Caplan's Conscience Objection to Utilitarianism

Does Utilitarianism imply that we're all bad people?

Maximizing is Merely Ideal

Bryan Caplan argues that no-one really believes utilitarianism is true:

Bill is a paragon of decency.  If he really believed he morally owed vast sums to the poor, he’d skip GenCon and fork over the money.  Since he doesn’t, I infer that despite his official position, utilitarianism seems almost as crazy to him as it does to me.  The same goes for every earnest yet non-compliant utilitarian.  Utilitarianism doesn’t just go against their interests.  It goes against their consciences.

This rests on the same mistake as the demandingness objection, namely, the assumption that utilitarianism is a theory of moral “wrongness” in the ordinary (mustn’t-be-done) sense. Really, no utilitarian thinks that failing to act optimally is wrong in the way that most people think of murder as being wrong (a semi-mystical status of objective prohibition that would properly threaten one’s social standing, and that one ought to feel terrible about violating). We just think you have most moral reason to do the optimal thing, that’s all. Far from being “crazy”, this claim is nearly trivial—who would deny it?

Putting aside special cases involving rights violations, even deontologists should agree that you have most moral reason to give more to charity or otherwise maximize welfare. (They might call it “supererogatory”, or “above and beyond the call of duty”, and then somehow overlook the fact that’s it’s worth doing more than the bare minimum. But I trust that they will, on reflection, concede that it would be crazy to deny the datum that it’s morally better to help others more.)

So there’s no special puzzle about why utilitarians fail to act optimally. Others equally fail to do what they recognize they have most moral reason to do, and that’s all that’s going on here. We’re not morally perfect, so it’s entirely to be expected that we won’t always act ideally. But there’s no deeper failing than that to be found here—no deep “wrongness” where this means anything more than failing to perform the morally ideal action. The confusion only arises because traditional utilitarians misleadingly co-opted the language of obligation for what was really just a theory of moral reasons.

The Weight of Moral Reasons

An interesting further question concerns the weight of these moral reasons. Chris Freiman responds to Caplan’s argument by suggesting that morality isn’t all that matters (and comparing moral standards to athletic standards, to undermine the idea that we always have to do what’s optimal by some standard). Someone might be a utilitarian about moral reasons, but then allow these to be outweighed by our personal reasons, such that all things considered, we really ought to buy ourselves luxuries after all.

I find that verdict implausible. Imagine responding to Singer’s drowning child by saying, “Sure, morally it’s best to save the kid, but overall my nice clothes are really more important.” It just seems really clear to me that others’ interests have a lot of normative weight, and whatever extra weight I can rationally give my own interests isn’t sufficient to truly justify massive departures from what beneficence recommends. (Curious whether deontologists tend to disagree on this, and insist that supererogatory acts are only morally better, and not all things considered normatively superior options?)

Living with Imperfection

The better response, I think, is just to allow that we aren’t all-things-considered perfect. It’s really tempting to make selfish decisions that are less than perfectly justified, and in fact we all do this all the time. Humans are inveterate rationalizers, and many seem to find it irresistible to contort their normative theories until they get the result that “actually we’ve most reason to do everything we actually do.” But when stated explicitly like this, we can all agree that this is pure nonsense, right?

We should just be honest about the fact that our choices aren’t always perfectly justified. That’s not ideal, but nor is it the end of the world. It’s OK to be flawed—everyone else is too. We can all celebrate incremental improvements, and uphold norms to prevent moral backsliding (you should feel terrible, and suffer criminal punishment, if you gratuitously murder someone!). We can even reconstruct notions of “right” and “wrong” out of scalar reasons, offering a satisficing utilitarian account of when we’ve fallen so low that we should feel bad about it.

All of which serves to yield an overall utilitarian picture that is, I think, deeply commonsensical. Again: who would deny that we’re imperfect beings? That’s all that the morally imperfect utilitarian is committed to, and it’s something that everyone (obviously!) ought to believe about themselves. That in itself doesn’t call for any kind of guilt or self-loathing. So I don’t think there’s anything here for Caplan’s conscience objection to get a latch on.