Does utilitarianism "require" extreme self sacrifice? If not why do people commonly say it does?

My view, and a lot of other people here seem to also be getting at this, is that the demandingness objection comes from a misuse of utilitarianism. People want their morality to label things 'permissible' and 'impermissible', and utilitarianism doesn't natively do that. That is, we want boolean-valued morality. The trouble is, Bentham went and gave us a real-valued one. The most common way to get a bool out of that is to label the maximum 'true' and everything else false, but that doesn't give a realistically human-followable result. Some philosophers have worked on 'satisficing consequentialism', which is a project to design a better real-to-bool conversion, but I think the correct answer is to learn to use real-valued morality.

There's some oversimplification above (I suspect people have always understood non-boolean morality in some cases), but I think it captures the essential problem.

It basically depends whether you're a maximising utilitarian or a scalar utilitarian. The former says that you should do the best thing. The latter is less harsh in that it just says that better actions are better without saying that you necessarily have to do the best one.

The main difference between a utility function based approach is that there is no concept of "sufficient effort". Every action gets an (expected) utility attached to it. Sending £10 to an efficient charity is X utilitons above not doing so; but selling everything you own to donate to the charity is (normally) even higher.

So I think the criticism is accurate, in that humans almost never achieve perfection following utility; there's always room for more effort, and there's no distinction between actions that are "allowed" versus "required" (as other ethical systems sometimes have). So for certain types of mind (perfectionists or those with a high desire for closure), a utility function based morality demands ever more: they can never satisfy the requirements of their morality. Those who are content with "doing much better" rather than "doing the absolute best" won't find it so cripling.

Or, put more simply, for a utility function based approach, no one is going to (figuratively) hand you a medal and say "well done, you've done enough". Some people see this as being equivalent with "you're obliged to do the maximum."

I thought about this question a while ago and have been meaning to write about it sometime. This is a good opportunity.

Terminology: Other commenters are pointing out that there are differing definitions of the word "utilitarianism". I think it is clear that the article in question is talking about utilitarianism as an ethical theory (or rather, a family of ethical theories). As such, utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism, the view that doing "the right thing" is what produces the best state of affairs. Utilitarianism is different from other forms of consequentialism in that the thing people consider good/valuable/worth achieving is directly tied to conscious beings. An example of a non-utilitarian consequentialist theory would be the belief that knowledge is the most important thing, and that we should all strive to advance science (at all costs).

In regard to the question, there are two interesting points that are immediately worth pointing out:

1) Utilitarianism (and any sort of consequentialism), if it is indeed demanding, is only demanding in certain empirical situations. If the world is already perfect, you don't have to do anything! 2) For every consequentialist view, there are empirical situations where achieving the best consequences is extremely demanding. Just imagine that the desired state of affairs is really hard to attain.

So my first reply to people who criticise utilitarianism for it being too demanding is the following: Yes, it's very unfortunate that the world is so messed up, but it's not the fault of the utilitarians!

Further, the quoted statement in bold speaks of certain actions being "not just admirable, but morally obligatory". I find this framing misleading. I believe that people should taboo words like "morally obligatory" in ethical discussions. It makes it seem like there is some external moral standard that humans are supposed to obey, but what would it be, and more importantly, why should we care? In my disclaimer on terminology, I wrote that I'm referring to utilitarianism as an ethical theory. I don't intend this to mean that utilitarians are committed to the claim that there are universally valid "ethical truths". I would define "utilitarian" as: "Someone who would voluntarily take a pill that turns them into a robot that goes on to perfectly maximize expected utility". With "utility" being defined as "world-states that are good for sentient individuals", with "good" being defined in non-moral terms, depending on which branch of utilitarianism one subscribes to (could be that e.g. preference-fulfillment is important to you, or contentment, or sum of happiness minus suffering). According to this interpretation, a utilitarian would not be committed to the view that non-utilitarian people are "making a mistake" -- perhaps they just care about different things!

According to the meta ethical view I just sketched, which is meta ethical anti-realism, the demandingness of utilitarianism loses its scariness. If something is requested of you against your will, you're going to object all the more if the request is more demanding. However, if you have a particular goal in life and find out that the circumstances are unfortunately quite dire, so achieving your goal will be very hard, your objection will be directed towards the state of the world, not towards your own goal (hopefully anyway, sometimes people irrationally do the other thing).

Yes, utilitarianism ranks actions according to how much expected utility they produce, and only one action will be "best". However, it would be very misleading to apply moral terms like "only the best action is right, all the others are wrong". Unlike deontology, where all you need to do is to not violate a set of rules, utilitarianism should be thought of as an open-ended game where you can score points, and all you try is to score the most points. Yes, there is just one best path of action, but it can still make a huge difference whether you e.g. take the fifteenth best action or the nineteenth. For utilitarians, moral praise is merely instrumental: They want to blame and praise people in a way that produces the best outcome. This includes praising people for things that are less than perfect, for instance.

So in part, the demandingness objection against utiltiarianism relies on an uncharitable interpretation/definition of "utilitarianism", which commits utilitarians to believe in moral realism. (I consider this interpretation uncharitable because I think the entire concept of "moral realism" is, like libertarian free will, a confused idea that cannot be defined in clear terms without losing at least part of the connotations we intuitively considered important.

Another reason why I think the demandingness objection is a bad objection is because people usually apply it in a naive, short-sighted way. The author of the quote in question did so, for instance: "It also appears to imply that donating all your money to charity beyond what you need to survive (…)" This is wrong. It only implies donating all your money to charity beyond what you need to be maximally productive in the long run. Empirical studies show that being poor decreases the quality of your decision-making. Further, putting too much pressure on yourself often leads to burnout, which leads to a significant loss of productivity in the long run. I find that people tend to overestimate how demanding a typical utilitarian life is. But they are right insofar as there could be situations where trying to achieve the utilitarian goal results in significant self-sacrifice. Such situations are definitely logically possible, but I think they are much more rare than people think.

The reason this is the case is because people tend to conflate "trying to act like a perfectly rational, super-productive utilitarian robot would act" and "trying to maximise expected utility given all your personal constraints". Utilitarianism implies the latter, not the former. Utilitarianism refers to desiring a specific overall outcome, not to a specific decision-procedure for every action you are taking. It is perfectly in line with utilitarianism to come to a conclusion such as: "My personality happens to be such that thinking about all the suffering in the world every day is just too much for me, I literally couldn't keep it up for more than two months. I want to make a budget for charity once every year, I donate what's in that budget, and for the rest of the time, I try to not worry much about it." If it is indeed the case that doing things differently will lead to this person giving up the entire endeavour of donating money, then this is literally the best thing to do for this person. Humans need some degree of happiness and luxury if they want to remain productive and clear-headed in the long run.

The whole thing is also extremely person-dependent. For some people, "trying to maximise expected utility given all your personal constraints" will look more like "trying to act like a perfectly rational, super-productive utilitarian robot would act" than for other people. Some people are just naturally better at achieving a goal than other people, this depends on both the goals and on the personality traits and assets of the person in question.

Finally, let's ask whether "trying to maximise expected utility given all your personal constraints" will, on average, given real-world circumstances, prove to be demanding or not. I suggest to define "demanding" as follows: goal A is more demanding than goal B if people who try to rationally achieve A have a lower average happiness across a time period than people who try to rationally achieve goal B. If you were to empirically measure this, I would suggest contacting people at random times during day or night to ask them to report how they are feeling at this very moment. When it comes to momentary happiness, it is trivial that trying to maximise your momentary happiness will lead to you being happier than trying to be utilitarian. Utilitarians might object, citing the paradox of hedonism: When people only focus on their own personal happiness, their life will soon feel sad. However, this would be making the exact same mistake I discussed earlier. If it is truly the case that explicitly focusing on your personal happiness makes you miserable, then of course the rational thing to do for a person with this goal would be to self-modify and convince yourself to follow a different goal.

There is a distinction between the experiencing self and the remembering self, which is why it would be a completely different question to ask people "how happy are you with your life on the whole". For instance, I read somewhere that mothers (compared to women without children) tend to be less happy in the average moment, but more happy with their life as a whole. What is it that you care about more? I would assume that people are happy with their life on the whole if they know what they want in life, if they think they made good choices regarding the goals that they have, and if they got closer to their goals more and more. At least for the first part of this, knowing what you want in life, utilitarianism does very well.

I'm seeing fundamental disagreement on what "moral" means.

In the Anglo Saxon tradition, what is moral is what you should or ought to do, where should and ought both entail a debt one has the obligation to pay. Note that this doesn't make morality binary; actions are more or less moral depending on how much of the debt you're paying off. I wouldn't be surprised if this varied a lot by culture, and I invite people to detail the similarities and differences in other cultures they are familiar with.

What I hear from some people here is Utilitarianism as a preference for certain states of the world, where there is no obligation to do anything - action to bring about those states is optional.

I think in the Anglo Saxon tradition, actions which fulfill preferences but are not obligatory would be considered praiseworthy or benevolent. Perhaps people would call them moral in terms of more than paying off your debt, but failing to "pay extra" would not be considered immoral.

Let's call people who view morality as what is obligatory as Moralos, and people who view morality as what is preferable as Moralps.

Moralos will view Moralps as unjustly demanding and completely hypocritical - demanding payments on a huge debt, but only making tiny payments, if any, toward those debts themselves. Moralps will view Moralos as pretty much hateful - they don't even prefer a better world, they want it to be worse.

This looks very familiar to me.

Haidt should really add questions to his poll to get at just what morality means to people, in particular in terms of obligation.

"Utilitarianism" for many people includes a few beliefs that add up to this requirement.

• 1) Utility of all humans is more-or-less equal in importance.
• 2) it's morally required to make decisions that maximize total utility.
• 3) there is declining marginal utility for resources.

Item 3 implies that movement of wealth from someone who has more to someone who has less increases total utility. #1 means that this includes your wealth. #2 means it's obligatory.

Note that I'm not a utilitarian, and I don't believe #1 or #2. Anyone who actually does believe these, please feel free to correct me or rephrase to be more accurate.

If you want to completely optimize your life for creating more global utilons then, yes, utilitarianism requires extreme self-sacrifice. The time you spend playing that video-game or hanging out with friends netted you utility/happiness, but you could have spend that time working and donating the money to an effective charity. That tasty cheese you ate probably made you quite happy, but it didn't maximize utility. Better switch to the bare minimum you need to work the highest-paying job you can manage and give all the money you don't strictly need to an effective charity.

Of course, humans (generally) can't manage that. You won't be able to function at a high-paying job if you can't occasionally indulge in some tasty food or if your Fun-bar is in the red all the time. (Or, for that matter, most of your other bars. You'll probably spend a lot of time lying on the floor crying if you live like this.

While it might be morally optimal for you to ignore your own needs and work on the biggest gains you can manage, this isn't something that can be required of (most) people. You can use utilitarianism as a framework to base you decisions on without giving up everything. Giving up 100% of your income to a good charity might be morally optimal, but [giving 10% still makes a huge impact[(https://www.givingwhatwecan.org) and allows you a comfortable life yourself.

I don't think being perfectly utilitarian is something (most) humans should strive for. Use it as guidelines to influence the world around you, but don't let it drive you crazy.

Or to quote someone on skype::

[Considering yourself a bad person because utilitarianism] is like saying Usain Bolt is slow because he runs at such a tiny fraction of the speed of light.

It's not just people in general that feel that way, but also some moral philosophers. Here are two related link about the demandingness objection to utilitarianism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demandingness_objection

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/11/why-i-am-not-a-utilitarian/

The way I think of the complication is that these moral decisions are not about answering "what should I do?" but "what can I get myself to do?"

If someone on the street asks you "what is the right thing for me to do today?" you probably should not answer "donate all of your money to charity beyond what you need to survive." This advice will just get ignored. More conventional advice that is less likely to get ignored ultimately does more for the common good.

Moral decisions that you make for yourself are a lot like giving advice. You don't actually have perfect control over your actions. So utilitarianism demands that you give yourself the best advice that will get followed, and possibly explore strategies for giving yourself better advice.

(And telling yourself that you should feel guilty for not donating all your money to charity is just bad strategy for getting yourself to donate money to charity.)

For me utilitarianism means maximizing a weighted sum of everyone's utility, but the weights don't have to be equal. If you give yourself a high enough weight, no extreme self-sacrifice is necessary. The reason to be a utilitarian is that if some outcome is not consistent with it, it should be possible to make some people better off without making anyone worse off.

As far as I understand it, the text quoted here is implicitly relying on the social imperative "be as moral as possible". This is where the "obligatory" comes from. The problem here is that the imperative "be as moral as possible" gets increasingly more difficult as more actions acquire moral weight. If one has internalized this imperative (which is realistic given the weight of societal pressure behind it), utilitarianism puts an unbearable moral weight on one's metaphorical shoulders.

Of course, in reality, utilitarianism implies this degree of self-sacrifice only if you demand (possibly inhuman) moral perfection from oneself. The actual weight you have to accept is defined by whatever moral standard you accept for yourself. For example, you might decide to be at least as moral as the people around you, or you might decide to be as moral as you can without causing yourself major inconvenience, or you might decide to be as immoral as possible (though you probably shouldn't do that, especially considering that it is probably about as difficult as being perfectly moral).

At the end of the day, utilitarianism is just a scale. What you do with that scale is up to you.

What does the whole concept of talking about morality or human motivation using the terms of utilitarianism and consequentialism mean? It means restricting oneself to using the terms and rules that are used to derive new sentences using those terms that are used in the moral philosophy of utilitarianism and consequentialism. Once you restrict your vocabulary and the rules that are used to form sentences using this vocabulary, you usually restrict what conclusions you can derive using the terms that are in this vocabulary.

If you think in terms of consequentialism, what operations can you do? You can assign utilities to different world states (depending on the flavour of consequentialism you are using, you might have further restrictio how you can do this) and you can compare them. Or, in another version, you cannot assign the utilities directly, but you can impose a partial order binary relations on pairs of world states. That's all. If you add something else, then you are no longer talking using just consequentialist terms. For example, take the trolley problem. Given the way the dilemma is usually described, there is not a lot of sentences that you can derive using consequentialist terms. The whole framing of the problem gives you just two world states and asks you to assign utilities to them.

Now, you can use the terms of consequentialist moral philosophy to talk about all human motivation. If your preferences satisfy certain axioms, then Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem allows that. Let's denote this way of thinking as (1).

Or you can use terms of consequentialist moral philosophy in much more restricted domain. Most people usually use those terms only to talk about things they consider to be related to morality (a question how some problems become discussed using the terms of moral philosophy and considered to be moral problems while other problems don't is an interesting, but quite distinct question). When they talk about all human motivation, they use terms that come from outside the consequentialist moral philosophy. Let's denote this way of thinking as (2).

Now, what do you use to describe all human motivation? Just the terms of consequentialist moral philosophy or other terms as well? Let's compare.

It also appears to imply that donating all your money to charity beyond what you need to survive isn’t just admirable but morally obligatory.

and

But where does the "obligatory" part come in. I don't really how its obvious what, if any, ethical obligations utilitarianism implies.

Now, I know very little about what kind of theory of morality and human motivation you or Chris Hallquist support. Therefore, my next paragraph is based on the impressions I got reading those two quotes.

I think that your confusion comes from the fact that you think that Chris Hallquist is using the terms of consequentialist moral philosophy in pretty much the same way you do. However it seems to me that Chris Hallquist is using them in (1) way (or close to that), whereas you are closer to the (2) way of thinking. And when you think about all human motivation, then you use various terms and concepts, some of which are not from the vocabulary of consequentialism.

The very fact that you can ask such question "But where does the "obligatory" part come in. I don't really how its obvious what, if any, ethical obligations utilitarianism implies." implies that you are using terms that come from outside of consequentialism, because remember: in consequentialism you can only assign utilities to the world states and compare them, that's all. The very fact that the idea that you can compare the utilities of two world states, find the utility of the world_state_1 is greater than the utility of world_state_2 and they disobey this comparison makes sense to you means that when thinking about human motivation you are using (perhaps implicitly) concepts that come from somewhere else than consequentialism [1]. There is no way you can derive disobedience using the operations of consequentialism. Therefore, if you use the terms of consequentialism to describe all human motivation ((1) way of thinking), it cannot not be obligatory. I think that Chris Hallquist is trying to implicitly convey this idea. Using (1) way of thinking (which I think Chris Hallquist is using), if your utility function assigns utilities to world states in such a way that the world states that are achievable only by donating a lot of money to charity (and not any other way) are preferable to other world states, then you are by definition motivated to donate as much money to charity as possible. Now, isn't that a bit tautological? If you use terms such as utility function to describe all human motivation, why are such encouragements to donate to charity even needed? Wouldn't you already be motivated to donate a lot of income to charity? I think that what a hypothetical utilitarian person who says such things (a hypothetical person whose ideas about utilitarianism Chris Hallquist is channeling) would be trying to do is to modify your de facto utility function (if we are using this term to describe and model all human motivation, assuming it's possible) by appealing to what kind of de facto utility function you would like to have or you like to imagine yourself having. I.e. what would you like to be motivated by? The said hypothetical utilitarian person would like your motivation to be such that it could be modeled by utility function which assigns higher utilities to world states that (in this particular case) are achievable by donating a lot of money to charity.

[1] Of course, there is another possibility. That you talk about certain things using the terms such as utility function, and all your motivations (including, obviously, subconscious ones) can be modeled by a utility function, but those two are different, therefore impression of disobedience comes from the fact that the conclusions that can be modeled as derived using the second utility function are different from conclusions that you derive using the first one.

Many thoughtful people identity as utilitarian [...] yet do not think people have extreme obligations.

My impression is that most people who identify as utilitarians do not use terms of consequentialist moral philosophy to describe all their human motivation. They use them when they talk about problems and situations that are considered to be related to morality. For example, when they read about something and recognize it as a moral problem, they start using those terms. But their whole apparatus of human motivation (which may or may not be modeled as a utility function) is much larger than that and their utilitarianism (i.e. utility function as they are able to consciously think about it) doesn't cover all of it, because that would be too difficult. The most you can say that they think about various situations and what should they do if they found themselves to be in them (e.g. what if you find yourself in a trolley dilemma, and others), precompute and cache the answers, and (if their memory, courage and willpower don't fail them) perform those actions when those situations arise.

Utilitarianism doesn't have anywhere to place a non arbitrary level of obligation except at zero and maximum effort. The zero is significant, because it means utilitarianism can't bootstrap obligation .... I think that is the real problem, not demandingness.

As others have stated, obligation isn't really part of utilitarianism. However, if you really wanted to use that term, one possible way to incorporate it is to ask what would the xth percentile of people do in this situation (where the people are ranked in terms of expected utility) given that everyone has the same information and use that as a boundary to the label "obligation."

As an aside, there is a thought experiment called the "veil of ignorance." Although it is not, strictly speaking, called utilitarianism, you can view it that way. It goes something like this: when deciding how a society should be set up, the designer should set it up as if they had no idea who they would become in the society. In this case "obligation" would probably loosely correspond to "what rules should that society have?" In this case, a utilitarian's obligated giving rate would be something like

k*(Income - Poverty Line) where k is some number between 0 and 1 such that you maximize utility if everyone did the same.

I think you have to look at utilitarianism in a question of, "What does the best good for the greatest amount of people that is both effective and efficient?" That means that sacrifice may be a means to an end in order to achieve that greatest good for the greatest amount of people. The sacrifice is that actions that disproportionately disadvantage, objectify, or exploit people should not be taken. Those that benefit the greatest number should. Utilitarianism is all about greatest good. I don't think moral decisions have much place anywhere outside of what harms people. I don't think there is a moral element of utilitarianism but rather it has to do with the greatest good question. If we lived in a world where the ills were solved by that question I do not know that we would want to live in that world because it would mean the whole of humanity would exist on very little seeing as there are so many of us and much of the global economy is predicated on developed nations raping the undeveloped nations for resources, talent, and wealth. Utilitarianism by its very nature lowers all boats to a certain common stand and only raises boats when all boats can be raised which is not very often. It is a good survival strategy but may be not something to thrive on beyond survival plus some culture and a small amount of leisure.

Utilitarianism is a normative ethical theory. Normative ethical theories tell you what to do (or, in the case of virtue ethics, tell you what kind of person to be). In the specific case of utilitarianism, it holds that the right thing to do (i.e. what you ought to do) is maximize world utility. In the current world, there are many people who could sacrifice a lot to generate even more world utility. Utilitarianism holds that they should do so, therefore it is demanding.

As I understand it, and in my just-made-up-now terminology, there are two different kinds of utilitarianism, Normative, and Descriptive. In Normative, you try to figure out the best possible action and you must do that action. In Descriptive, you don't have to always do the best possible action if you don't want to, but you're still trying to make the most good out of what you're doing. For example, consider the following hypothetical actions:

• Get a high-paying job and donate all of my earnings except the bare minimum necessary to survive to effective charities. (oversimplified utility: 50,000)

• Get a job I enjoy and donate 10% of my earnings to effective charities. (oversimplified utility: 5,000)

• Volunteer at a homeless shelter. (oversimplified utility: 500)

• Buy one game for $10 and donate $10 to effective charities. (oversimplified utility: 50)

• Buy two games. (oversimplified utility: 5)

• Bang my head against a wall. (oversimplified utility: -5)

Normative would say that I must always pick the first action. Descriptive would say that these are some options with different utilities, and I should probably try and get one with a higher utility, but I don't have to pick the optimal one if I don't want to. So with Descriptive, if I didn't feel like making my self a slave to the greater good as in the first example, but I thought I would be okay with effective tithing or volunteering, then I could do that instead and still help a lot of people. If I were in a bad place and all I could motivate myself to do was to donate $10 to an effective charity, I would still know that's a higher utility action than buying a second game. Even a completely selfish action such as buying two games is still better than an action that is harmful, such as the oversimplified example of banging my head against a wall.

I feel that Descriptive is more practical, though theoretically Normative would take into account an agent's motivation in determining the best possible action that the agent could take.

(This was somewhat inspired by a similar discussion on the rational side of Tumblr from maybe a few months ago, though I don't remember exactly where. If anyone knows, please share a link.)

ETA: It seems that there are already terms for what I was trying to describe. Namely, maximising utilitarian instead of Normative, and scalar utilitarian instead of Descriptive.

The word "utilitarianism" technically means something like, "an algorithm for determining whether any given action should or should not be undertaken, given some predetermined utility function". However, when most people think of utilitarianism, they usually have a very specific utility function in mind. Taken together, the algorithm and the function do indeed imply certain "ethical obligations", which are somewhat tautologically defined as "doing whatever maximizes this utility function".

In general, the word "utilitarian" has been effectively re-defined in common speech as something like, "ruthlessly efficient to the point of extreme ugliness", so utilitarianism gets the horns effect from that.