Abstract
I argue that utilitarianism cannot accommodate a basic sort of moral judgment that many people want to make. I raise a real-life example of shockingly bad behavior and ask what can the utilitarian say about it. I concede that the utilitarian can say that this behavior caused pain to the victim; that pain is bad; that the agent’s behavior was impermissible; even that the agent’s treatment of the victim was vicious. However, there is still one thing the utilitarian cannot say, namely that the agent wronged the victim, that they violated her. According to utilitarianism, moral offenses are offenses against global utility, right reason or the totality of sentient beings, but never against individual victims, yet this aspect of the action – that it is an offense against a particular person –is highlighted when we say that this action wronged that woman.
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Notes
For a discussion of utilitarian treatments of the virtues, see Crisp (1992).
It may be objected, of course, that the utilitarian is not bound to assume this. As Saul Smilansky has pointed out, a bullet-biting utilitarian who is indifferent about preserving or rationalizing our pre-theoretical moral convictions is free to argue, e.g., that the horror of terrorism must be graphically depicted if we are going to be sufficiently aroused to combat it, which we must do for reasons of global utility, and so on. That is correct, but the utilitarian is also free not to argue thus, and we need not saddle them from the start with this studied indifference to pre-theoretical moral convictions and feelings.
I am not the first person to have noticed this, it seems. Some time after first writing this paper, I became aware of Michael Thompson’s rich and interesting paper, ‘What is it to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice’ in Smith et al. (2004). Thompson’s aims in his essay are different from mine, but he sees clearly the distinctive ‘bipolar’ character of wronging. He sees equally clearly that some ethical systems have trouble accounting for this, though his focus in that essay is primarily metaethical, while mine is primarily normative. Still later, I became aware of Stephen Darwall’s work on this topic, some of which draws explicitly on Thompson. See Darwall (2013). Soran Reader also points to this issue in her discussion of indiscriminate killing in warfare: ‘So, we need moral answers to the question, “Why was she harmed?” My point is that, in bombing cases, no moral answer to that question is available. The utilitarian answer at best provides us with an explanation of her death – she died because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It does not, and cannot, tell us how and why it right to harm her.’ (Reader 2000: 176)
It is not clear, on utilitarianism, against whom we offend, when we do offend. I think utilitarians should be more worried about this than they are. To be even-handed, however, I note that similar problems arise for Kantians as well: the first formulation of the categorical imperative, makes it sound as if what is wrong with immoral behavior is that it embodies maxims that undermine or conflict with the agent's own nature as a rational agent. So even if Kantianism correctly identifies all and only bad maxims as bad, and even if actions that wrong or violate persons always embody bad maxims, this version of it does not locate the offense in the right place. Thompson criticizes Kantians along similar lines at Thompson 2004: 339.
W.D. Ross makes this point in Ross (1930: 28).
Darwall notes: ‘An apology is, by definition, addressed to someone who receives it and who has the authority to accept it or not. If a victim comes upon an unaddressed admission of guilt and expression of sincere regret in her victimizer’s diary, she has not discovered an apology. Apologies are a way of holding oneself personally answerable to an obligee whose authority to hold one thus answerable is thereby reciprocally recognized. It is a second-personal acknowledgement of having violated a bipolar obligation to the obligee and of the obligee’s special authority to hold one answerable for it’ (Darwall 2013: 31).
Scott Woodcock, among others, pursued this response, and sketched a number of these arguments in private conversation.
I.e., they were better off under A1 than they would have been under A2.
This is not quite correct, as it stands. Neither the utilitarian nor I needs to hold that Mrs. V alone was wronged by the action, so we need not hold that she was the biggest loser, given A1 – just that she lost out badly enough under A1 to have been wronged. For simplicity’s sake, however, I shall talk about her being the biggest loser.
This is why I focus on the actions of the camera crew and not of the bombers. I am indebted to Saul Smilansky for helpful discussion on this point.
A classic expression of which comes from Alan Donagan: ‘Act-utilitarianism has generally been put down as incredible on the ground that in certain circumstances it enjoins as duties what virtually everybody considers to be criminal. To employ a hackneyed example: it might well be the case that more good and less evil would result from your painlessly and undetectedly murdering your malicious, old and unhappy grandfather than from your forbearing to do so: he would be freed from his wretched existence; his children would be rejoiced by their inheritances and would no longer suffer from his mischief; and you might anticipate the reward promised to those who do good in secret. Nobody seriously doubts that a position with such a consequence is monstrous’ (Donagan 1974: 166).
The classic expression of this is from Elizabeth Anscombe: ‘But if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration – I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind’ (Anscombe 1958: 16–7).
Peter Geach criticized Ross’s theory for precisely this reason: ‘This speciously strict doctrine leads in fact to quite laxist consequences.... Sir David Ross explicitly tells us that on occasion the right act may be the judicial punishment of an innocent man ‘that the whole nation perish not’; for in this case the prima facie duty of consulting the general interest has proved more obligatory than the perfectly distinct prima facie duty of respecting the rights of those who have respected the rights of others. (We must charitably hope that for him the words of Caiaphas that he quotes just had the vaguely hallowed associations of a Bible text, and that he did not remember whose judicial murder was being counseled)’ (Geach 1956: 41).
Analogous to the utilitarianism about rights described in Nozick (1974: 28, ff).
The wording here was suggested by Saul Smilansky.
I am assuming that, for rights to do useful philosophical work here, they have to be both general and precise. It is no good saying that the right the camera crews violated was ‘the right not to have that particular sort of thing done to you.’
For different reservations about the centrality of rights here, see also Denyer (1997: 41–2).
Michael Thompson sees Elizabeth Anscombe as making a similar point: ‘…Anscombe, thinking of propositions like “You can’t take that, it’s for N” or “You can’t do that, it’s for N to do”, writes: “We have here a very special use of the name of a person, or a very special way of relating something to a person, which explains (not is explained by) the general term ‘right’.”’ (Anscombe 1981: 142), quoted in (Thompson 2004; 337, my emphasis).
It is not essential to my argument here, but we might even suppose that rights (or rights claims) are simply codifications of, or generalizations from, such claims about actions that wrong or individuals. One advantage of such an idea is that it would allow us to accommodate the suspicion, felt by many, that rights are in some sense constructs, without having to deny them altogether.
See Thompson (2004: 344). Thompson notes that he borrows the terminology of ‘bipolarity’ from Weinrib (1996). David Sussman comes close to this point when, in his discussion of torture, he notes: ‘The utilitarian focuses on the actual harms involved in torture, and in so doing, clearly captures an essential element of what is morally objectionable about such practices. However, utilitarianism will have trouble explaining the moral significance of the social and intentional structure of the “drama” that torture enacts.’ Later, he adds, ‘There seems to be something about the distinctive structure of the relationship of torturer to victim that is intrinsically objectionable and that goes beyond the badness of its usual effects’ (Sussman 2005: 13).
Stephen Darwall makes a similar observation: ‘Rule consequentialists would likely agree that optimific social rules will include bipolar conventional or rule-defined obligations. The most socially useful practice of promising, for instance, is likely structured by rules that tie promisers to promisees in various ways, giving title to promisees to hold promisers personally accountable for fulfilling promises, to release promisers from their obligations to promisees, and so on. If that is so, rule consequentialists will hold that it would be morally wrong to violate such socially useful bipolar rules, even if doing so would be optimific in the case at hand. All this is familiar ground. However, rule consequentialists do not accept that these rule-defined bipolar obligations are inherently normative or have any inherent moral force in themselves, hence
that they have any basic “bipolar normativity.” According to rule consequentialism, conventional bipolar obligations get whatever normativity they have thanks to be their being socially useful and hence something we have a moral obligation period to follow. Rule consequentialism thus denies that genuine moral obligations are themselves bipolar. There are just moral obligations period to comply with bipolar-obligation-defining conventional rules’ (Darwall 2013: 25, emphasis mine). In my view, this is why the indirect utilitarian cannot avoid the problem simply by showing that they can believe in rights, as in, e.g., Pettit (1988).
This not the most basic level, of course. Judgments about which actions do or do not maximize utility are constituted by or inferred from a combination of judgments, say, that A1 produces n utiles, and that some other action, A2, does or does not produce n + 1 utiles.
Guy Fletcher first suggested this interpretation of my views to me.
Thompson argues that the moral distinction between actions that wrong persons and actions that are ‘merely wrong’ parallels the legal distinction between civil law and criminal law. See Thompson (2004: 343–5).
Or, rather, not all forms of fraud do, though some may. Saul Smilansky has pointed out to me that identity theft is a form of fraud that can indeed violate a person.
Timothy Chappell comes close to making this point in his discussion of utilitarianism and other standard ethical theories, when he observes, ‘there is one very basic and obvious point about murder that all of these moral theories seem to miss. This is that murder is not just a matter of treating someone badly, unjustly, unfairly or in a way that deprives them of goods (although it is that of course). In murder you do not so much take something away from someone as take away the someone; you deprive him, not of this or that good, but of himself, by destroying him. This seems to be the most central wrong involved in murder, and most moral theories remarkably enough, do not even get around to mentioning it’ (Chappell 2009: 210).
For an insightful, though occasionally harrowing, discussion of how interrogatory torture attacks the will of its victim, see Sussman (2005: 30): ‘Torture does not merely insult or damage its victim’s agency, but rather turns such agency against itself, forcing the victim to experience herself as helpless yet complicit in her own violation. This is not just an assault on or violation of the victim’s autonomy, but also a perversion of it, a kind of systematic mockery of the basic moral relations than an individual bears to others and to herself.’
According to Wolterstorff, ‘…violation of a person – or to put the same thing in other words, of a human being’s personhood – occurs when someone does something to that person’s body, that person’s inner life, that person’s deep moral and religious convictions, that person’s deep investment in the world’ (Wolterstorff 2001: 245).
Sussman seems to side with Wolterstorff on this point. In his discussion of the wrongness of torture, Sussman notes that one of the bad things about it is that ‘The most intimate and private parts of a victim’s life and body become publicly available tools for the torturer to exploit as he will. The victim is completely exposed, while the torturer is free to conceal anything he likes’ (Sussman 2005: 7, emphasis mine).
It also explains why invasion of, or displacement from one’s home, can be (or feel like) a violation and not just, say, an infringement on property rights. Helen Frowe, e.g., suggests that this is why we feel justified in using more force against those who break into our home than against those who merely steal our property: ‘Property alone is not usually thought to be of sufficient importance to make serious harm a proportionate means of protection. But we might think that our homes our more than mere property: that they are ‘our part of the world’…’ (Frowe 2011: 12, my emphasis).
See Adams’s disclaimer of infallibility his (1999: 105).
Compare what Sussman says about torture. Having starkly portrayed the grotesquely violative character of torture, he nevertheless says: ‘I do not here contend that torture is categorically wrong, but only that it bears an especially high burden of justification, greater in degree and different in kind from even that of killing’ (Sussman 2005: 4).
Arguably, Orwell misinterprets his own position here. Orwell takes his example to show the absolute wrongness of killing, but I think it is better interpreted as showing that, right or wrong, killing is a violation. Otherwise, we have trouble making sense of the same Orwell, who later went to Spain with the stated intention of killing fascists, and who is supposed to have insisted that ‘We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.’ See also Michael Walzer’s treatment of ‘naked soldiers’ in (Walzer 1992: 138–143), which includes Orwell’s equally famous account of his time as a sniper during the Spanish Civil War.
I am indebted to Tim Chappell for originally calling this passage to my attention.
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Acknowledgments
The writing of this essay was supported by the Provost’s Office of Westmont College, and CREUM, the Centre de Récherche en Ethique de l’Université de Montréal. A distant ancestor of it was presented to ISUS X at Berkeley and to the Philosophy Colloquium at Westmont College; more recent versions were presented at the Society for Applied Philosophy, Atelier du GRIN at CREUM and the conference on ‘Virtue, Medicine and Modern Moral Philosophy’ at the University of Notre Dame. I am grateful for this support and to my discussants on those and other occasions for helpful comments and criticisms, especially: Timothy Chappell, Christopher Coope, Andrée-Ann Cormier, Roger Crisp, Guy Fletcher, Ulrike Heuer, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Brad Hooker, David McNaughton, Antoine Panaioti, Melinda Roberts, Mauro Rossi, Saul Smilansky, Rob Sparling, Rebecca Stangl, Christine Tappolet and Scott Woodcock.
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Nelson, M.T. What the Utilitarian Cannot Think. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 18, 717–729 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9599-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9599-z