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feotakahari) wrote2019-03-08 01:02 am
The Ever-Growing Rulebook
One of the many reasons I’m a Utilitarian: I fundamentally do not trust any moral code that allows you to make up new rules on the spot.
A common argument against Utilitarianism is that it overcomplicates things. A Utilitarian who says that lying is wrong has to come up with an argument for why lying reduces net utility. Someone else can just say that lying is wrong, because they already know that lying is wrong. Why go to so much effort to get the same answer?
Rather than address this issue, I’d like to bring up a different one: a person who uses an old flag to clean a toilet. (This example comes from Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind.) My experience with deontologists is that they’ve got a lot of separate, seemingly unrelated moral rules already, and they’re not afraid to add new ones. They may have a rule that disrespecting symbols is wrong, or that lacking in patriotism is wrong, but if they don’t have one, and they’re sufficiently perturbed by this idea, they’ll just make up a rule that using a flag to clean a toilet is wrong. But Utilitarians, who aren’t allowed to make up new rules, have to justify how using a flag to clean a toilet reduces net utility. If they can’t come up with an argument, they have no choice but to say that it’s perfectly okay.
I could say that I’m afraid the ability to create new moral rules will be used to create a rule that being gay is wrong. This is true, but it’s not the whole picture. I’m afraid of a rule that being weird is wrong. You think BDSM is icky? Make up a rule that BDSM is morally wrong! You think someone else’s religion is strange and frightening? Make up a rule that their religion is morally wrong! It’s a bully’s view of the world, where the person who can be targeted should be targeted, and whatever punishment you enact upon them is just putting them in their proper place.
(Also benefiting from this argument: Kantian ethics, some forms of care ethics, and divine command theory, as long as God isn’t coming down to personally tell you that all the things you don’t like are heretical. Also opposed by this argument: virtue ethics, because the ability to say that some action you don’t like is inherently against a particular virtue is the philosophical equivalent of conjuring an anvil directly above your opponent’s head.)
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Virtue ethics, in general, is less about what is right or wrong than a personal guide to being virtuous; it's not intended to give moral rules, it says that if you cultivate certain virtues you will tend to act in a way that furthers the good (the good being defined however the virtue ethicist likes--it's not necessarily a great system and I'm not a virtue ethicist.
I'm not a utilitarian, or a consequentialist more generally, because I think it requires more foreknowledge than we usually have, an action whatsoever can be justified given an extreme enough scenario, and because the demands it makes on individuals are nearly infinite (most ethical systems allow for actions that go beyond the standards of baseline morality and are extra-good; in utilitarianism the standard is absolute and there's no way to exceed it which, when I tried to do utilitarianism, led me to believe that everything I did that did not actively contribute to others' wellbeing was evil. The last is more of a scrupulosity problem on my part, but it is consistent with the standards of a consequentialist ethic).
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