I am a consequentialist, and while I am not a utilitarian, I am sympathetic to utilitarianism. But here I want to outline what I think is a slight problem for utilitarianism — I don’t think it’s disastrous, nor is it the reason that I’m not a utilitarian. But it is kind of a cool issue, and while it does not sway me, it is one that I know has swayed other people deeply.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that utilitarianism doesn’t seem able to capture the moral weight we tend to place on self-sacrifice.
Imagine, for instance, that you and your dear friend Sam are walking along in the city. Suddenly, an armed man appears, and he aims his gun at Sam’s head. He says: “I’ve got one bullet, and it’s coming for your head!” He then fires. You are terrified as you hear the bullet fire — you have a great life ahead of you, you are constantly cheerful and happy, and you don’t want to die. But you also have a deep love for Sam, you want the very best for him, and despite the fact that you don’t want to die, you do something truly amazing: you jump in front of Sam and take the bullet yourself. You sacrifice yourself so that Sam can continue to live: you loved Sam so much that you gave up your own life so that he could keep living.
It seems like what you’ve done here is the pinnacle of a moral act — you gave up your own life for someone else’s. You should be lauded for what you did. However, if we make some basic assumptions (in particular, that your life, had it gone on, would have consisted in a slight bit more happiness than Sam’s), then utilitarianism entails that what you did was the wrong act. You should not have done this. If we all care about right action, instead of applauding you, we should all be upset that you did what you did and wish that you had not done this.
But isn’t this absurd? How can such noble actions be wrong? Indeed, if we change the facts further — if we imagine that you were going to live a much better life than Sam — everyone should deeply condemn your action of self-sacrifice. By sacrificing yourself, you made the world way worse than it would otherwise have been. If utilitarianism is true, future generations should look back at you with regret, sadness, and condemnation.
Or, imagine that you and Sam are going to live equally good futures. Then the armed man fires at Sam. On utilitarianism, should you choose to sacrifice yourself for Sam, this means nothing — you may as well do nothing, there is no difference either way. Things are not any the better should you choose to courageously sacrifice yourself than if you instead choose to faint-heartedly run away.
The problem here is kind of a cousin to the problem of consent for utilitarianism: common-sense morality evidently tells us that consent has the power to “transform the normative landscape.” If you consent to being killed to save five, that isn’t as bad as my killing you to save five (without your consent), even if the effect on total utility is the same in both cases.
Put another way, we tend to think that self-sacrifices are deeply virtuous, noble, and good acts. And they’re not so wrong because, when it comes to your own well-being, you have the power to consent to it being given away to save another. But utilitarianism has a difficult time accounting for the virtue of such acts, because the virtue of such acts does not come down to whether they maximize utility.
What should utilitarians say in response?
Well, there are two kinds of replies: replies that try to accommodate the intuition, and replies that try to explain why we should reject the intuition.
I think replies that try to accommodate this intuition are implausible. A straightforward way of accommodating the intuition is simply expanding one’s value theory — say, by claiming that virtue intrinsically valuable. But the utilitarian does not have this option: their view just is that the only intrinsically valuable thing is utility or welfare. Now, they might try to accommodate the intuition of the value of self-sacrifice by expanding their theory of well-being: but it’s pretty implausible that self-sacrifice makes one’s life better.
However, even though accommodating replies probably don’t work, I think replies that try to explain away the intuition are much more successful.
First, utilitarians can make their standard distinction between criteria of rightness and decision procedures. A community where we encourage people to be selfless and to care deeply about others’ well-being — even beyond their own — is one that will tend to be very good and leads to more well-being overall. So it is a generally good procedure of decision-making to be selfless. But that does not mean that we should think there is something intrinsically valuable about selflessness as such.
Now, I don’t think this standard reply is quite enough to blunt the force of the issue: the intuition here seems to be that there is something intrinsically valuable about being selfless. This in some way makes the world better: it isn’t just a useful rule of thumb that we have internalized.
But the utilitarian can say more. As I have explained before, there is an important difference between right action and praiseworthiness. On utilitarianism, people can be blameworthy or praiseworthy for doing an act, independent of how right or wrong that act is — e.g., utilitarians are not committed to the thesis that one who intentionally harms another is equally blameworthy to one who unintentionally inflicts the same amount of harm. What attributions to make of people is a separate question from how good or bad their actions were: and utilitarianism is only a theory of right action, not a theory of people-attributions. So the utilitarian can say that you are noble, praiseworthy, laudable, and admirable for sacrificing yourself, while also maintaining that the world would have been better off if you had not sacrificed yourself. Of course, this would mean that you can be praiseworthy for non-right actions. But I don’t think that is weirdest in the slightest — you are presumably also praiseworthy for donating 99% of your money to charities that, according to all your evidence, are super effective, even if it turns out that, unbeknownst to everyone, the butterfly effects of those charities are, on the whole, very bad. Thus, we would do well to distinguish between how good of a person you are for sacrificing yourself, and how good your act was.
Indeed, let’s think carefully about the case where you save Sam by sacrificing yourself. If we’re saying that, contrary to the utilitarian, the right action is to sacrifice yourself, it must be not morally right to let Sam die. But that doesn’t sound super plausible … putting things this way suggests that the real intuition behind self-sacrifice isn’t about right action, but instead an intuition about what we want to say about people who engage in self-sacrifice.
But I also know that many do not share this final judgment — they think that it’s not just that the person who self-sacrifices is praiseworthy, but that their act was the right act! I’m not so sure about that. Sometimes I find it plausible, other times I do not.
I more or less think what you say about praiseworthiness is right. From the outside, I'd hope that the happier person didn't sacrifice themselves. Still, the fact that they do shows that they're the kind of person I have good opinions of--someone who does not put their own interests in front of others', which is the more common vice.
I think things like self-sacrifice can be thought of as "ethical heuristics"; they generally correlate and indicate good moral actions, and therefore our intuitions associate them. I don't think it's a huge bullet for a utilitarian to bite to say that self sacrifice is not necessarily good, and that your examples are ones where it is not. They are edge cases where the heuristic fails.