something doesn’t exist and/or cannot be thought about until people have whatever name for it a modern prefers. They did, they had several names for it, and obviously meanings (and people’s conceptions of how psychology works) change over time but I think we can sensibly assume that humans have been able for a long long long time, like before written philosophy long, to wonder about and discuss why they do the things they do.
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It’s also quite likely that he’s not at his best right now. His mental health must have suffered enormously through this, and the views he’s expressing now may not represent his past or present views. We shouldn’t hold him to be permanent.
That’s not to excuse any deception he engaged in.
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bit late here and am currently unable to read the "lesser known " objections, but my problems with utilitarianism are legion;
first, it seems to imply that people with dyscalculia cannot be moral agents, which seems absurd, there must have been very many people throughout history who could not do arithmetic but knew that murder was wrong.
second, as mentioned above, it seems impossible to define a unit measure of suffering that would allow us to compare, for example, the amount of subjective suffering between each of two persons who might be affected by our descision.
third, it seems impossible to define a unit of exchange between happiness and dsuffering, that is exactly how much laughter equals the inverse of the pain casued by that compound fracture?
fourth, even assuming that such a unit measure of suffering and such an exchange value between suffering and happiness could be established, and that those without the capacity for arithmatic could be somehow excused, it would remain the case that for a broad class of ethical problems would thereby become computationally intractable, rendering the right course of action unknowable.
fifth, even if somehow the computational problem where overcome it remains the case that consequences are not time limited, that is, assuming that human actions are possible at all, they continue to have consequences infinitely far into the future, so summing them must be impossible (unless there are limits?)
sixth, even if there where not insurmountable problems with regards to unit, equivalence, computation, and temporality, it would still be the case that an individual simply cannot know even the immediate consequences of their actions in a wide variety of circumstances.
I could go on, and I often do, but I just have to say that I think utilitarianism is fine as a rule of thumb for governments pursuing public policy in fairly narrow bounds, but as a theory of ethics for the individual it is manifest dross.
any theory of morality that could justify the slow torture of a human if only enough youtube viewers eventually find it mildly amusing has clear and insurmountable problems.
Metta.
With respect Bhante, there is more to the theory of money. For something to be money it needs to have the following characteristics:
- A store of value
- A medium of exchange
- A unit of account
Anything used as money needs to have a characteristic that makes it a store of value - i.e. a characteristic that makes it desirable. One way to do this is to have it guaranteed by a government, but this is not the only way. Gold, for example, has been used for thousands of years and doesn’t produce anything at all. It derives its store of value from being aesthetically pleasing and, more recently, as a useful metal for industrial applications.
What makes Bitcoin a good store of value is its superior properties in a few respects:
- It cannot be debased in the way that national currencies can. The value of just about every currency in history has gone to zero.
- It allows money to be highly portable and divisible at low cost.
- It is able to be secured in a way that neither paper currency nor gold can.
If you track Bitcoin from its first bull market you will see a clear trend of its value increasing. Initially it was just valued as a curiosity. However due to its limited supply, over time this translated to price going up. Eventually it became valued because the price went up. When price ran up too quickly, it crashed and then the next cycle started. At each cycle, its value increased. Then, over time, its value proposition expanded from being a curiosity / vehicle of speculation to one of utility - i.e. security, transferability etc. This expansion is at its beginning stages, but is expected to continue.
Gold followed a similar trajectory. Many thousands of years ago gold had little practical utility. It was too soft to be used in tools and there were no electronic applications. It was merely a pretty curiosity that was limited in supply. But that enabled it to become money in time. The self re-enforcing nature of the changes meant that whole cultures built myths , legends and superstitions around gold making it even more valuable.
The scandals and scams that are rife in crypto these days have little to do with the Bitcoin protocol. The Bitcoin protocol itself has never been hacked or compromised in any way. It’s just that users of exchanges forget the oft said adage not your key, not your coin.
FTX was a regulated company that deliberately hid its paper trail from regulators; similar to some companies in the 2000s and 2008. You could compare them to Lehman’s etc. that had sketchy practices. Collapses of non-BTC cryptos can be attributed to the teams that ran them and their bad intentions or failure to understand basic economics. Terra Luna, for example, offered various high returns to incentivise people to hold their coin without understanding that you can’t generate returns from nowhere. But none of this has any bearing on Bitcoin as a protocol.
Here is a simple thought experiment to illustrate another aspect to money:
There is a country (A) that needs to get goods to country (C), but these need to traverse through country (B). Countries A and C operate in dollars while country B operates in pounds. Further, country B specifies that only goods that are transacted in pounds are allowed to go through their country.
Suppose that country B has a supply of 1000 pounds.
Now, further suppose country A needs to send 1000 dollars worth of goods to country C per transaction on average. If the transaction is made in pounds, this would require each pound to be worth one dollar.
Then suppose that this grows until country A needs to send 2000 dollars worth of goods to country C per transaction. But we still only have 1000 pounds. Therefore this would require each pound to be worth two dollars.
As you can see, the value of the pound has nothing to do with what country B is producing. Rather, it has everything to do with the supply of goods that need to be transacted in pounds. The higher the worth of goods to be transacted in pounds, the more expensive the pound needs to be, if no more pounds are printed.
In this example, country B did not have to produce anything. They simply needed to monopolise their trade route to increase the number of transactions done via the pound. As can be seen, a country’s production is not fundamental to a currency’s value. As long as there are other properties that make a currency appealing as a store of value or medium of exchange, that is enough.
If we translate this to Bitcoin, or to any other properly decentralised cryptocurrency, this means that as long as people are willing to transact in it its value will go up. Note that you don’t even need to buy and hold Bitcoin. All that is required is that a conversion to and from Bitcoin take place at some point in the goods and services lifecycle. Because the number of Bitcoin is limited, a rise in the number of transactions will naturally increase the value of each Bitcoin.
As mentioned earlier, there are also other elements that make Bitcoin a good store of value. Time will tell which element of Bitcoin will be the appealing factor that allows it to continue gaining momentum as a store of value. In the unlikely event that it does not become the store of value or currency of choice, another crypto eventually will due to the inherent properties of a good cryptocurrency protocol.
If crypto is unappealing, it is only because it is a nascent technology that humans haven’t learned to manage well yet. Kind of like cars when they were invented. There were lots of accidents and fatalities as a proportion of car users, because people didn’t understand the risks or have a collective way to govern transport. Yet now, after inventing dividing lines for roads and road rules the danger has been minimised and cars are commonplace.
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It don’t disagree, but in my experience, utilitarianism is more of a rule of thumb, a thought experiment more than a mathematics. Perhaps that simply disallows the whole project.
But take this for example. Consider the suffering incurred by factory farming.
As opposed to the pleasure gained because “I like to eat pork”. I dunno, it seems like a no-brainer.
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I don’t need utilitarianism to find this abhorrent. I know that I wouldn’t want to live like this, this is enough for me so I don’t wish it for others.
Great video synopsis of the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange and Sam Bankman-Fried’s role in it all:
Why I link this here is that “effective altruism” pops up again and again all the way through, not in a good way. I have some sympathies for the idea and motivations behind effective altruism. However, in this case, it seemed to more function as a PR front and moral sop to help the protagonists sleep better at night. The author Georg Rockall-Schmidt often has these insightful, entertaining and bitingly sarcastic exposés on his YouTube channel.
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“To others as to myself”.
This includes all beings, of course.
The phrase encompasses both “sides” of the Golden Rule – “Do unto others as…” and “Do not do unto others as…”
Wow. What an absolute horrid thing.
Sure. The point is that utilitarianism does not always require that we can calculate suffering and happiness in a precise way. Often enough, it’s pretty obvious. This is why I think that the ideas behind utilitarianism are still of value in helping sort out some ethical issues.
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