TL;DR: Is freedom valuable because it lets us pursue utility, or is utility good because free people would pursue it? I argue the latter, grounding morality in freedom rather than utility. First, valuing utility above all else can lead to morally perverse outcomes, as many hypotheticals have shown. These thought experiments can be satisfactorily resolved by valuing freedom instead. Second, utility arises as part of an amoral biological process of evolutionary adaptation. Something amoral cannot create something moral. Third, since utility is subjective, its utility is shaped by our freedom. How we choose to experience something determines its value to us. Freedom therefore grounds utility.
In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asks whether an act is pious because the gods will it as pious, or if the gods will it as pious because it is inherently pious.
A secular, meta-ethical version of the dilemma can be rephrased by asking whether something (for example, protecting a loved one ) is an inherently moral act or whether it derives its moral status from elsewhere.
As applied to this article, the same can be said for utility and freedom in determining which one grounds our moral universe. Is freedom good because it lets us pursue utility, which is the ultimate moral good? Or is utility good because free people would pursue it? Deontologists may side with the former statement, whereas utilitarians side with the latter. Yet both cannot be right. There can only be one foundation for ethics.
Freedom or utility? Which one is the mean, and which one is the end?
Utilitarians and Thought-Experiments
Everyone is familiar with hypotheticals where prioritizing utility leads to a perverse and undesirable outcome. I provided my own in the “utility coach” thought experiment meant to show that freedom rather than utility grounds morality. But I’ll provide another.
Imagine an enlightened monk who is completely indifferent between pain and pleasure. He is at one with the world and entirely at peace with his fate, including what others may do to him. If he is left alone, he gains no pleasure, and if he is killed, he really wouldn’t mind.
Under a utilitarian framework, killing him is morally acceptable.
This gives a new meaning to the phrase, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” If welfare is fundamental, enlightened monks may find themselves enlightened all the way outside the moral universe.
Some utilitarians may bite the bullet and say that killing the monk is morally justified. If he can’t feel pleasure or pain, then who cares? Yet we all know this is wrong.
Thought experiments like this aren’t just unrealistic hypotheticals meant to poke arbitrary holes at what is truly a rational moral theory. Tying human worth to welfare is fundamentally flawed, which makes rationalists’ intrinsic gravitation towards utilitarianism all the more confusing.
Maybe since scientifically-minded individuals prefer exactness and understanding first principles, the calculability of utilitarianism appeals to their personality types.1 Vague notions of justice and fairness are squishy and have been disputed for thousands of years, yet welfare experiences are universal and fundamental.
However, just because something can be measured doesn’t make it correct. This is the drunk looking under the lamppost for his keys since that’s where the light is.
Countless examples of utilitarian logic lead to morally wrong answers. Yet where utilitarianism goes against our notions of morality (harvesting the organs of one to save five) are instances where it subverts freedom.
If freedom were recognized as fundamental to morality, then utilitarians wouldn’t run into these moral quandaries. Every one of them can be resolved by simply recognizing personal agency.
Similarly, slavery, war, discrimination, and all other moral wrongs humans are capable of have led utilitarians to create convoluted arguments meant to derive the conclusion that these actions would never be acceptable under their moral framework. In some roundabout way, all the acts we now recognize as bad actually reduce welfare, which is still the only bad thing.
Yet all these actions can be recognized as moral wrongs far more easily and directly if we give freedom a central role in our ethics. If freedom grounds our moral universe, then all social interactions between free beings would be governed by the principles of a social contract.
Utility is Amoral Biology
If utility is the foundation of ethics, then what is the foundation of utility? What shapes and constructs utility? In its most fundamental sense, utility is just a survival guide.
“Utility” is an experience that can be measured by the activation of causal mechanisms in the brain. Yet these causal mechanisms were created by evolutionary adaptation, a completely amoral process, as those who have watched a few nature documentaries can attest to. How can something entirely amoral create something moral?
In evolutionary terms, utility is not a good in itself but serves as a signal for maintaining existence. Food, sex, community, and practically all of our earthly pleasures aren’t objectively good. They’re just useful, so our internal mechanisms choose to view them as inherently good.
Utility is only our emotional reaction derived from pursuing our biological needs. This explains why much of our pleasure derives from anticipation rather than consumption.
In ultimate terms, the ideal state is biological homeostasis. The “perfect condition” biologically speaking is to be free of want, rather than possessing an insatiable desire. Buddhists seemed to have figured out that endless desire is antithetical to inner peace.
However, according to utilitarians, endless desire creates moral worthiness and imposes ethical duties. Utility isn’t just a survival heuristic, but manna from heaven, to be maximized at all costs. Therefore, a utility monster rests on the highest moral plane and is worthy of pleasure-producing sacrifices at its altar.
Yet if freedom is prioritized, someone’s bottomless desire is their own responsibility. Your desires don’t (by themselves) impose duties onto others.
The fact that we have certain desires isn’t in itself a reason for fulfilling them, let alone placing obligations on others to fulfill them for us. The scientific fact of experiencing utility doesn’t justify fulfilling these desires any more than it justifies the manipulation of our desires.
For instance, Sam Harris justifies his moral realism by claiming that avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone is a moral truism. However, this claim doesn’t disqualify changing our perception of the worst possible misery, or even eliminating our ability to experience misery. Instead of satisfying desires or alleviating misery, morality may require that we deny others the ability to feel pleasure or pain.
A long-termist view of a “better” future may be creating robotic humans who lack utility-generating experiences. Genetic engineering on this scale might be far easier than addressing long-term risks.
What better way to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone than to give everyone a lobotomy? It seems easier than preventing climate change. Utility as a foundation for morality doesn’t rule that out, but freedom as a foundation does.
The Problem of Interpersonal Utility
The fact that utility can’t be compared between individuals shows that it cannot serve as the foundation of ethics.
Our pleasure, as well as our pain, are subjective. We experience pain from strenuous workouts, eating spicy foods, or watching scary movies. Yet these sources of pain aren’t objectively bad. There is no moral duty of others to close down gyms, smack chili peppers out of our hands, or warn us about jump scares.
The above experiences may be pleasurable to some, but torture for others. This is the fundamental problem with comparing welfare between people. The same physical outcomes can create widely different experiences. And our freedom to interpret these similar experiences creates these differences.
It can also be argued that a life without pain isn’t a life worth living. Pain isn’t just a necessary fact of life; it plays a significant role in one’s personal growth and life satisfaction. The utilitarian who avoids pain may find his life with little personal meaning. His mind and body will be weak from a lack of challenge, and life will be filled with anxiety over facing obstacles he hasn’t prepared for. He will avoid relationships for fear of being hurt and settle in his career for fear of stress and difficulty
Others, meanwhile, will learn and grow from their pain. They’ll welcome challenges and gain valuable experiences as they move further from their comfort zone. Pain isn’t a universal bad, but is subject to interpretation. Our freedom creates meaning from pain in a way that’s incalculable to utilitarians.
Utility isn’t good in and of itself but only serves as a guide to exercise one’s freedom. Freedom, however, sets the boundaries of our moral universe and is the foundation of our moral rules. And it’s freedom that sets the stage for the social contract.
Jeremy Bentham was likely on the spectrum, and I’m willing to bet neurodivergent thinking is far more prominent among the EA/rationalist community than average.
You seem to be conflating utilitarianism with a specific variant of utilitarianism, perhaps hedonic utilitarianism or perhaps preference utilitarianism. Utilitarianism simply says that the good is whatever maximizes aggregate welfare. Welfare is a free variable here and can be, on the basis of the beliefs of the utilitarian, among other things: desire satisfaction, hedonia or eudaimonia.
I don't think the overall argument here is true. I think the purpose of freedom is to support utility, not the other way around. I think the monk example is a bad counter argument to utility, because it assumes pleasure and pain as the only things that matter--I see the monk as having an independent, fulfilled, sentient experience, and that's what I would seek to preserve with a utility function.
HOWEVER - I think that thinking about freedom, rather than utility, is quite likely a more useful way to help people be more moral. Utilitarianism might be technically true (if you can figure out the right utility function), but that doesn't necessarily make it a good guide for how to lead a good life.