Against Utilitarianism: in Ethics & Politics, Net Happiness is Irrelevant.

my claim about this whole category of
moral philosophy the whole ethical and political approach of utilitarianism it's not that it's meaningless but that it is irrelevant to ethical questions to questions of right and wrong questions of whether or not we should do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do now my biggest disagreement with özil with regard to ethics is in the derivation of his ethics rather than the ethics themselves so firstly eyes will dismisses ideas like maximizing net happiness or minimizing suffering as meaningless or worthless I know we can't accurately measure these things but I think we can estimate them and these estimators are essential to ethical judgments and I know so my claim is that the sphere of deontology sphere of ethical philosophy and making decisions about what we're going to do what we do is separate from is not overlapping with the sphere in which we could ask in a meaningful and useful way these questions about and that happiness torture the military and the police using torture is it ethically acceptable to torture one person in order to extract information in order to compel a confession that could save the lives of 100 people so typical scenario still today in 2019 the police or the military are asking themselves whether or not they should torture someone who is this a suspected terrorist because there is the possibility that this will reveal information that will save a hundred people's lives that will prevent a terrorist attack this is an ethical question this is a matter of de ontology this is a matter of right and wrong this is a matter of doing the right thing because the right thing to do so from my perspective this kind of pleasure pain in calculus the original terms used by John Stuart Mill this idea of net happiness is totally irrelevant okay either procedurally torture is correct or incorrect either this person is innocent until proven guilty and has the right to a trial and the right to remain silent or they do not I mean there are all kinds of ethical questions to be asked here and even procedural and bureaucratic and legal okay but there is no question to be asked there is no salience there is no relevance of taking this abstract equation whereby you have an imaginary amount of pleasure and enjoyment and then you subtract the amount of suffering and pain and then ask well how much is left over what's what is it a positive or negative number at the end of the equation absolutely by definition any evil whatsoever can be justified by this equation now net happiness think about the meaning of the word net it's like net profit okay so net profit you earn a certain amount of money and it costs you a certain amount you lose a certain amount of money so you subtract the losses from the profits and what do you get you get the net net net income net profit whatever okay in this same way you're talking about some a positive quantity of happiness or well-being and then subtracting the misery the harm the torture the suffering you inflict whatever it might be any evil whatsoever can be justified this way including killing cows in order to eat their flesh there's there's no end do it okay what about taking taxpayers money to build a casino right there's suffering caused by a casino poor people are going to get poor people are gonna lose money people's lives are gonna be destroyed by gambling addiction there's also the actual use of resources of taxpayers money when you could have been building something else that these negative things but then what who can quantify the enjoyment who can who can quantify how much happiness this casino will bring to the people how much entertainment and gambling and maybe there'll be music and dancing and alcohol and cigars and there's gonna be a fancy hotel you can you can inflate in your own minds I in your imagination in your estimate the supposed pleasure being created by this casino and it can justify any amount of pain what about torturing someone to death in order to build a casino well what are the units of this calculus it's completely surreal now again coming back to my original premise here I'm not actually claiming that this line of reasoning is completely meaningless or completely useless I think it is only meaningful and useful when we're entirely outside of the domain of these ethical questions so to give an example if you have a museum and you're gonna put on an exhibition of art but you're gonna do this anyway it's already been established let's say the government assigned a certain budget the government says okay you have ten million dollars to put together an art exhibition now do you want to put on an exhibition of ancient Egyptian art or 17th century French art or do you want to do an exhibition on dinosaurs let's just say hypothetically this this museum you can use the same gallery you got 10 million toys in this context it may be that it's meaningful to ask about net happiness it's may be meaningful to think in utilitarian terms like well do people here really care about ancient Egypt how many people will attend this how many people will enjoy this maybe also what is the educational value I mean okay a lot of children like dinosaurs but are they really gonna learn anything if we do another dinosaur exhibition as opposed to the educational value of talking about ancient Egypt or something there can be contexts like this where I think ethical and political questions are frankly banal where this kind of pleasure pain calculus this kind of concept of net happiness may be meaningful if it is a foregone conclusion that the government is going to build a sports stadium so for whatever reason there's a hundred million dollars that will go into building the sports stadium you have no that's there's no question about that there's no option here to take the hundred million dollars and instead feed homeless people 100 million dollars have been set aside to build a sports stadium and then you are gonna ask the question should we build a basketball Stadium or should we build an ice hockey arena with this budget so you can imagine that maybe a context in which you are really asking questions that very closely resemble net happiness you can look okay how many people within this city how many people really enjoy hockey how many enjoy basketball what are gonna be the impacts on these sports and for people as spectators and as athletes maybe what's going to be the impact on the local university or something so there are contexts in which the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people is a meaningful question and can even be a useful metric and where we can agree on even the unit's that make up the total number in this guide you like it maybe the unit is how many people would buy tickets to attend a sports event or to go to a museum or to see a movie there may actually be Aerith matically real measurable units of human enjoyment involved and we may be able to think in these terms what's bizarre and tragic and surreal is that this ultimately misguided economistic way of thinking it's a pseudo economic way of thinking has been applied to questions in political science politics ethics morality it's been applied to questions where it has absolutely no validity [Music]