Utilitarianism: Ethics for Gamblers

[feotakahari]

 There’s a book called The Lathe of Heaven that’s about how Utilitarianism is bad and wrong. (More directly, it’s about how trying to overwrite reality with dreams will turn everyone’s skin gray and make aliens invade the moon, but the general message is that Utilitarianism is bad and wrong.) The Standard Utilitarian Villain has a monologue about how if you found someone dying of snakebite on the side of the road, and you had antivenom, you would save them. The protagonist responds that the person you saved might go on to kill four people, and you have no way of knowing whether you did the right thing or not.

Besides making me hope Ursula K. Le Guin never finds me dying of snakebite, this argument disappoints me in its neglect of probability. It’s possible from your perspective that the dying person is a murderer, and it’s also possible that they’re not. But if we assume that less than 25% of randomly chosen people will kill four other people, then saving the dying person is a net gain.

I believe all ethics relates back to probability, although most ethical systems do their best to hide their work. A rule saying “don’t lie” comes from a background in which lying repeatedly had negative results, and the probabilities worked out in favor of telling the truth. On the other hand, a community that repeatedly had negative interactions with the outside world might create the rule “don’t trust outsiders,” with lying and misleading outsiders as the tactic supported by probability. But these rigid rules lack the flexibility of an approach that directly considers probability in the moment. The more room you have to consider everything that relates to the case at hand, the better your chances at making the right choice. (Is the dying person carrying a bloody axe? But what if it’s blood from the snake–is there a dead snake nearby? And do you know anything about why they were on this road in the first place?)

Utilitarianism is not a moral system for making the right choice, in that it’s a system that acknowledges that you don’t know the right choice. It’s a system for making choices that are moderately more likely to be right, and will hopefully add up over time. As a Utilitarian, there will be times when you screw up and make the world worse! All you can do is make a judgment and take a gamble.