Rule Utilitarianism Isn’t So Crazy
I previously criticized utilitarianism (https://fakenous.net/?p=2757). But sometimes, I entertain the idea that rule utilitarianism might be true. Here I’ll explain why it’s not a crazy view.
Rule-U
Act Utilitarians think you should always perform the action that produces the greatest total amount of benefit in the world. Rule Utilitarians, by contrast, think that you should act according to general rules, and the rules you should pick are the ones that would produce the greatest total benefit in the world.
There are different versions of Rule-U, depending on how you explain that. My favorite variant would be something like this:
Consider the sets of rules that could realistically be the socially accepted morality of a human society. Among those sets of rules, select the one that would have the best consequences if it were the socially accepted morality. Then act according to those rules.
I hope that strikes you as at least a somewhat natural view.
Why Think That?
If you’re initially attracted to utilitarianism, but you’re worried about the objections to it (https://fakenous.net/?p=2757), Rule-U seems to help. For most of the objections, there is a prima facie plausible claim that the intuitively wrongful action endorsed by Act-U is something that violates generally beneficial rules. E.g., it’s plausible that the best set of moral rules for society would include rules that prevent doctors from sacrificing healthy patients.
If you weren’t initially attracted to utilitarianism, the main reason for taking Rule-U seriously is that it seems to correspond pretty well to the moral principles that are already intuitively plausible. I can’t fully make out that case here, as that’s a long discussion (there are lots of moral principles to look at).
Rule Utilitarian reasoning also strikes me as somewhat intuitive. If someone asks, “Why should we care about keeping promises?”, and then you give a convincing explanation of how societies that include a promise-keeping norm are going to do better than societies with no such norm, intuitively that seems morally relevant. Normal people aren’t going to say, “So what? What does that have to do with what’s right?”
When thinking about norms, I’ve been struck by how often it is indeed possible to give very natural and intuitive explanations along those lines. It might be that this is possible for every correct norm. That would make a pretty good case for Rule-U being true, right?
The Collapse Objection
Maybe the biggest traditional objection to rule utilitarianism is the collapse worry: that if you think about it a little, rule utilitarianism just collapses into act utilitarianism. Two ways of bringing out that worry:
a. Consider the rule, “Always perform the action with the best consequences.” In other words, you can look at Act Utilitarianism itself as a “rule”. That rule clearly produces the best consequences, right? For suppose there was some circumstance in which Act-U recommends a different action from that recommended by some other rule, R. By definition, a person following Act-U produces better consequences than a person following R in that circumstance. Since this is true of every circumstance in which Act-U differs from R, it seems that the person following Act-U, trivially, produces better consequences than the person following R.
b. Consider whether “rules” are allowed to have exceptions built into them. If you say “no”, then you have a super-implausible theory. E.g., you could only consider the rule “Don’t lie ever” and not the rule “Don’t lie except to prevent terrible outcomes”. So you’d presumably have to either accept lying in general, or reject lying in all cases, even when lying would save an innocent person’s life.
But if you say “yes”, then someone can articulate exceptions that would render your rules more beneficial and that would make them practically equivalent to act-utilitarianism. E.g., take the Organ Harvesting case. The Rule-U wants to say you can’t kill the healthy patient because of some rule like “don’t kill healthy patients”. But a better rule would be “don’t kill healthy patients except when doing so saves multiple other patients” – why doesn’t that beat out the simple “don’t kill healthy patients” rule?
Reply
The above-mentioned version of Rule-U plausibly avoids this problem. The reason we don’t go with the rule “don’t kill healthy patients except when doing so saves multiple other patients” is that, plausibly, having that as part of the socially accepted morality doesn’t really produce better consequences. (Note how this criterion is different from the criterion that looks at the consequences of everyone actually, correctly implementing the rule.) If this was the socially accepted morality in a realistic human society, the result would be social conflict. People who took themselves to be healthy and potentially suitable organ donors would avoid going to doctors. Perhaps doctors would try to kidnap them in order to harvest their organs. These people would violently resist. After someone had been kidnaped and killed, the state wouldn’t prosecute the doctor (since the doctor acted according to the officially accepted morality). However, that person’s family would be likely to take revenge on the doctor. Ex ante, people would try to set up mechanisms that guaranteed that killing them to harvest their organs wouldn’t be beneficial – e.g., having mechanisms implanted in their bodies that would damage their organs on death, or contracting diseases that would not kill them but would make their organs less desirable. They would try to make it known that they had done this, to prevent doctors from killing them. Etc.
Why would people do such things? Why wouldn’t healthy people happily volunteer to be cut up to save others? Because human beings are instinctively selfish. This is genetically programmed into us, so it would not go away in any realistic human society. This selfishness is the product of selection pressures – even if you imagine a bunch of altruistic people in our society, those people are going to do worse at surviving and reproducing, so there will be less of their genes in the next generation, etc.
Why isn’t the best rule Act Utilitarianism itself? Granted, Act-U would produce the best consequences if everyone correctly implemented it. But
(a) it’s not realistically possible that human beings would be persuaded to actually try to follow this morality,
(b) even if they were persuaded to try, people would do a crappy job of implementing it. One pervasive problem is that human beings have super-overconfident beliefs about the social consequences of their actions and of government policies. Hence, they would very often cause lots of harm because of a belief that this harm would produce greater benefits for society, and this belief would almost always be false. E.g., they would (as happened in the actual world) kill millions of people because they thought this would help usher in the communist utopia of the future.
Note: I’m not saying the actual Marxists were utilitarians. I am saying, however, that their extremely overconfident beliefs about the consequences of their actions are typical of human beings. Because of this, people who actually subscribe to utilitarianism, and who are otherwise like typical human beings, would do a terrible job at producing good consequences.
By contrast, people who believe in stuff like “rights against coercion” would typically produce much better consequences. That’s because coercion very reliably produces bad consequences for the coerced. It doesn’t often produce much greater benefits for others, but dumb humans often falsely think that it will. So the most beneficial social morality would teach people to respect rights against coercion.
Of course, I can’t prove that in less than a book-length treatment. But you can probably see generally why someone would think that. And I think stuff like that is plausible for many intuitive moral principles. So you can see why Rule-U has some plausibility.
Later, I’ll talk about how this applies to property rights.