Topics Ethics

Question According to Utilitarianism as I understand it, an action should be judged by its outcome. I can't understand how this argument has any credence. How is it possible before the action is undertake to be able to know its outcome? We can not tell the future. Even to do with things that are very straightforward the influences and flow on effects from the near distant future to the far future would be astronomical in number. Which raises the further question how do you judge where to draw the line in terms of future ramifications, is it once removed effect, twice, thrice?? It seems completely illogical to me to call it a philosophy.

Accepted:
November 25, 2012

Comments

It is true that you often cannot know the outcome of alternative courses of conduct beforehand. But you can typically assign reasonably accurate probabilities, at least a little time forward. We do this all the time when we make decisions -- between two holiday destinations, perhaps, or about whether to accept a job offer or have a child. Utilitarians ask us to do the same sort of thing but then to evaluate in terms of the happiness of all those affected (including oneself). We are to choose the course of conduct that we have good reason to believe will produce the highest probability-weighted expected happiness. The probability-weighted expected happiness produced by a particular course of conduct (C) is calculated this way: one identifies the possible outcomes of C, evaluates each outcome in terms of happiness, multiplies each outcome's happiness by that outcome's probability (subject to one's having chosen C), then sums the products.

You are right that one can do this with tolerable accuracy only if one confines attention so as to exclude most remote and indirect effects. But one can typically do this on the reasonable assumption that these remote and indirect effects will be about the same for the various candidate courses of action. To be sure, this may often be a false assumption. Still, if one makes this assumption consistently, then one will still do better in terms of happiness than one would if one were to choose randomly -- and this makes the assumption a reasonable one.

Admittedly, this is not very reassuring. Most intelligent utilitarians do a little better than the rest of us at promoting happiness, but they still do vastly worse than they could do with perfect foresight into the effects various courses of conduct would have in future decades, centuries, and millennia. But is this a problem with utilitarianism? One might deny this on the ground that there is no a priori assurance that what we morally ought to do is easy or achievable. It's very difficult for those who seriously work to end world poverty to succeed -- yet it does not follow from this discovery that there is no value in ending world poverty. Utilitarians are committed to their goal for reasons that are independent of how successfully humans can be in the pursuit of this goal.