After the question and answer session had gone fifteen minutes over time, I had to leave the effective altruism meeting. Next to the vegan pizzas waiting outside the door stood a young man with long blond hair dressed all in black. He asked if he could walk out with me. He correctly guessed my day job: who else would make time after work for a meeting about moral philosophy except an academic. He told me he was excited by the movement’s ability to change the world. Through effective altruism, philosophy is becoming the most applied of the humanities. A quip of my colleague Karol Szwagrzak immediately sprang to mind, that only a monster could live his life according to philosophical principles.
The event centered around a defense of utilitarianism, and the speaker was a believer who runs the Utilitarian Podcast. He was refreshingly confrontational, and the atmosphere among the men present was jovial. One man joked that the two bags of potato chips present should be for him alone, because he gets more pleasure from eating potato chips than anyone else. Before the talked started, one man asked the speaker how much in principle one should give to charity (almost everything), and how much the speaker himself gives (one shouldn’t obsess about it).
I’m using the noun men, because the speaker and the fifteen or so attendees were young, chipper, white, and all apparently of the male persuasion. At forty I may have been only a little under twice the age of the next oldest attendee. A less chipper looking negative utilitarian did settle himself in at some point. I learned that he believes that no amount of pleasure can outweigh a moment of suffering. Therefore, a world without people is preferable to the one we have. One might be distressed that an organization with some pretty out-there ideas and the goal of saving the world attracts mostly white men, but luckily I am one too, so I let it slide.
The chipperness and energy was such that the planned format of the talk broke down quickly. The audience peppered the speaker with questions, which often led far afield. There was a long discussion of what it would mean for the value in the universe to be infinite, and whether or not that is the most serious challenge to utilitarianism. The speaker thought it was. We discussed the various flavors of utilitarianism, and their plausibility. We discussed the somewhat self-serving idea that the way to do the most good as a utilitarian is to take good care of yourself so you do not burn out. Some of the discussion reminded me of the Bernard Williams quote about consequentialists always having “one thought too many".
So, is utilitarianism true? The speaker thought we have strong intuition for the premises that lead us to utilitarianism. There is no good reason to assign implicitly higher value to one person over another. Pleasure is the ultimate good, and pain the fundamental bad. Therefore what is good is summing up all the pleasure of all people, and subtracting all their pain. Moreover, unlike most other moral theories, utilitarianism is internally consistent. The rest of the talk was about the seemingly counter-intuitive implications of such a view. In these cases, we were told our intuitions fail us. For one thing, they are often contradictory. Therefore, we should stick with utilitarianism.
I was not convinced. Why privilege some intuitions over others? All we have to base our moral views on are a set of mutually inconsistent intuitions. Brilliant utilitarian thinkers from Sidgwick, to Parfit, to Singer have all tried to find a way to firmly plant common-sense morality in the ground of clear philosophical principles. Every one of them failed. Why defend principles that require biting the bullet on something apparently terrible (a negative utilitarian might push the nuclear button if he had it), or something seemingly crazy (preferring a trillion trillion nematodes to a billion humans)? Wouldn’t it be better to simply go with Marcus Aurelius? “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.’’