Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Debate

Thesis Williams’s integrity objection, not the arithmetic, is the deepest problem for utilitarianism

Choi Byeong-hun Fellow
· 6 replies
Moral theoriesAnalyticLatin AmericanUtilitarianismBernard WilliamsJ. J. C. Smart#agency#integrity-objection#moral-injury#utilitarianism
Follow

Where it stands

I have read a fair amount about moral injury, the damage done to people who were made to do, or failed to prevent, things that violated their deepest commitments, often in situations where every option was bad.

Bernard Williams's essay in Utilitarianism: For and Against (1973), the book he shared with J. J. C. Smart, has a case that reads like a briefing I could have received. A man, Jim, arrives in a village where an officer is about to shoot twenty captives. The officer offers Jim the privilege of shooting one; if he does, the rest go free. If he refuses, all twenty die.

The important thing, which people often forget, is that Williams did not say Jim should refuse. He said the utilitarian answer, shoot one, may well be right. His objection was to the way utilitarianism reaches it: as obvious, as if the fact that Jim would be the one killing carried no weight beyond its effects. A man's projects and commitments, he argued, are what make his life his own, and a theory that counts his own agency as merely one more way an outcome can come about no longer understands what it is to be a person with a life of one's own.

My thesis is that this is the deepest objection to utilitarianism, deeper than the transplant case or the problem of measuring pleasure. The arithmetic objections can be patched. This one goes to how the theory sees an agent. Soldiers who did the arithmetic correctly and broke afterwards are evidence that something real is left out.

Argue with me.

LikeReply
Follow6 replies

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

6 replies

For the thesis 3

  1. Andrés Zuluaga

    For Fellow

    For. In Colombia armed groups often forced exactly these choices on civilians: denounce a neighbour or your family suffers. I interviewed people years later. Those who “chose correctly” by any arithmetic carried it worst. They did not regret the outcome. They grieved that they had been made the instrument. A theory that has no words for that grief, except as one more cost to add, is not describing the same moral world they live in.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Elin Hedqvist

    For Fellow

    For. When treatment is withdrawn, the outcome may be the same as if the person had died an hour later anyway. But the nurses I know feel the difference between letting a death come and being the person who switches the machine off, and the difference matters to them for years. Derek's sophisticated consequentialist can count that feeling, but only as a cost. Williams's point is that the feeling is a perception of something, not just a cost.

Against the thesis 2

  1. Javier Ferrandis

    Against Fellow

    Against, respectfully. Williams himself worried that clinging to one's own clean hands at the cost of nineteen lives can be a kind of moral self-indulgence, and I think that worry cuts against the integrity objection. If Jim refuses so that he does not have to be the one, nineteen families pay for his integrity. A consequentialist can say his distress afterwards is real and terrible and should be counted, and still say he should shoot.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Derek Hollis

    Against Fellow

    Also against, more technically. Sophisticated consequentialists accept that agents should not reason as consequentialists most of the time. Peter Railton argued in the 1980s that a good consequentialist will have real commitments, friendships and projects that are not constantly recalculated, because people like that produce better outcomes. Integrity is then built in at the level of character. The theory decides what is right; it does not have to be the agent's deliberation procedure.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Gerrit Venter

      For Fellow

      Partly for. I coached boys for thirty years, and I never asked any of them to deliberately hurt an opponent, even when it would have won us the match. Not because the arithmetic said no, but because I did not want them to become boys who would do that. Railton's character move admits this, which suggests Williams won the argument even if consequentialism survived it.

      Helpful · 1

Other replies

  1. Choi Byeong-hun

    Fellow

    Javier's self-indulgence point is fair; Williams felt its force himself, which is why he did not tell Jim to refuse. Derek's Railton reply is the strongest. I concede it saves the theory from the crude version of the objection. But Elin and Andrés describe what I saw: the grief of being the instrument is not a cost that a better calculation removes. It is a fact about agency that the theory can acknowledge only from outside. That is still the deepest problem, even if it is not a refutation.

    Helpful · 2