Outgrowing Utilitarianism

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I’ve outgrown utilitarianism, and it seems I’m not the only one. Several studies show that young people are more likely to be utilitarian than older adults, while older adults display more deontological preferences. According to the studies, this holds true from Greece to China.

When I was younger, utilitarianism made sense to me. Doing the most good for the most people seemed like a logical and objective rule, although I had the feeling it was lacking something. I was sure that utilitarianism would come to some conclusions I disagreed with, but it seemed a firmer theory than deontology or Aristotelian virtue ethics.

Deontology, which Kantian ethics falls under, seemed unfounded to me in the absence of theism. The idea that one has particular moral duties prompts the question: according to whom? As a budding atheist, it made no sense that there were some kind of innate and objective obligations or moral rules people ought to follow without a moral agent behind the rules. It makes sense that it may be useful to act as if we have innate moral duties, but to claim they truly exist, without a god in the picture, was utterly absurd since the universe isn’t sentient.

I saw Aristotelian virtue ethics as fairly useless. Virtue ethics focus on the character of someone rather than judging individual actions. It offers the guidance that one should try to find the golden mean of virtues. For example, aim for courage, which is the mean between cowardice and recklessness. Yet the “courageous” choice is ambiguous. One person might think it courageous to cut off an abrasive family member, while another thinks it’s courageous to give the relationship another go. If the same theory can lead to two opposite conclusions, it’s not useful. What’s a moral theory for if it cannot help you make a moral decision?

So, given that I still hold these objections, why have I moved past utilitarianism? Let me first make a distinction — becoming post-utilitarian does not mean that utilitarianism is wrong. I do not have a new objection disproving it; I simply recognize that it has outlived its usefulness to me. I think utilitarianism served as a substitute for experience.

As a young person in the world, you are looking for somewhere to plant your flag. You want to stake out non-negotiable moral positions because it offers you a community and a sense of self. Things like justice and being a good person begin to matter, and you have to make moral decisions like whether to identify with a religious group, whether to eat meat, or reduce your carbon emissions. One ought to have some consistent ethical view to begin to ground these decisions in.

Deontological theories of ethics and virtue ethics seem more intuition-based than consequentialist ones, often called “moral calculus.” Although deontological views claim that everyone has objective moral duties, without a moral agent or god, it seems only based on an innate intuition that we have duties to one another. When you’re young, you don’t yet have much recognizable intuition or pattern recognition because you lack experience. It’s terrifying to look at the adult world and learn that choices, directions, and morals aren’t grounded in anything. There is no one — no god and no dead white dude — telling you (or, importantly, anyone else) what to do.

We crave moral consistency, and in an ideal world we would have it. But we live in a world of many religions and philosophies that have both many commonalities and key differences. People have different intuitions about what is right and will create a moral philosophy that suits their tendencies, whether or not we agree with it. The world is already effectively functioning on a deontological basis; see things like the United Nations International Bill of Human Rights and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Universal Declaration goes beyond what we would consider rule utilitarianism by saying explicitly we were born with these rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Of course, the world functioning through a deontological lens does not mean that deontology is true, but it does tell us something about what is tenable across adults of all nationalities. What I’m getting at is it matters less what is true, since who knows how to access ultimate truth, assuming one even exists, and more capturing what it feels like to grow up. Something has shifted as I’ve gotten older that is quite difficult to articulate, but it comes with the accumulation of experiences.

When I was younger, I was baffled by people’s lack of attention to some of the biggest producers of long-term suffering. No one seemed to care about animal suffering and factory farming, nor the abuses of sweatshops in the fashion industry. I did not understand why no one was asking where their food and clothes came from. But I think the answer is likely that they don’t have enough capacity to absorb more suffering into their lives. Ignorance is bliss because if they knew what went into their clothes and food they would feel overwhelming guilt and if they swore off animal products and sweatshops it would lead to constant inconvenience, not to mention social ostracization from cultural norms. People feel like they’re living in a boat that’s taking on the water that is suffering and they’re using a bucket to scoop out their work stress, insomnia, and trying to potty train a toddler. It feels like taking on animal suffering or the suffering of the person who made their t-shirt would sink them.

Even the utilitarians cannot properly feel the amount of suffering in the world. It is a clinical, abstract quantity for them. Maybe that is the only way we can interact with so much suffering without having it consume us. But full understanding of anything comes from both knowledge and experience. I think people pick up on the fact that utilitarians have knowledge but not close experience of the suffering they seek to describe. That’s not to say they don’t suffer personally, but that they don’t suffer the particular and immense problems that, say, most GiveWell charities are trying to solve.

For a while I thought I understood what it felt like to be in a boat taking on water, but I didn’t. I was familiar with a particular type of mental suffering, but there are so many kinds of suffering I had never experienced — from grief to abuse to phantom limb pain. To grow up is to learn the character of different types of pain. It is not just to understand the sensations of depression, but to understand the bittersweet feeling of watching your aging parents grow more fragile, to understand the experience of supporting someone you love through their own grief, to understand losing a decade-long friendship over national politics. Undoubtedly, there are many shades of pain I will meet in the coming years, but I’ve already experienced so many phrases I knew the abstract meaning of shift into true understanding now that I have some experience with them. I now really understand what it’s like to “watch someone’s eyes light up” and to “watch the light fade from someone’s eyes.”

As these experiences accumulate and I understand the different varieties of suffering more intimately and complexly, I find myself, in some cases, acting more in line with deontology or virtue ethics. Once a type of suffering becomes a tangible experience rather than an abstraction, I find myself thinking that something like the golden mean or the middle path is the only way to practically survive the flood of suffering threatening my life boat. Trying to mitigate suffering becomes a tactic of avoidance that does not meet the water level where it’s at. It’s always looking toward some imagined future where a series of tradeoffs led to a better world, rather than approaching and being with the current pain. Virtue ethics may not offer an exact solution, but it does allow you to step into the problem.

I find that sometimes supporting a friend through a hard time out of a sense of moral duty may only alleviate their suffering a little and increase mine a decent amount, but contra utilitarianism, it’s worth it. As I said at the beginning, I don’t have a grand analytic argument for this, beyond the fact that suffering is so often intertwined with love, hence the existence of the emotion bittersweetness.

I would maintain that it is good in most cases to actively mitigate suffering in the way utilitarians argue. Yet it is also healthy to accept that you will cause some suffering, and you will experience suffering from natural causes like sickness, old age, and death. Such suffering is often the cost of loving others and fully engaging in life, even in cases where the grief feels greater than the love. Struggling against the suffering, resisting it by trying to solve it, often makes it worse.

Trying to maximize pleasure and mitigate pain naturally mitigates and limits our understanding of that pain. Common experiences of pain create a connective tissue that we use to relate to one another. That doesn’t mean we should intentionally cause pain or suffering, but that connective tissue does become important as we gather more and more experiences of inevitable pain.

That connective tissue makes us feel less isolated, but it also gives us the impetus to collaborate over the shared experience and motivates us to create larger solutions than we would without the direct experience. Like it or not, we are emotional animals, and we can use those emotions, including suffering, to motivate ourselves to be more moral. I don’t know if utilitarianism is wrong, but I know I don’t see a world in which utilitarians’ abstract knowledge of suffering motivates large swaths of people to actually reduce suffering when everyone feels like they’re on a sinking boat of their own. In most cases, people will need to understand a specific type of suffering to be motivated to solve a problem, especially as their life fills with increasing responsibilities as an adult. Accepting that we’re wired that way, rather than working against it with brute rationality, feels key to moving ourselves to doing the next right thing.