The Sick, Dark, Twisted World of Utilitarianism

It’s Christmas Eve as I’m writing this. In a few hours I’m going to start wrapping gifts for my girlfriend and two kids. I call it “wrapping,” but honestly I just crumple paper around boxes until they appear vaguely covered, and apply tape at random until the ball of wrinkled paper more or less holds together. This is not a skillset I’ve mastered.

There’s magic in the air already. I cannot wait to see my girlfriend’s reaction when she sees what I bought her. The gifts are small, but I hope thoughtful and meaningful. She brings so much joy to my life and there’s nothing more important to me than moments when I can bring joy to hers.

And the kids? I cannot wait to hear their steps as they race down the hall at five in the morning to see the pile of toys arranged under the Christmas tree. I cannot wait to watch them tear open my poorly wrapped gifts and smile with surprise and delight.

But something haunts me. Behind me, on my bookshelf, I see the works of utilitarians like John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and Peter Singer. My moral obligation, they tell me, is to seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number. My girlfriend’s happiness? My children’s happiness? I’m wrong to give those more weight than the happiness of a truck driver in Indiana or the inhabitants of a village in Indonesia.

Surely, they would say, the money I spent on the people I love could have brought more happiness to humanity had I spent it on mosquito nets for Africans dying of malaria. My girlfriend, after all, will would be perfectly happy—perhaps happier—if I simply wrote her an adoring love letter. My children? Yes, they will beam with delight as they open their gifts, but the gifts will be just as quickly tossed aside and forgotten. And besides, how can I worry about their joy when there are people around the world who aren’t worried about their next toy but their next meal?

My moral duty, the utilitarians insist, should be to serve the more pressing needs of strangers around the globe.

Well, to hell with those thinkers. I am not a utilitarian and no person who loves this world should be a utilitarian. Utilitarians are enemies of your joy, your happiness, your life.

And, revealingly, they can’t give you one good reason to throw away your own joy, happiness, and life.

John Stuart Mill’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Really Bad Argument

John Stuart Mill is history’s most famous advocate of utilitarianism. But his argument for utilitarianism is famously bad.

No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good: that each person's happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons. (Utilitarianism, chapter iv)

Did you catch that? Mill moves from the fact that people (allegedly) desire their own happiness to the view that they should desire the general happiness. But the two propositions aren’t just different—they are radically at odds. Mill himself is the most eloquent spokesman on this point.

I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. (Utilitarianism, chapter iii)

In other words, Mill says that we should seek to maximize happiness because we want to maximize our own happiness—and then puts forward a principle that calls on us to sacrifice our own happiness for the sake of others, since our own happiness is but a drop of water in the sea of humanity. He uses our love of life to justify a morality that teaches us to be largely indifferent to our own life.

Utilitarianism is moral promiscuity. Sex with your wife is amazing? Then you should drive her to the nearest brothel so the whole town can partake.

Henry Sidgwick to the rescue

Utilitarians have long recognized the flaws in Mill’s argument. But no one took the problem Mill danced around more seriously than utilitarianism’s greatest theorist, Henry Sidgwick. In his magnum opus The Methods of Ethics, Sidgwick expends an enormous effort to bridge the gap between the moral case for individual happiness and the moral case for collective happiness.

For Sidgwick, the utilitarian faces a dilemma: either an action is for your own happiness or it is not. And if it’s not, then the question is: why should you do it? “I must somehow see that it was right for me to sacrifice my happiness for the good of whole of which I am a part.” (The Methods of Ethics, xviii)

Sidgwick couldn’t find the answer in reason. He found it in an ethical intuition. “The utilitarian method—which I had learnt from Mill—could not, it seemed to me, be made coherent and harmonious without this fundamental intuition.” (The Methods of Ethics, xviii-xix)

What was this intuition? It was “the self-evident principle that the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other.” (The Methods of Ethics, 382)

From my own standpoint, there are absolutely no grounds for sacrificing my values, my happiness, my life. But if I adopt the impersonal standpoint of no one—of a cold, dead universe that cares nothing for me—then how can I say that my happiness is uniquely important?

Sidgwick’s moral intuition is that the right way to think about ethics is to adopt the value perspective of that which does not and cannot value anything.

Taken seriously, adopting the “point of view of the Universe” would lead to nihilism: to the rejection of values as such. Things only matter to valuers—and only individuals value. Only individuals care about things, want things, seek things. From the point of the universe, it makes no difference whether human beings live and thrive or suffer and die. The universe views the liberation of enslaved Americans and the mass murder of Holocaust victims the same.

But Sidgwick draws a different conclusion: though we should be indifferent between our own life and the lives of others, we should not be indifferent to life in general. The universe, in his fantasy, somehow values the sum total of human happiness, and we, for some reason, should make maximizing that happiness the aim of our life.

But Sidgwick is an unusually honest philosopher. He recognizes that he is basing utilitarianism, in effect, on a revelation—and that an egoist could easily deny the revelation. The egoist may concede that his own happiness is not more important than the happiness of all from the point of view of the universe—but he can insist that it is more important to him.

In this case all that the Utilitarian can do is to effect as far as possible a reconciliation between the two principles, by expounding to the Egoist the sanctions of rules deduced from the Universalistic principle,—i.e. by pointing out the pleasures and pains that may be expected to accrue to the Egoist himself from the observation and violation respectively of such rules. (The Methods of Ethics, 420)

The problem, Sidgwick acknowledges, is that it is manifestly not always in my interests to act for the general interest. The only way to harmonize egoism and utilitarianism, he concludes, is to posit that God will reward utilitarians after death. But Sidgwick knows that’s an unsatisfying answer and ends his book by throwing up his hands and saying: Look, I believe in utilitarianism, but I can’t refute egoism.

And he can’t. Though our culture takes egoism as obviously wrong, anyone who grapples with the issues honestly can’t help see that it is obviously right. The only coherent answer to the question “Why be moral?” will have to be: because it’s in your interest.

The utilitarian motive

Sidgwick recognizes that there is no compelling reason you can give a man to sacrifice his own happiness for others. So why does he resist egoism? Because he thinks the egoist misses out on something really important about life.

For Sidgwick, an egoist’s “excessive concentration of attention on” his own happiness “renders it impossible for him to feel any strong interest in the pleasures and pains of others.” This “perpetual prominence of self”

tends to deprive all enjoyments of their keenness and zest, and produce rapid satiety and ennui: the selfish man misses the sense of elevation and enlargements given by wide interests; he misses the more secure and serene satisfaction that attends continually on activities directed towards ends more stable in prospect than an individual’s happiness can be; he misses the peculiar rich sweetness, depending upon a sort of complex reverberation of sympathy, which is always found in services rendered to those whom we love and who are grateful. (The Methods of Ethics, 501)

Sidgwick grasps that there’s something compelling about egoism—but he can’t embrace egoism because he is blinded by a conventional view of what it means to be an egoist. Above all, he sees valuing other people as outside of and separate from an individual’s self-interest.

This is insane. Your interests are the values that sustain your life, which absolutely include other people—especially the people you love. Indeed, utilitarians have no right to criticize egoists for not appreciating the value of love since their own doctrine demands that you sacrifice, not just yourself for the greater good, but the people you care most about. As Sidgwick admits:

There are very few persons, however strongly and widely sympathetic, who are so constituted as to feel for the pleasure and pains of mankind generally a degree of sympathy at all commensurate with their concern for wife or children, or lover, or intimate friend. . . . And thus when Utilitarian Duty calls on us to sacrifice not only our own pleasures but the happiness of those we love to the general good, the very sanction on which Utilitarianism most relies must act powerfully in opposition to its precepts. (The Methods of Ethics, 502)

Utilitarianism is the morality that says you should throw your child under a bus to save ten strangers.

There are two motives that attract people to utilitarianism: humanism and altruism.

The humanist element is drawn to a doctrine that promises to promote human flourishing. But in reality human flourishing exists to the extent that people live as Effective Egoists, pursuing their own rational self-interest in free societies, neither sacrificing themselves to others nor others to themselves.

The altruist element embraces utilitarianism precisely because it tells you to throw your happiness away. You can see hints of it in Mill and Sidgwick, but it is most in the open with modern utilitarians such as Peter Singer. What draws these thinkers to utilitarianism is that, as Sidgwick writes:

from a practical point of view the principle of aiming at the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” is prima facie more definitely opposed to Egoism than the Common-Sense morality is. For this latter seems to leave a man free to pursue his own happiness under certain definite limits and conditions: whereas Utilitarianism seems to require a more comprehensive and unceasing subordination of self-interest to the common good. (The Methods of Ethics, 87)

Utilitarianism is not an instruction manual for living, but an instruction manual for climbing into a furnace if it will help heat a crowded home.

Effective Egoism 101

The conception of earthly idealism I champion was defined by Ayn Rand. Here are three key works that summarize her perspective:

• Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World by Ayn Rand

• Causality vs. Duty by Ayn Rand

• The Objectivist Ethics by Ayn Rand

And if want the full case for egoism, you can buy my book Effective Egoism: An Individualist’s Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness.