Moral Reasoning and Moral Intuitions

I initially set out to write a series of arguments about why abortion was murder that would be acceptable to atheists. I had prepared a series of rational arguments, with no appeal to the human soul or any aspect of inherent worth, in the analytic style. It was a punishing task. The arguments were long, annoying to read, and ultimately unsatisfying — only to the point of whether a fetus was a human being. If the imagined interlocutor said at the end of it “so what? It would be fine to kill them anyway,” I had no response.

This led me to a slightly different topic, which is investigating why atheists, who are for the most part consequentialist utilitarians, think killing people is wrong in general. Note that there is a difference between rule utilitarians, who believe that ethical actors follow the set of rules that tends to produce the greatest utility (and have a much easier time handling the objections I will raise here) and act utilitarians, who believe that ethical actors act in a way that produces the greatest utility.

If asked “why is it wrong to kill a person?” a utilitarian might answer that it decreases the total amount of utility (however defined, utility is generally assumed to inhere in conscious beings) in the world. This has the troubling implication that the best thing we could do to increase total utility is to increase the population as much as possible, even if each individual person suffers greatly for it. This is frequently referred to as the “repugnant conclusion,” because we would never choose to live on a world containing 300 billion miserable people over one with 100,000 happy people who experience paradise. It violates our intuitions about what makes a good life.

While some utilitarians accept the Repugnant Conclusion and argue that it only sounds repugnant, many try to avoid it. One way they do this is by appealing to the idea of negative utility. If a person experiences more suffering than utility over the course of their life, they do not increase total utility, which avoids the Repugnant Conclusion by preserving our intuition that a large number of sufferers is a worse world-state than a small number of non-sufferers. However, the negative utility argument has its own repugnant implication, that is, because killing a negative-utility person increases total utility, killing on that basis can be construed as a moral act. This is where the rule utilitarian can get off the ride: because we never know who has negative utility, the optimal rule is “do not kill on the basis of negative utility.” Act utilitarians do not have this out, and in fact, many seem to accept that killing people they believe to have a high chance of negative utility going forward is okay or even good, as demonstrated by the push for euthanasia legalization.

If killing is wrong because it removes a utility-machine, thereby decreasing the amount of utility in the world, that suggests that abortion has the same ethical status as killing an adult human being. There is some existing object, with the potential to increase the utility-balance of the world, that is destroyed. They can say it is not a person, but it is unclear why that would matter, since it is at the very least a potential person and therefore potential experiencer. They might fall back on arguments that the utility of the mother would overcome the utility of the fetus, but it is unclear why this would be necessarily true instead of having to be calculated for each possible abortion. Or they could say that, although each abortion is an immoral act, a regime of legal abortion produces higher utility than a regime of illegal abortion.

Other utilitarians say that it is in general wrong to kill people because it violates their preferences. Under this view, they argue, abortion is permissible because the fetus (as an empirical matter, they would say) has no preferences about its life. But many people that we think are wrong to kill lack such preferences. Do newborns prefer to be alive? Nonverbal autistics do not have a preference for remaining alive that they can express to anyone — should we impute it based on their behavior, and, if so, why should we not for the fetus? Sleeping people do not have a conscious desire to remain alive, can we kill anyone asleep? If what matters is what they would want were they conscious, again, that ought to apply to a fetus, as well. How about anyone who has a preference for dying?

Again, the rule utilitarian can escape by saying that, since we can never be sure, the optimal rule is “assume people really want to live.” Although am I going too easy on the rule utilitarians? Why think the optimal rule is that simple? Why not “only kill when you are certain that it does not violate that person’s preferences”? That would more optimally satisfy preferences because it also sometimes satisfies those of the people who want to die (or who want to kill). Of course, many of them think that the optimal rule is not the one that would maximize utility if followed perfectly, but it should also be simple enough that it can realistically be followed, taking into account that our information is never perfect.

Having now laid out the utilitarian arguments, I find them highly unsatisfying, but that is not to say that they are bad. Many people are convinced by utilitarian arguments, and I have by no means covered all the possible responses to these classic objections. Utilitarian arguments can be highly sophisticated, and many of its adherents hold a complex-enough notion of utility to preserve our intuitions that not only pleasure (or absence of pain) and/or subjective preferences matter.

What I mean by unsatisfying, then, is that these arguments do not do anything for me on an emotional level, except for produce mild unease. They do not seem to have anything to do with how I experience wrongness. When you think something it outrageously wrong, how do you usually get there? By doing math?

Here is the answer to why it is in general wrong to kill people, an answer which applies equally-well to the unborn, and that I do find satisfying: human beings are important. We are loved by God. Our lives are sacred to Him. It is wrong to kill because we value human beings, and this is not a contingent product of our psychology, either. We value each other and we should, is/ought fallacy be damned.  

I doubt I could capably defend this position with “Facts And Logic,” but I do not feel the need to. Moral reasoning is about love, righteous anger, and disgust. We feel rightness and wrongness in our stomachs. I am not making any claims about moral relativism or the extent to which these feelings are the product of our social environment as opposed to ingrained in us by nature. But I do think the primarily affective nature of our experience as moral creatures tells us something important, that is, that there is something unusual and post-hoc about secular moral reasoning. Note that the primary way we proceed through secular moral arguments is that we go until we get to the point where our intuitions are violated, and then we stop and ask, “okay, what went wrong?” It would be deeply weird to attempt to divorce ethics from our felt experience that there is some meaning to our lives that does not boil down to pleasure or happiness, that we are meant for something more than “not harming” each other. It is not even clear that this would be possible, given the role that moral intuition has in even the driest presentation of analytic ethical philosophy. Intuitively, our moral intuitions matter.

Part II, on the reliability of our intuitions and sensations generally, coming soon.