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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2009
Utilitarianism seems to require us to sacrifice a person if doing so will produce a net increase in the amount of utility. This feature of utilitarianism is extremely unattractive. The puzzle is how to reject this requirement without rejecting the plausible claim that we are often wise to trade lesser amounts of utility for greater amounts. I argue that such a position is not as paradoxical as it may appear, so long as we understand the relationship between the value of utility and the value of persons in a certain way. I argue that the traditional utilitarian position assumes an inadequate view of this relationship. I suggest a more plausible view of this relationship, one which implies that we may not sacrifice a person merely in order to produce a net gain in utility, where that utility does not result from the saving of any other persons' lives.
1 ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in Smart, J. J. and Williams, B., Utilitarianism: For and Against, Cambridge, 1973CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Assuming, of course, the non-existence of any precedent-setting or other ‘remote’ effects, and assuming that the person sacrificed was not about to cure cancer, that no axe-murderers are among those saved, and so on. In this paper I stipulate that none of the persons I am discussing is a cancer-scientist or axe-murderer, and that any indirect, remote, or precedent-setting effects of any sacrificing of persons can be prevented, offset, or otherwise cancelled out and thus ignored.
3 I adapt here the phrase from the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech by William Jennings Bryan, a nineteenth-century American who was worried about how individuals might suffer if certain economic policies involving the gold standard were enacted. The full quotation is ‘you shall not crucify this country on a cross of gold.’ This reference is the first of several ‘Americanisms’ for which I apologize in advance.
4 The issue here is not the same as (though it may be related to) the issue of ‘replaceability’ in utilitarianism. That issue concerns whether one person can be killed (or prevented from coming into existence) in order to bring about the production of a happier person. While replaceability might be a consequence of the utility-favouring claim, and irreplaceability a consequence of its denial, I will not pursue these connections here.
5 Later I will discuss whether utilitarianism can or should be understood in a way which would not commit it to the utility-favouring claim.
6 Despite its name, a defender of the person-favouring claim could claim that angels, space-aliens, and even some non-human animals must not be sacrificed in order to secure a mere utility gain.
7 Intuitively, the weak person-favouring claim is the more plausible of the two. Most people hold that some projects that are sure to result in one or a small number of deaths are nevertheless justified if they result in a large enough improvement of the lives of enough other persons. Examples might include large construction projects, dangerous activities like mountain climbing and sky-diving, experimental drugs or surgical techniques, and the practice of driving automobiles. The strong person-favouring claim would seem to forbid such activities.
8 I define moderate anti-utilitarianism this way because I think that the problems that most people have with utilitarianism would remain even if it permitted us only to sacrifice persons for mere utility, and even if the only such sacrifices it permitted were passive.
9 More needs to be said about passive sacrifices than I can say here. For there is a sense in which we engage in such sacrifices when we fail to give aid to people in starving countries. Answering the question of whether our doing this violates our moral requirements – or whether it is ‘merely’ a morally indecent but permissible neglect of others – is beyond my present capabilities, and certainly beyond the scope of this paper. So when I mention passive sacrifices here, I shall mean failures to take relatively costless measures to prevent the imminent death of someone who is in one's immediate spatio-temporal vicinity.
10 See Taurek, John, ‘Should the Numbers Count?’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vi (1977)Google Scholar.
11 See Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass., 1971, pp. 23Google Scholar f. and Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York, 1974, pp. 32 f. See alsoGoogle ScholarMcKerlie, Dennis, ‘Egalitarianism and the Separateness of Persons’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, xviii (1988)Google Scholar.
12 It is also true that many of the deontological prohibitions discussed in the literature are ‘agent-centred constraints’. That is, they prohibit an agent from performing some action even if doing so will prevent the performance by other persons of a larger number of actions of that same kind. This feature of agent-centred constraints has been the source of much debate, and it is often argued that it makes agent-centred constraints paradoxical and perhaps irrational. I do not want to take up this issue here, and so I speak of prohibitions – which I do not mean to be agent-centred – rather than agentcentred constraints. I will not address the question of whether a cross of utility sacrifice would be permissible if it would prevent several other relevantly similar sacrifices.
13 Closer to what I have in mind is Judith Jarvis Thomson's notion of a right that can be overridden in some cases, but not just to secure a small to moderate gain in mere utility (see The Realm of Rights, Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar. However, Thomson grounds her non-absolute rights on deontological considerations. Her reason for doing this is that an appeal to the value of human life will in some cases justify sacrificing one to save many (see pp. 146–8). Thomson seems to regard this possibility as a reductio of any attempt to ground rights in considerations about value. However, moderate antiutilitarianism – which I think represents the intuitions of a large number of people – holds that in at least some cases it is permissible to sacrifice one person in order to save many others. Thomson presents several cases (e.g., where a mafioso has told you that if you do not kill one person, his henchmen will kill five others) in which she thinks it would be wrong to sacrifice one in order to save many. But while I share most of her intuitions about those cases that she discusses, I also think that Jim is at least permitted to shoot one person to save nineteen others. If a moral theory is to reflect this (I think common) intuition, then it cannot say that the reason that we must not kill in the Mafia case is the existence of a general prohibition on sacrificing one person to save many others, for that would also prohibit Jim from shooting in Williams's case.
14 This response on behalf of the utilitarian is a paraphrase and amalgam of various things I have seen various utilitarians (and other consequentialists) write. These include Sprigge, T. L. S., ‘Utilitarianism and Respect for Human Life’, Utilitas, i (1989), p. 8Google Scholar; Kagan, Shelly, The Limits of Morality, Oxford, 1989, p. 58. Kymlicka's ‘first interpretation’ of utilitarianism comes close to the idea here (seeGoogle ScholarIntroduction to Political Philosophy, Oxford, 1990, pp. 30–5)Google Scholar.
15 I am grateful to Samantha Brennan for pushing me to deal directly with this defence of the utility-favouring claim.
16 I have been using the complicated locution ‘utility is added to the world by’ so as not to prejudge the metaphysics of utilitarian value theory. Such a theory would answer questions like: Is utility is best thought of as a property, or as some kind of quasi-substance? If it is a property, is it a secondary property, a supervenient property, a natural property? Is it a property of states of affairs, desires, satisfied desires, pleasure, pleasant mental states? The answers to these questions do not affect my argument here.
17 The reduction claim might hold for ordinary, run-of-the-mill buildings (as, for example, the value of an ordinary house often increases if we add material to it by building an addition to it); however, we are thinking here of historic buildings, the value of which is not increased enough simply by adding material to them to compensate for the loss of another historically significant building.
18 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for help in making this distinction.
19 See Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica, Cambridge, 1903, sects. 18–23Google Scholar.
20 Of course each brick does have the property of being a brick in the building in which the Declaration of Independence was signed, and each brick no doubt derives some value from that property. (Note how bits of the Berlin Wall acquired value because of their possession of a similar property.) However, it is still true that the intact building has the value-making property of being the (whole) building in which the Declaration was signed. It seems clear that this value-making property of the whole building contributes more value than the sum of the values of the bricks. For a pile of the bricks that now compose Independence Hall does not have the property of being the building in which the Declaration of Independence was signed, for it is no longer a building at all.
21 The distinction between these two ways that a thing may be more valuable than the sum of the values of the elements that compose it is probably somewhat artificial. For we could define an organic unity as a whole that has value that its composing elements lack and claim that anything that has value has value-making properties. In that case, an organic unity would, by definition, have value-making properties that its elements lack. Or, if we think of being an organic unity as a value-making property, then an organic unity would, by definition, have a value-making property that its elements, taken individually, lack. Thus the distinction between a thing's being an organic unity and its having value-making properties that its elements lack may not be metaphysically deep. However, the distinction does highlight differences in the sorts of value making properties that a whole can have but its elements lack. Classic cases of organic unities are entities in which the extra value of the whole comes from relations among the elements. Some wholes, however, might have additional value-making properties that do not derive from the relations among the elements. Thus some of the architectural value of Independence Hall comes from the fact that the bricks are arranged in a particular way and thus bear certain relations to one another. Much of the additional historical value of Independence Hall, however, is less a function of the particular arrangement of the bricks than it is of the fact that certain things happened there: the bricks could have been arranged in indefinitely many other ways (so long as they were arranged into some sort of structure) and still had the value-making property of being the building in which the Declaration of Independence was signed.
22 The defender of the utility-favouring claim might object that the relation between persons and utility is closer to the relation between a producer and a product: persons do not contain utility; rather, they produce it. She might then argue that it often makes sense to sacrifice a producer in order to gain more of the product than that producer would have produced. However, this reply leaves the utility-favouring claim vulnerable to the inadequate concern objection. For a product is a separate entity from a producer. It is implausible to say that our concern for a producer is expressed by a concern for the product when we are willing to sacrifice the producer in order to obtain more of the product. If we prefer the product over the producer in such situations, then it seems implausible to claim that this is because of a more fundamental commitment to the value of the producer. If the proponent of the utility-favouring claim accepts a producer-product model of the relation between the value of persons and the value of utility, then she can no longer claim to have a fundamental commitment to the value of persons which she expresses in the form of a commitment to their happiness. And thus she lacks any response to the inadequate concern objection.
23 So-called narrative views of the self would support this line of thought. According to such views, a person's life is constituted not only by the individual episodes in it, but also by a narrative that binds them together into a coherent whole. For views along this line, see Schechtman, Marya, The Constitution of Selves, Ithaca, 1996. I develop such an account of persons and suggest some of its implications for ethics inGoogle Scholar‘Kantian Respect and Particular Persons’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, xxix (1999)Google Scholar.
24 Along these same lines, one might argue that the goodness of life itself and the badness of death are more than the goodness and badness of the loss of the sum of each individual element that adds to her happiness. For the loss of a life as a whole seems worse than the sum of the losses of each element of that life. For the loss of a whole life deprives that person of all future experience, and this badness is greater than the summation of the badnesses of being deprived of the individual bits of happiness which death takes from her (and subtracts from the aggregate). For some reflections that might be of use in fleshing out and evaluating this line of argument, see Kamm, Francis, Morality, Mortality, vol. 1, Oxford, 1993Google Scholar.
25 This may not be the only way to benefit an agent, of course. Other ways to benefit an agent would simply be to improve her rationality or provide her with information. However, it seems clear that an agent – a goal seeker – is successful when her goals are achieved. Thus there is a sense in which, as a goal seeker, an agent is made better off when her goals are achieved. For it is then that her purposes have been fulfilled. This is no doubt a murky set of ideas, but they seem no less credible than the brute claim that preference-satisfaction produces value. It seems to me that the only hope of offering a rationale for the claim that preference-satisfaction produces value will involve an appeal to some story along these general lines. (I offer a more detailed – and I hope somewhat less murky - account of the rationale for the claim that preference-satisfaction produces value in ‘Kantian Respect and Particular Persons’.)
26 A slightly different third option (which was suggested to me by Roger Crisp) would be to modify the utilitarian account of value so that utility can be contributed to the world by things other than the elements of a person's life. Thus we could distinguish ‘elemental’ utility contributed by the elements of a person's life from ‘holistic’ or ‘person-hood’ utility that is added to the aggregate in virtue of the existence of an intact person. Here we would accommodate the person-favouring claim in our definition of utility rather than in our definition of value; rather than saying that there is a value other than utility, we would say that utility can be contributed by things other than the elements of a person's life.
27 A variation on this idea would be to claim that persons and utility are incom-mensurable in the sense that there is no cardinal ranking of their values, but that the value of various amounts of utility can be ordinally ranked vis-a-vis the value of persons.
28 Schneewind, J. B., ‘Voluntarism and the Origins of Utilitarianism’, Utilitas, vii (1995), p. 87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 I am grateful to Samantha Brennan, Sam Black, Roger Crisp and an anonymous reviewer for extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Some of the ideas in this paper appeared in papers I presented at Simon Fraser University in October 1997 and at Central Michigan University in March 1998, and I thank members of both audiences for their comments and questions. Questions from John Wright at the CMU talk were especially helpful. I also thank Julia Driver for comments on a version of this paper that was presented at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, December 1999.