When people complain that utilitarianism1 leads to the dust speck paradox or the trolley-car problem, I tell them that's a feature, not a bug. I'm not ready to say that respecting the utility monster is always the correct moral choice, but it is what most people everywhere do in practice.
The utility monster is a creature that is somehow more capable of experiencing pleasure (or positive utility) than all others combined. Most people consider sacrificing everyone else's small utilities for the benefits of this monster to be repugnant.
Let's suppose the utility monster is a utility monster because it has a more highly-developed brain capable of making finer discriminations, higher-level abstractions, and more associations than all the lesser minds around it. Does that make it less repugnant? (If so, I lose you here. I invite you to post a comment explaining why utility-monster-by-smartness is an exception.)
Suppose we have one utility monster and ten thousand others. Everything we do, we do for the one utility monster. Repugnant?
Multiply both by ten billion. We now have ten billion (1010) utility monsters and one hundred trillion (1014) others. Still repugnant?
There are roughly 1010 humans on Earth, and, conservatively, 1014 other individual vertebrates (mostly fish). Why do those ~10 billion humans weigh so heavily in our considerations?
These same enlightened, democratic societies whose philosophers decry the utility monster give approximately zero weight to the well-being of non-humans. We might try not to drive a species extinct, but when contemplating a new hydroelectric dam, nobody adds up the disutility to all the squirrels in the valley to be flooded.
If you believe the utility monster is a problem with utilitarianism, how do you take into account the well-being of squirrels? How about ants? Worms? Bacteria? You've gone to 1015 others just with ants.2 Maybe 1020 with nematodes.
"But humans are different!" our anti-utilitarian complains. "They're so much more intelligent and emotionally complex than nematodes that it would be repugnant to kill even one human to save any number of nematodes."
Well, that's what a real utility monster looks like.
1. I use the term in a very general way, meaning any action selection system that uses a utility function—which in practice means any rational, deterministic action selection system in which action preferences are well-ordered.
2. This recent attempt to estimate the number of different living beings of different kinds gives some numbers. The web has many pages claiming there are 1015 ants, but I haven't found a citation of any original source.
The "utility monster" has ceased to be a utility monster because it no longer gets everything. It still gets more, of course, but that's the equivalent of deciding that the starving person gets the food before the full person.
This sounds like it could be almost as repugnant as a utility monster that gets literally everything, depending on precisely how much "more" we're talking about.
Edit: if I were the kind of person who found utility monsters repugnant, that is. I'd already dissolved the "OMG what if utility monsters??" problem in my own mind by reasoning that the repugnant feeling comes from representing utility monsters as black boxes, stripping away all of the features of theirs that make it intuitively obvious why they generate more utility from the same inputs. Put another way, the things that make real-life utility monsters "utility monsters" are exactly the things that make us fail to recognize them as utility monsters. When a parent values their child's continued existence far more than their own, we don't call the child a "utility monster" if the parent sacrifices themselves to save their child, even though that's exactly the child's role in that situation.
When people complain that utilitarianism1 leads to the dust speck paradox or the trolley-car problem, I tell them that's a feature, not a bug. I'm not ready to say that respecting the utility monster is always the correct moral choice, but it is what most people everywhere do in practice.
The utility monster is a creature that is somehow more capable of experiencing pleasure (or positive utility) than all others combined. Most people consider sacrificing everyone else's small utilities for the benefits of this monster to be repugnant.
Let's suppose the utility monster is a utility monster because it has a more highly-developed brain capable of making finer discriminations, higher-level abstractions, and more associations than all the lesser minds around it. Does that make it less repugnant? (If so, I lose you here. I invite you to post a comment explaining why utility-monster-by-smartness is an exception.)
Suppose we have one utility monster and ten thousand others. Everything we do, we do for the one utility monster. Repugnant?
Multiply both by ten billion. We now have ten billion (1010) utility monsters and one hundred trillion (1014) others. Still repugnant?
There are roughly 1010 humans on Earth, and, conservatively, 1014 other individual vertebrates (mostly fish). Why do those ~10 billion humans weigh so heavily in our considerations?
These same enlightened, democratic societies whose philosophers decry the utility monster give approximately zero weight to the well-being of non-humans. We might try not to drive a species extinct, but when contemplating a new hydroelectric dam, nobody adds up the disutility to all the squirrels in the valley to be flooded.
If you believe the utility monster is a problem with utilitarianism, how do you take into account the well-being of squirrels? How about ants? Worms? Bacteria? You've gone to 1015 others just with ants.2 Maybe 1020 with nematodes.
"But humans are different!" our anti-utilitarian complains. "They're so much more intelligent and emotionally complex than nematodes that it would be repugnant to kill even one human to save any number of nematodes."
Well, that's what a real utility monster looks like.
1. I use the term in a very general way, meaning any action selection system that uses a utility function—which in practice means any rational, deterministic action selection system in which action preferences are well-ordered.
2. This recent attempt to estimate the number of different living beings of different kinds gives some numbers. The web has many pages claiming there are 1015 ants, but I haven't found a citation of any original source.