A Defense of the Demandingness Objection against Utilitarianism
Author’s note: I came across this paper I wrote for Normative Ethics and rewrote for Pense, the Edinburgh Uni PhilSoc journal, a few weeks ago. And I like it a lot. I admire what I think I remember of my time thinking up this thesis – a wholly obsessed period of thinking on moral demand and whether or not it was fair. And I feel sad, partly that I don’t altogether feel as interested in the legal doctrinal classes I’m taking at the moment, partly that I’m not sure I’d be capable of coming up with something as interesting as this nowadays. I think this is one of very few valuable papers I wrote in undergrad. Enjoy.
- Introduction
A chief concern of normative ethics is demandingness in theories. Proponents of demanding theories say that any normative ethics must be demanding in some sense, as morality must obligate us to some standards. In contrast, opponents of demandingness argue that overly demanding theories are psychologically unrealistic and commit us to obligations that ask too much of agents. In the utilitarianism debate, this opposition argument takes its form in the Demandingness Objection, a slightly vague term meant to encompass the breadth of demandingness arguments against utilitarianism. David Sobel notes this vagueness and aims to pin down what exactly it is that opponents find demanding about utilitarianism, ultimately arguing that the Demandingness Objection is a red herring and that the only question of demandingness in utilitarianism stems from the doing/allowing distinction. However, in this essay I will show that Sobel’s attempt at nullifying the Demandingness Objection falls short, as there exists demandingness in utilitarianism regardless of the doing/allowing distinction.
- Utilitarianism and the Doing/Allowing Distinction
As a form of consequentialism, utilitarianism is only interested in the outcomes of events. In particular, utilitarians subscribe to the principle of utility, which Jeremy Bentham defined as the “principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question”, with Bentham clarifying that happiness to pleasure (Bentham 14). Adherence to the principle of utility leads to two notable traits of utilitarianism.
First, utilitarianism is agent-neutral: the utility of any given action is impartial and determined regardless of agent-relative factors. In any given scenario, all agents follow the same principle of utility and as a result must come to the same conclusions about which action maximizes utility. If I am to sacrifice someone to save multiple people, I must do so regardless of whether the sacrifice is a stranger or my own mother. Further, if sacrificing myself can save the lives of multiple people, I am obligated to do so as I must consider the scenario impartially. Second, utilitarianism does not recognize the doing/allowing distinction: for an agent to allow an outcome to come to fruition is no different than an agent doing something to cause the same outcome under the principle of utility. If I allow someone to be murdered, it is as if I murdered them myself, because the net utility is the same in both scenarios.
- Demandingness Objection to Utilitarianism
The Demandingness Objection to utilitarianism essentially argues that the standards of morality which utilitarianism espouses are too demanding on moral agents. There isn’t one explicit original source for the objection, but rather it gets cited as encompassing various arguments about aspects of utilitarianism that appear to be psychologically unrealistic. Very broadly, the Demandingness Objection can be laid out as follows: Utilitarianism obligates agents to courses of action that go against ordinary moral intuitions. This isn’t to say that the conclusions act utilitarianism comes to are bad, but rather that we view these actions as supererogatory: laudable, but optional. Some of the most extreme examples of these actions include organ donation, extraordinary charity, and martyrdom. Under utilitarianism, we are asked to follow the course of action that produces the most utility regardless of the cost to ourselves, whether monetary, temporal, or physical.
Moral philosophers attempt to respond to the Demandingness Objection in a multitude of ways. Some, such as Peter Singer, accept the demandingness, while the majority, like Thomas Nagel, Samuel Scheffler, and Garrett Cullity, attempt to defend some variant of consequentialism that is less demanding. Others, like Bernard Williams, still reject utilitarianism on grounds of psychological unrealism. The work of David Sobel has been particularly notable in that he denies there even is a Demandingness Objection to start with, and it is this argument that we will be examining.
- Sobel’s ‘The Impotence of the Demandingness Objection’
In his paper The Impotence of the Demandingness Objection, Sobel aims to clarify the argument of the Demandingness Objection and along the way attempts to show that demandingness supervenes on the doing/allowing distinction. He argues that all demandingness arguments levied against utilitarianism obligating what seem like common-sense supererogatory acts stem from utilitarianism’s rejection of this distinction. According to Sobel, we can discard the Demandingness Objection and instead focus our energies on the doing/allowing distinction.
Consider a kidney transplant case, in which we have a patient requiring a kidney transplant and a moral agent with two healthy kidneys. Our intuition says that the kidney donation is supererogatory, but at a demanding cost for the agent. From this intuition, the Demandingness Objection takes shape and argues that we cannot demand the moral agent to donate a kidney and yet at the same time, donating a kidney maximizes utility. Sobel doesn’t disagree that this is a cost that utilitarianism requires; he does, however, note that this is not the only cost in play.
Sobel raises the distinction between what a moral theory requires and what it permits. Not only should we look at the required cost of action for the moral agent, but we ought to look at the permitted cost of inaction for the patient. For the kidney transplant case, we are neglecting the cost that the patient bears if they do not receive a transplant: death. The fact that the Demandingness Objection only considers the required cost for the agent and ignores the permitted cost for the patient shows that the Demandingness Objection rests on the premise that in our everyday moral intuitions, this required cost is higher than allowed cost.
The doing/allowing distinction is the source of the Demandingness Objection, argues Sobel. Our intuitions against demandingness in utilitarianism come from our ordinary embrace of the doing/allowing distinction. After all, most people would identify a difference between murdering someone and allowing someone to be murdered, even if one could stop that murder. Going even further with the previous example, imagine that a moral agent is asked to donate their heart to a patient with heart cancer. Despite the patient bearing no responsibility for their condition, we can reasonably say that the moral agent also bears no responsibility to donate their heart. Through a utilitarian lens, there is no difference between the agent and the patient living due to the same utility being generated through both actions. Because utilitarianism holds that morality is agent-neutral, we cannot simply say that the moral agent can keep their heart if there is no net change in utility between the two courses of action. The fairest solution would be to flip a coin to decide who gets the heart, but if any one of us were to be the agent, we would think this to be greatly unfair to us. Sobel says that our intuitive rejection of the demandingness of utilitarianism therefore resides in the fact that we think required costs ask more of us than equally-sized allowed costs.
- The Impotence of “The Impotence of the Demandingness Objection” Objection
If we are to solve issues of demandingness in utilitarianism, Sobel believes we must reconcile our intuitions of a doing/allowing distinction with the theory. However, I hold that Sobel’s account of demandingness in utilitarianism does not encompass all forms of utilitarian demandingness. Sobel identifies a form of demandingness that I will call the demandingness of personal affairs. It is in scenarios like the kidney and heart transplant that this variety of demandingness arises. As we are obligated to ignore our personal affairs in favor of maximizing utility, we can be asked to perform supererogatory acts such as sacrificing our own life to donate multiple life-saving organs. This is perhaps on the extreme side of the possible costs of utilitarianism, but it illustrates the point: we’re demanded to ignore our welfare for the greater good as we cannot make a distinction between doing death on the patients ourselves versus allowing their deaths.
There exists at least one more form of demandingness that Sobel’s thesis does not address, which I will call the demandingness of shared obligations. This variety of demandingness presents a different intuitive objection to utilitarianism: that we are asked to act without consideration of other moral agents. Imagine we are again in a hospital, but with two patients who need kidney transplants and a moral agent with two healthy kidneys. The demandingness of personal affairs rears its head in this scenario as well. In the maximized outcomes, two of the three people in the scenario walk out alive with a healthy kidney. Once again, we see that utilitarianism’s commitment to agent-neutrality and the lack of a doing/allowing distinction create high levels of demandingness for the moral agent.
However, this scenario is different from the previous one in which the moral agent donated his heart, liver, lungs for one chief reason: we can further maximize the outcome by introducing a second moral agent with two healthy kidneys. If each moral agent donates one kidney to one of the patients, we now have an outcome in which both moral agents and both patients’ lives are saved. However, a moral agent cannot choose how another agent acts. The first moral agent must choose their course of action without consideration for what another agent might do, which in this case does not produce maximum utility and asks more of the first agent than is necessary for an optimum outcome. As Singer noted in Famine, Affluence, and Morality, “the principle [of utility] makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position” (Singer 232). We find ourselves with a variety of demandingness in shared obligations that is completely unrelated to the doing/allowing distinction; it is irrelevant in this scenario whether the required cost of action (donating a kidney) is greater than the permitted cost of inaction (letting the patient(s) die). Demandingness exists in utilitarianism stemming from the lack of a model for collective agency.
- Conclusion
I would like to state clearly that all I claim in this essay is a rejection of Sobel’s thesis: demandingness (and consequently the Demandingness Objection) does not reduce to a problem with utilitarianism’s rejection of the doing/allowing distinction. I show how the variety of demandingness that Sobel isolates, the demandingness of personal affairs, does stem from the doing/allowing distinction, but that there exists at least one additional variety of demandingness that does not: the demandingness of shared obligations. I do not make any claims on the merits of the Demandingness Objection nor do I make any recommendations for any forms of consequentialism that are less demanding. As someone sympathetic to utilitarianism, I do find the demandingness of personal affairs to be less convincing as an objection to utilitarianism than the demandingness of shared obligations. It seems that utilitarianism must reconcile the potential of collective agency with the inability to predict the actions of other agents in some capacity to deal with this variety of demandingness.
- Works Cited
Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Batoche Books, 2000.
Singer, Peter. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 3, 1972, pp. 229–243. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2265052. Accessed 18 Oct. 2020.
Sobel, David. “The Impotence of the Demandingness Objection.” Philosophers’ Imprint, vol. 7, no. 8, 2007, pp. 1-17. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/impotence-of-the-demandingness-objection.pdf?c=phimp;idno=3521354.0007.008;format=pdf. Accessed 18 Oct. 2020.