A simple proof that Utilitarianism is false.

You can't make impossible demands on moral agents.

This article contains a logical error. See here for a correction.

One of the most compelling arguments in favor of Utilitarianism is that pain is self-intimatingly bad, and pleasure is self-intimatingly good, therefore they form some kind of axis on which we can grade our experiences. To simplify to the extreme:

• unpleasant experiences are “negative”, pleasant experiences are “positive”

• Utility is the sum of the two

• The goal is to have the greatest positive sum

Intuitively, it makes sense. In everyday life, we often accept some negative experiences to obtain “greater goods”. We accept the pain of exercising for the benefit of being healthy (albeit exercising can be pleasant in itself). We accept the pain of studying all night for the benefit of having good grades. This calculation is even integrated with our most fundamental life decisions, like having children.

This is one of the oldest defenses for Utilitarianism, and it can be found as early as in the eponymous book by John Stuart Mill.

It’s also completely false.

To see why, let’s define an additional element: suffering. Now this is a bit tricky, because suffering is hard to describe unless you have already experienced it yourself, and it is relatively easy to conflate it with pain (not that pain itself is easy to define, see this article, for instance). But suffering is different from mere pain. You can be in pain and ignore it. You can be in pain and push through it. You can even desire pain, if you are a masochist. But suffering you can’t ignore, let alone desire. It’s something that stays, that suffuses the whole mind and takes over every other system. It’s a kind of overriding pain. Suffering can happen all at once, like in the case of extreme physical pain. It can also happen over time, like in the case of chronic depression. In the same way that there are various forms of pleasure, there are various forms of pain, and various forms of suffering. We will see what they have in common shortly.

For now, let’s simply define suffering as the pain threshold (physical or psychological) at which it becomes impossible to ignore.

Let’s now observe real-world behavior. People have the ability to postpone pleasure indefinitely. This is even a predictor of how successful they will be in life. The marshmallow experiment is so famous that it has become an element of pop culture. People can even consciously decide to stop experiencing pleasure while they are experiencing it, because they have something more important to do. This fact alone should be a very strong indicator that pleasure does not have the kind of self-intimating, foundational value that Utilitarians think it has.

On the other hand, people do not have the ability to postpone the alleviation of suffering (provided it is intense enough). Suffering has an additional feature: absolute urgency. Absolute priority. When you put your hand on a hot stove, your immediate reaction will be to remove it, not to check whether the plate that you are cooking is going to taste super extra good. In fact, by the above definition, it would be impossible to do so, unless of course you were able to alter the sensation of extreme pain originating from the burning itself, or if you had congenital analgesia or pain asymbolia.¹

Similarly, if you were currently experiencing trigeminal neuralgia (also known as “suicide disease”), and a genie granted you an experience to have right now, you wouldn’t wish for an orgasm. You would wish for the relief of the pain you are experiencing. This happens for two simple reasons:

• while you are experiencing it, the alleviation of suffering takes precedence over anything else, and

• the absence of suffering is a necessary condition to experience pleasure.

For psychological suffering, the effect is even worse: it can remove the will to act, like in cases of severe depression. In fact, the vast majority of the people who commit suicides (up to 90%) present signs of mental illness.

These two features are what makes all cases of suffering alike. A person who suffers from extreme physical pain will be ready to end their own life to stop it, and likewise a person who suffers from extreme emotional pain, or chronic depression. They will not be able to “push through it”, no matter how great the benefits. Their one and only, overarching priority will be to put an end to the suffering. The Utilitarian calculation described in the beginning of the present article is simply abolished. This is valid at the personal level.

Now on to the simple proof of Utilitarianism’s falsehood at the interpersonal level, which should show, I hope, that aggregationism is false. This demonstration is based on a slightly modified version of a thought experiment presented by David Pearce in “Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering?”². Suppose a genie appeared and made you experience the worst conceivable pain to you. Suppose he then chose a random person and made them experience the most sublime conceivable pleasure to them. Suppose he then made your pain increase at an exponential rate. Finally, suppose he made the other person’s pleasure grow at a superexponential rate.

The genie then says to you: “You can ask me to stop the exponentially growing pain that you are currently experiencing, but it will also prevent the other person from experiencing the superexponentially growing pleasure that they are having. You will both return to normal.”

The question is: do you have a moral obligation to refuse the genie’s offer?

The Utilitarian will say “yes: superexponential growth beats exponential growth”. However, it would be literally impossible for you to make such a decision. If ought implies can, then can’t implies there is no “ought”. You do not (you cannot) have a moral obligation to refuse the genie’s offer. In fact, the Negative Utilitarian would retort that, in this case, you have a moral obligation to stop your own suffering. Since it is what you would necessarily do anyway, Negative Utilitarianism is “more real” (or more natural) than Utilitarianism.

Now let’s get back to the defense of Utilitarianism presented at the beginning of this article. If what grounds Utilitarianism is that pain is self-intimatingly bad, and pleasure is self-intimatingly good, then the demonstration that only those pains that qualify as suffering have this self-intimating property means that only their elimination can serve as the basis of moral decisions.

In other words: the “natural morality” of the world must be based on Negative Utilitarianism, not Utilitarianism. Suffering is the only self-intimating disvalue, and alleviating suffering is necessarily the only distinctively moral obligation.

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References

Mill, J. S. (1863). Utilitarianism. Longmans, Green, and Co.

Pearce, D. (2017). A response to Toby Ord’s essay “Why I am not a negative utilitarian”. In Can biotechnology abolish suffering? (M. Vinding, Ed.). The Neuroethics Foundation.

1. The existence of these two conditions could be an indicator that suffering is in itself a distinct phenomenon, non-identical to mere pain. I will not go into the details of the neural architectures involved in these phenomenae for now.

2. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do.