▶︎ 0:01 Ethics is largely about evaluating actions to see which one is the right thing to do, and which one is the right action to take. But as simple as that sounds, it's actually more complicated than that, and that's the motto of philosophy, that things are more complicated than they seem initially.
▶︎ 0:20 Because not only are the philosophers that we're going to look at, not only do they disagree about what the right thing to do, what the right action to take is, they disagree about what it means to take an action. Each one of them, an action, again, it might seem simple, but in fact, an action is a complex phenomenon that has multiple parts to it. And each one of the thinkers that we're gonna be looking at focuses on a different part and thinks that a different part of it is the essential aspect for ethics.
▶︎ 0:57 If we look at utilitarianism, what utilitarianism says, according to the greatest happiness principle, is that actions are good in proportion to the happiness they produce and bad in proportion to the unhappiness they produce. So what a utilitarian is looking at, when they're looking at an action, they're looking at what, the happiness it produces. They're looking at the results. The question that utilitarianism asks is, what follows from the action? What are the consequences of it? They're not looking at anything about the actor. They're not looking about the motivations. They're looking at the results.
▶︎ 1:43 And for Mill, this is obvious. The point, the thing that matters is how actions affect people. If you did something horrendous, something horrible that didn't harm anyone in any way, whatsoever, including yourself, then what does it mean to call it horrendous? Actions have to affect someone in some way in order for them to be ethically relevant. It's like if you had the worst, horrible, horrible disease that had no symptoms whatsoever, that didn't impair your activities in any way or shorten your life in any way, why are you even calling it a disease? It has to come out and impact people somehow for it to be ethically relevant, for Mill.
▶︎ 2:41 And this puts it in a group called consequentialism. Consequentialist theories are theories that say that the aspects of an action that are ethically relevant are the consequences. Pretty good name. That's what we need to focus on, and the rest of it isn't as relevant.
▶︎ 3:16 Now, for all of these lectures, we were only doing an hour and a half on very, very, very complex theories. So I'm going to be leaving out a lot of details. There are other versions of utilitarianism. There are more sophisticated versions. There are objections. And so there are a lot of other forms of utilitarianism that would encompass more than this, but the most basic straightforward form of it is purely consequentialist.
▶︎ 3:50 And if you want to learn more about it and what we learn about these more sophisticated versions, great. There are going to be other lectures. There are other books. There's tons of stuff to learn. But we're just getting our foothold on it. We're just getting the basic idea here. So we're looking at it in a relatively simple format just to see what insight the theories achieved, the theories are based on. And at this level, Mill is a, utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory.
▶︎ 4:24 Consequences come in degrees. So there's more happiness or less happiness. You rarely are gonna find a situation of an action that makes everyone completely happy or everyone completely unhappy. So utilitarianism tries to find the thing that makes most people most happy. It's gonna look for degrees, and compare conflicting duties where one action makes some people happy, and another action makes other people happy, and it tries to find the best way through those, to find the most.
▶︎ 4:58 It doesn't treat any actions as absolute. For utilitarianism, the one absolute is happiness. Happiness is the absolute good. It's the only thing in the universe that is truly intrinsically good. Everything else is good because of it, and therefore, you have to analyze things in their specific concrete situation.
▶︎ 5:22 It's never stealing is wrong. The question is always, is this act of theft in this situation, stealing this thing from these people for this reason, is this wrong or right? Because it's always a matter of what results does it produce. How much happiness does it create or unhappiness does it create? And that's always going to be an empirical question for Mill.
▶︎ 5:46 We always have to look at specific concrete situations. Although the rule is universal, its application is particular. And we have to look at every situation on its own and judge it on a case by case basis.
▶︎ 6:07 For utilitarianism, the ends justify the means. The point of the means, the point of the instrumental good is to produce the intrinsic good. The point of our actions is to get happiness, and therefore, we evaluate the instrumental goods not on their own, not for themselves. The question is never, "Is this action itself good or bad?" The question is always, "What does this action produce? What are the results of this action?" And the action itself doesn't matter much, because what matters is what comes from it, what comes about because of it.
▶︎ 6:56 Now this gives utilitarianism a great flexibility. It is able to accommodate tremendous variety of circumstances. It is able to adjust to different circumstances, to new circumstances, able to take into account virtually any factor that comes up. Anything that's relevant, it's able to integrate and take into account.
▶︎ 7:28 But it does have a problem. Every theory has problems. There's no such thing as a perfect theory. Every theory we're going to look at will have strengths and weaknesses. These are the three most important ethical theories from the history of Western thought. They are the three most successful. They have fantastic strengths, amazing insights, but each one does have a limitation. Each one does have problems with it.
▶︎ 8:02 So your job is to understand the strengths, understand the weaknesses, and decide for yourself which one, if any of them, you think is right or comes closest to the truth. And one of the problems with utilitarianism is precisely this, that the ends will justify the means.
▶︎ 8:24 Because happiness is the only absolute good, nothing is off limits absolutely. Mill tried to work something in there with the notion of dignity. Again, we're not going to go into that. That would be a little too much detail. If you want to study it, he did try to find a way to resist this.
▶︎ 8:50 But the theory itself, by making happiness the only intrinsic good, the only absolute good, means that we judge things by what produces the most happiness, which means that whatever produced the most happiness is the right thing to do. And that whatever means whatever. Nothing is absolutely off limits. Nothing is absolutely off the table. We have to entertain the possibility of anything, and this leads to situations of exploitation.
▶︎ 9:31 So let's take slavery, for example. Mill was very, very active in fighting slavery. He was very much against it personally, and his theory can condemn it quite easily. Utilitarianism looks at a situation like slavery and it asks about the total happiness produced. Now, one of the wonderful things about utilitarianism is the way it determines who is morally relevant.
▶︎ 10:04 Every theory has to decide who counts as a moral agent, who counts as morally relevant, whom we examine when we make a decision. The absolute good of utilitarianism is happiness, feeling pleasure and pain. And therefore, the criterion for who counts in utilitarianism is who feels pleasure and pain. That is what determines membership in the moral society, in the group of people, group of entities who must be evaluated in an ethical decision. If you feel pleasure or pain, then you must be counted.
▶︎ 11:03 And it is radically egalitarian, which means pleasure is pleasure. Your pleasure is my pleasure is his pleasure, her pleasure. It doesn't matter whose pleasure. All that matters is the pleasure or the pain. So questions like race are taken off the table from the beginning. Doesn't matter what race someone is. All that matters are whether they feel pleasure or pain.
▶︎ 11:29 Gender, taken off the table. Mill was a very strong fighter for women's rights. If women feel pleasure and pain, then they count exactly as much as men. Bentham said that animals count exactly the same. This was a very progressive view in the early 19th century, which was resurrected by an Australian philosopher in the 20th century named Peter Singer, who founded the Animal Liberation Movement based on utilitarianism.
▶︎ 12:05 If you are a vegetarian, if you are involved in protesting or working for animal rights, there's a good chance that that came from Peter Singer's work, which came from utilitarianism. Because Bentham did not accept the difference between higher and lower pleasures that Mill had, which distinguishes humans from animals, because only humans can have the higher pleasures. But instead, so everyone, every entity that feels pleasure and pain is equally relevant, and animals feel pleasure and pain; therefore, they must be counted just the same. So racism, sexism, speciesism, which means we pay more attention to some species, like humans and others, all of that gets taken off the table before we even start looking at ethics, which is admirable.
▶︎ 12:58 Which is wonderful. All that comes from the idea that pleasure is pleasure. We count every pleasure the same. But that idea also has a dark side. Because if everyone's pleasure counts the same, then we also have to count the pleasure of the perpetrators of crime. We have to count the pleasure and the suffering of the slave.
▶︎ 13:29 Doesn't matter if the slave is a different race. Doesn't matter if the slave is a different gender. None of that's relevant. Their suffering matters. The way that societies tend to justify slavery is by saying that the race that is enslaved is subhuman, is less than human; therefore, their suffering doesn't matter as much. For a utilitarian, you cannot say that. Their suffering is exactly the same.
▶︎ 13:55 The slave's suffering and pleasure are exactly the same as the slave owner's. But that also means the slave owner's pleasure and pain is exactly the same as the slave's. Now, the suffering of being enslaved is massive, it's huge, and it will overshadow the pleasure that the slave owner gets by sitting on the porch and drinking mint juleps. But what if you could devise a system where one or two slaves produced huge amounts of pleasure for lots and lots of slave owners?
▶︎ 14:36 What if you had a situation of, let's say, torture. Torture, Mill can condemn it. You inflict enormous amounts of suffering on a person, let's just say for the sadistic pleasure of the torturer. The pleasure the torturer gets can't possibly outweigh the pain and suffering inflicted on the victim. But what if you put it on the internet? What if you filmed it and put it on the internet?
▶︎ 15:03 Then you could have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of sadists getting pleasure out of this, out of one person's suffering. If you have hundreds of thousands of people getting pleasure, even if not that much, from one, they can outweigh the one person's suffering, if you get enough of them. These are situations of exploitation.
▶︎ 15:32 If you can set up a situation where enough pleasure is gotten out of a terrible action, then it can outweigh the suffering produced by the terrible action, and then the action becomes not just permissible, but ethically obligatory. You are required to torture that person in order to produce all that happiness, because all that happiness outweighs the suffering, and you are required ethically to produce the greatest amount of happiness. Now again, Mill put in
▶︎ 16:09 certain defenses against this. Whether they work or not, that's a whole different story, but the theory alone does not have a defense against this. And we will see Kant thinks this is a fatal flaw of utilitarianism.
▶︎ 16:27 And what's really interesting here is that these two points, the egalitarianism taking racism, sexism, specie-ism, making them impossible, is the flip side of the same idea that makes exploitation situations possible. It's the egalitarianism. The egalitarianism says, all pleasures must be treated the same. The positive side of that is, men and women in every race and every species must be treated equally. The negative side of that is that victim and perpetrator's pleasure and pain must be treated equally. And there are situations in which the perpetrator's pleasure can outweigh the victim's, and therefore, justify the action. It's the same idea.
▶︎ 17:20 You see, ideas are very complex. We don't get simple answers. When we start looking at human affairs, when we start looking at ethics, we find layers and layers of complexity, and we find simple answers are few and far between. And these decisions are hard to make. That's what makes these theories so important, because they help us understand these ideas.
▶︎ 17:49 But as Socrates would show, we need to understand the implications of the ideas, and egalitarianism has both positive and negative implications. And we need to understand that. And if you take one, it's harder to take that without the other. I'm not saying it can't be done, but you have to do some work to get there.
▶︎ 18:10 Now, this theory, this idea of torturing, putting something on the internet, having one slave help a lot of people, they seem very extreme. It seems very distant from your life. But you are doing this too. Would you vote for a 20 mile an hour speed limit everywhere? When I ask this in class, not a single hand goes up because driving at 20 miles an hour sucks. Ugh, it's horrible.
▶︎ 18:45 But there have been many, many studies of the effects of speed limits. In 1974, the United States passed a national maximum speed law that capped all US driving at 55 miles an hour. The first year that that was passed, there were 17% fewer fatalities, 17% fewer deaths from traffic accidents. In 1987, 13 years later, there was an amendment that allowed the speeds to go up to 65 miles an hour on rural highways, and that year, there were 14% more accidents and 44% more fatal accidents. 44% more people died because of that amendment.
▶︎ 19:36 Then in 1995, the government revoked all national speed limits, allowed individual states to set their limits, and over the 10 years after the repeal of the national maximum speed limit, there were approximately 12,500 deaths due to that increased speed limit. That means 3.5 extra deaths every day for 10 years. Terrible suffering, that's awful. Why did they make that decision?
▶︎ 20:09 What they did was they weighed up the deaths, terrible suffering, that's awful, versus all of the irritations of going slower and all the pleasures of going faster. There are a whole lot more people getting to Starbucks five minutes faster than the three and a half people a day dying, and all those pleasures outweighed those relatively small number of people suffering. But we know for a fact with exact numbers how many deaths reducing the speed limit reduced, how many lives we could save by reducing the speed limit.
▶︎ 20:58 But we don't want to do it. Even when I go through all these facts in class and I still ask the same, "How many people would vote for a 20 mile an hour speed limit?" I still don't get hands raised, and I don't raise my hand either, because it sucks. But let's be clear about what we're doing. We are agreeing to kill people so that we have greater convenience. We are sacrificing human beings, we know for a fact they will die, a few people so that a whole bunch of us can get to Starbucks five minutes earlier.
▶︎ 21:43 We are exploiting people every time we get in a car. And if you don't drive, look at your phone. Look into the conditions of people who make the phone, who make the clothes you wear. We are constantly exploiting people so that we can have cheaper goods. And I do it too. But we are always involved in these exploitive situations.
▶︎ 22:11 Whether what you want to do about it is your decision. The point is that these are much, much more common than the kind of extreme examples that we use to make them clear would suggest. We are always making these utilitarian bargains, and some of them we might want to revisit and reconsider.