Ethics and Possibilities

“Don't nobody know my troubles with god.”

A follow-up to “The Philosophical Bullet Bites.”

A lifetime ago, I regularly gave talks to students about animal rights – everyone from middle schoolers to college groups to Future Farmers of America at their national conference chanting "Eat more meat!"

Regularly, I would get a question along the lines of, “Don’t you think people are more important than pigs?” Or, “Wouldn’t you sacrifice a rat to save your wife?”

I loved this question. I would hold up a cute picture of the baby and say, “Obviously, I care about our kid more than a rat. I care about our kid more than I care about all of you! Without a doubt, I would sacrifice each and every one of you to save them!”

This story came to mind when someone who read “Biting the Philosophical Bullet” in Losing My Religions asked, “Why can’t we add up the chickens’ suffering in Chicken Worlds?”

Of course, we can add up lives / suffering / utility. Just as we can value our kid over every other living being. Or care about our neighbors and fellow citizens more than people in Venezuela and Syria. Or believe white people are the devil, or Aryans are the master race, or the possibility of trillions of future happy robots matters more than people suffering cluster headaches right now.

We can do anything! Our “moral intuitions” are strong. But they are just intuitions, even ours are less overtly prejudicial than the Klan’s.

It seems obvious that we should sum up the happiness / suffering (net utility) of sentient beings to determine “good” and “bad,” “better” and “worse.” But there is absolutely nothing in the actual, physical world that corresponds to this sum. The universe as a whole does not experience anything. 

There is no entity experiencing the net utility utilitarians try to maximize.

The sum of total pleasure minus total pain is no more real than the belief that a certain god (or gods) commands you to convert or kill infidels. Both are made-up illusions.

“But Matt,” you say, “of course, you agree that, everything else being exactly equal, fewer suffering individuals is better than more suffering individuals.”

Of course I would. But also, of course, I would kill you in the blink of an eye to save Anne. I would kill all of you! 

My attraction to less total suffering and more total happiness in the world is just that – my attraction. Others might have an attraction to more suffering because that pain makes us stronger, or teaches us to love (their) god and value heaven over earth.

My attraction, my intuition, my feelings – those are not and cannot be the basis for a fair and just set of ethics.

The only thing we know exists – and thus the only morally relevant thing – is an individual’s consciousness. (This is why it is impossible to disprove the Simulation Hypothesis. Everything could be an illusion – signals fed to a digital brain. All that we can be sure actually exists is our personal consciousness.) 

Each individual’s consciousness is an entire world, an entire universe. 

Of course, it took me into my fifth decade to realize this. That’s how strong the attraction was of Xtianity, then deontology, then utilitarianism. 

But then, as discussed in Losing My Religions, I realized that ethics based on summing utility across individuals can justify any amount of cruelty, any level of agony, as long as it is offset by more positive experiences across more people, no matter how faint their pleasure. Even people who don’t yet exist. Even people who might not ever exist. 

That’s what broke the spell. That’s what led to the realization that this exalted “sum” of pleasure and pain (or worse, the “expected value” of this sum) is simply an illusion, a made-up fantasy. It certainly seems useful, attractive, and mesmerizing. But in reality, it is a myth, a mirage that has led to an immoral acceptance of – or even blindness to – worlds of actual agony.

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