Utilitarianism, Pragmatism and Selfishness
I recently posted a link to a questionnaire that seeks to work out how utilitarian people are who take the test. It's very short, and has questions that some may want to think more closely about the wording.
When I took it, I must admit that I experienced not a little cognitive dissonance. I'm going to be a little self-congratulatory here. One thing that I value about being a skeptic is that I analyse my own thoughts and psychology when staking a claim about anything. I really look to understand what is motivating my own reasoning. When taking the questionnaire about utilitarianism, I felt mildly uncomfortable in putting down some of my answers. This is because, with a cold, rational head, I realised I would give a different answer to the one I would give from an intuitive and emotional position. This is classic psychology, perhaps utilising the system one and system two thinking advanced by psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman.
I am perhaps a little selfish and morally imperfect. Well, in reality, I fall very short of perfection, obviously. An example might be one to do with giving away one of my spare kidneys. Now, if push comes to shove, I would put myself through an operation whereby I would donate one my kidneys to a close family member; but how close they have to be? Shouldn't I, as a human and part of the human race, donate one of my kidneys to any other human who needs it? Technically, rationally, yes. However, in reality, I'm not so sure that I would and this is because I fall short of perfection. I don't think I can morally rationalise it away in any other manner, as other people might do other than to admit that I am imperfect. Some might use this to debunk utilitarianism when, really, they need to debunk their own perfection. There is a pragmatic reality that affects our moral decisions. It is perhaps "morally necessary" or "morally required" (as the questionnaire put it) for me to do so, to donate my kidney to anyone who needs it, but I'm not sure that I would. My rational brain gets overridden by a selfish, emotional impulse.
I suppose this is actually one of the challenges to utilitariaism, at least pragmatically speaking: the fact that there is no end to the lengths that you can go towards being morally perfect. We should, arguably, be like the Jains by sweeping away bugs in front of us so we don't step on them to kill them. We can all be morally better all of the time.
Now, perhaps certain contexts would mean that my decision might be different. For example, if the survival of the human race required my spare kidney, or some other such urgent reason, then I almost certainly would donate that kidney. There is some arbitrary line in the sand that demarcates when I do and don't donate a kidney. And so, in this way, there is a tension that exists between the desire to be rational and moral, and I really did feel that tension: selfish tendencies towards self-preservation seem to win the day for most people. There is a cost-benefit analysis on the hoof.
I was acutely aware of it when answering the questions. I think, in principle, I am fairly utilitarian, but I do also realise the limits to such a moral philosophy. I'm more of a moral skeptic, whereby I believe all moral value systems fail in some (certainly ontic) way, such that, after 3000 years, we are still unable to agree on moral philosophy. As a result, we construct moral value systems and codify them into law. But they are all, essentially, imperfect in some way.
We are all probably quite different in what we would morally choose when discussing these things in abstracts, and in the comfort of an armchair, to what we would choose when push comes to shove in an emotional and psychological scenario in the real world.
Indeed, this is what psychological research also shows. Famously, a huge majority of us would pull the lever in the trolley experiment. This shows that, rationally, most of us are utilitarian in principle. However, if we have to push someone off the bridge to stop the trolley from killing five people, then the percentages switch around to be pretty much the opposite. In other words, our emotional psychology overrides our rational moral decision-making even though the moral calculation is identical. We think the calculation works until we have to do the pushing.
I think this is what is happening in the questionnaire. I am fairly sure that there is a battle in my mind between the rational self and the emotional self, and when imagining myself in actual real-world scenarios.
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