It’s for the greater good

I’m pretty sure you have heard of this phrase before, yet you’ve probably never heard of

It’s for the lesser bad

My suspicion is that, the principle of utilitarianism is so widespread that most people just happen to adopt it as the default view, because it makes sense (at least at first glace), and they have never really been exposed to its variants.

Before we venture too deep, let’s first get the definitions sorted out.

The utilitarianism popularized by Bentham (what I think to be the default one) is the belief that the moral action is the one that results in the greatest utility (or happiness). Mathematically, given a set of actions, assuming you can quantify the happiness gained from each of them, the moral action would be choosing the one that results in the greatest happiness, which can look something like this - $\sum_{i=1}^{n} h_i$, where n is the number of beings affected by the decision, h is the intensity of the happiness and for the ith being. Don’t mind me, I am just finding excuses to make use of my CS knowledge… But you basically just sum up all the happiness.

On the other hand, negative utilitarianism, like the name suggests, is akin to the “inverse” of utilitarianism. Instead of summing up all the happiness, you sum up all the pain and make the decision that results in the least amount of pain.

If you are an economist, this distinction might not be meaningful. After all, utility is just a negative cost, and a cost is just negative utility. However as normal human beings, this distinction matters.

Regardless of which one it is, utilitarianism in general has a lot of flaws, but most people believe in it anyways. My aim therefore is not to convince you to discard utilitarianism as a principle, but to convince you to switch over to negative utilitarianism.

Firstly, I think the best way to challenge your intuition is to take each of the principles to the extreme. I would illustrate the extreme cases with 2 examples each.

Utilitarianism

  1. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas illustrates this with a story on how the prosperity of a whole town is the result of torturing a child in a basement. Note that in the original utilitarianism, we do not take into account the pain caused, but only sums up all the happiness. In this case, when we sun up the happiness of the whole town, the utility gained from the action of torturing the child now justifies the action.
  2. In a perfectly utilitarian world, it would be justfied to harvest your organs without consent to save the lives of 5 others. If we sum up the happiness of the 5 people saved without consideration of the pain, this action would appear to be justified.

Negative Utilitarianism

  1. Anti-natalism would be justified if we take negative utilitarianism to the extreme. I could write a whole essay about this but it is the view that it is immoral to procreate and have children. Yes I know… It sounds dumb and I was so confused when I first read about it. But if you disect the argument rationally, it makes sense. The argument goes as such:

    1. If the baby is born, it now has the capacity to suffer.
    2. If the baby was not born, it will be in nonexistent.
    3. A being in nonexistance does not have the capacity to suffer.
    4. Thus the natural conclusion is that you should not bring a child to this world so as to not cause suffering. Of course you might argue that by bringing a child to this world you are introducing it to more happiness than suffering. That is valid, but remember, just like how utilitarianism cares about happiness and not suffering, negative utilitarianism cares about suffering and not happiness. To them, regardless of how much happiness the child gains, the fact that it has to capacity to suffer makes it unjustified. Of course I am simplifying this argument a lot, I would probably dedicate a blog for it someday.

  2. World destruction: This has the same rationale as the one above. Beings in nonexistent do not have the capacity to suffer. By pressing the nuclear button, even though you are causing them immediate suffering (to die), that is nothing compared to the generations of suffering you prevented. Remember, beings in nonexistance do not have the capacity to suffer. If there is no living beings, there is no suffering. Again like before, a negative utilitarian would not include happiness in the equation.

Now that we have gone through the implications if we take both utilitarianism and negative utilitarianism to the extreme, what can you conclude?

Personally, I can accept the implications that come with negative utilitarianism, but that is an essay for another time. I suppose for most people, both extremes seem intuitively problematic. This, combined with many other limitations of utilitarianism not covered in this essay, are reasons why utilitarianism (negative or not) is inherently flawed.

That is however not the purpose of this essay, suppose we still want to subscribe to utilitarianism (for whatever reason), I want to show you that it still makes more sense to adopt the negative counterpart.

And the argument hinges on one very important assumption - which is that there is an asymmetry between happiness and suffering in terms of moral weight. As Schropenhauer puts it, happiness is desirable, but the absense of suffering is a necessity.

All else remains equal, the loss of the same amount of suffering is worth more than the gain than the same amount of happiness. I can go into more details about the psychological reasons (such as losing 50 dollars vs gaining 50 dollars) but I am not going to do so since this is more of a philosophical piece rather than a practical one (and also I might just be lazy).

I hope that this assumption is not be too controversial to accept. Most people, when given the choice to increase happiness or reduce suffering by the same amount, would choose the latter.

However, that is for the case where the quantity of happiness is comparable to the quantity of suffering. What about cases where the quantity of happiness far outweights the quantity of suffering (Like the 2 extreme examples given)?

This is the part where things become more complex so this is the part where we resort not to reasoning but to intuition. Like many people (hopefully), my intuition tells me that alleviating suffering has an inherent value that cannot be outweighed by any amount of happiness increased, especially when the suffering is severe (like in the case of torturing). This is perhaps why we find Le Guin’s story of the child in the basement morally repungant.

So tbe next time you want to justify a decision, use

It’s for the lesser bad

instead.

Note: if you want to explore the responses to the criticisms of Negative Utilitarianism, I am writing one soon (hopefully)