Utilitarianism.net Updates Again

New study guide, glossary updates, and guest essays

New content since our last update includes:

(1) A new study guide on Peter Singer’s ‘All Animals are Equal’ (the first chapter from Animal Liberation Now), which covers:

• Singer’s argument against speciesism (based on his analysis of what makes unjust discrimination in general wrong).

• Detailed discussion of factory farming as the most egregious example of mass mistreatment of animals.

• Why “equal consideration” does not entail “identical treatment”, and how Singer’s view can make sense of its being much more morally bad to kill a person than a mouse (in most cases).

• Possible objections to Singer’s strong anti-speciesism, based on (i) the treatment/enhancement distinction and (ii) the possibility of a prerogative to give some (human) beings more moral consideration than is objectively warranted. (Of course, even if one rejects Singer’s strong anti-speciesism, that doesn’t suffice to justify factory farming.)

• Practical implications, including whether we should prioritize personal diet over other causal levers (e.g. donations to animal welfare charities).

• Discussion questions.

(2) Expanded glossary to discuss various “leftover” objections that didn’t crack our top nine objections with dedicated articles. These include:

• The utility monster,

• Interpersonal utility comparisons, and

• Self-sacrifice (i.e., how it doesn’t seem “wrong” to accept a cost in order to bestow a smaller benefit on someone else)

And, best of all…

New Guest Essays

(I) Utilitarian Political Philosophy, by Marcus Schultz-Bergin, masterfully explains “how utilitarianism can make sense of core political concepts while maintaining its fundamental commitment to promoting well-being. The result is a distinctive and attractive approach to political philosophy that combines pragmatic attention to consequences with robust protections for individual liberty.” It wraps up with illustrative policy analyses of universal basic income, futures assemblies, and open borders.

(II) Expected Value Fanaticism, by Petra Kosonen, offers a whirlwind tour of the complexities of the debate over how (or whether) to take into account tiny probabilities of immense value. We learn both that fanaticism “follows from very plausible principles,” and that many of these principles are either “mutually inconsistent, or they imply that fanaticism is false.” Puzzling!

(III) Harsanyi’s Utilitarian Theorems without Tears, by Johan E. Gustafsson & Kacper Kowalczyk, explains, as simply and intuitively as possible, Harsanyi’s three famous arguments for utilitarian aggregation: the social-aggregation theorem, the impartial-observer theorem, and the separability theorem. [I expect this will be widely appreciated as an invaluable teaching resource! Currently only available in PDF form; we hope to add an HTML conversion in future.]

(IV) Utilitarianism and Business Ethics, by Brian Berkey, seeks to correct a sociological oddity: apparently “philosophical business ethicists” associate utilitarianism with neoclassical economic arguments for profit-maximization as the appropriate goal of business actors. This seems strange since, as Berkey aptly explains, there are obvious reasons to expect profit maximization to systematically diverge from what maximizes total well-being. Hopefully this essay will help to set the record straight!

Conclusion

This may be the last major update to utilitarianism.net for a while, as I turn my focus to other projects. Huge thanks to everyone who contributed! I think it’s now in a pretty comprehensive and respectable near-final state.¹ (I’d be interested to hear whether other professors use the “study guides” much in teaching—that’s something I could imagine myself expanding further in future if there was significant interest.)²

One other intriguing possibility would be to someday add a custom GPT chat bot, trained on the major works of the consequentialist moral tradition (from Sidgwick to Singer), and including our entire textbook contents in the “context window” working memory. Users could then ask whatever questions/objections they might have about utilitarianism, and probably get quite reliable answers. That would be neat, I reckon.

1. The main lacunae I’d be excited to see filled are guest essays on utilitarian bioethics, pro-natalism, digital minds, and x-risk / longtermism. (And we do still have the Portuguese translation of the website to get online at some point this year, to supplement the Spanish and German versions.)

2. I had originally envisaged writing study guides for many of the classic works of moral philosophy that are standardly assigned in intro ethics classes. But it’s hard to know whether that creates enough “value added” to be worth prioritizing over original research and blog posts that I’m personally more excited about writing.