How should utilitarians think about the future?

Abstract

Utilitarians must think collectively about the future because many contemporary moral issues require collective responses to avoid possible future harms. But current rule utilitarianism does not accommodate the distant future. Drawing on my recent books Future People and Ethics for a Broken World, I defend a new utilitarianism whose central ethical question is: What moral code should we teach the next generation? This new theory honours utilitarianism’s past and provides the flexibility to adapt to the full range of credible futures – from futures broken by climate change to the digital, virtual and predictable futures produced by various possible technologies.

Keywords:

• Utilitarianism
• rule utilitarianism
• future people
• intergenerational justice
• broken world
• moral imagination
• virtual reality

Notes

1. The argument in this paragraph was inspired by a discussion following a paper I presented to the Philosophy Seminar at the Australian National University in September 2015, and especially to questions from Kim Sterelny and Steve Stich.

2. More restrictive definitions of ‘teach’ or ‘next generation’ are appropriate for some limited scope variants of IMOU. If ‘we’ is restricted to some class of moral educators, such as people professionally engaged in moral education, then perhaps our ‘teaching’ is what we officially do, and ‘the next generation’ is our current cohort of students. (Similar restrictions might apply if ‘we’ are people developing public education policies, etc.) However, these restricted IMOUs are not our primary interest in this paper.

3. Problematic boundary cases may still emerge. (What about people in the distant future whose moral outlook is formed directly by viewing Michael Sandel’s lectures on justice on some future incarnation of YouTube, for instance?) But I propose to set these aside here.

4. IMOU has richer resources to deal with partial compliance than any existing rule utilitarianism because it does not idealise to full compliance among the next generation at all. We idealise our teaching, not their response to that teaching – and certainly not their subsequent behaviour. The IMO is chosen because of how it would actually be implemented by real human beings. This prevents it from becoming too idealistic. Anyone who has internalised the IMO will therefore be well-equipped to respond to partial compliance, especially partial compliance with that outlook’s more demanding elements.

5. I have found no sustained discussion of rule utilitarianism and the future in the literature. A search on The Philosophers’ Index in March 2016 for works published in English between 1990 and 2015 that include both ‘rule’ and ‘future’ in either title or abstract yielded 128 results. Only two of these dealt with rule utilitarianism – and those were my Future People book and a review of that book. (One exception, which I discovered only after I had finished this paper, is Kaczmarek 2016.)

6. Post-scarcity technology, if concentrated in a few hands, might enable the few to easily dominate the many. If I own the only cornucopia machine (or I alone have the information that makes the machine produce the right things), then I might reasonably hope to impose my minority preferences indefinitely.

7. Another potential resource for collective utilitarians is the extensive literature on moral uncertainty (e.g. Lockhart 2000; Sepielli 2014). However, that literature is largely orthogonal to the concerns of this paper because it focuses on uncertainty regarding competing accounts of right action, rather than uncertainty about the correct theory of well-being or value.

8. My thinking about digital futures is especially indebted to Agar (2010, 2014). For general philosophical discussion, see Blackford and Broderick (2014), Bostrom (2014), Hauskeller (2013, 115–132). Some philosophically rich fictional presentations are Bayley (2001), Egan (2008a, 2008b); MacLeod (1996), Naam (2012) and Walton (2015).

9. Not all objectivists will find value in the unconscious digital future. Some will agree with hedonists that it is a valueless void. If we endorse an experience requirement (Griffin 1986, 13; Fletcher 2013, 210), then other list items (achievement, knowledge, friendship and preference satisfaction) only add value to a person’s life if she experiences them. In a world without experience, there can be no valuable lives. There can thus be value in the unconscious digital future only if some items on our list are not subject to an experience requirement. Of course, if pleasure has any value, then worlds with flesh-and-blood humans will still retain an advantage. But unconscious digital futures are now worth something. And unconscious digital beings can then outweigh conscious competitors – if they can collectively accumulate enough valuable achievements to compensate for their lack of awareness. Given the potentially enormous achievements opened up by the digital transition, this is not out of the question.

10. Predictability and freedom might also be closely linked to consciousness. Suppose consciousness must include awareness of one’s own freedom. Predictable beings are thus never truly conscious. If digital beings are predictable, then every digital future is both predictable and unconscious.

11. For a taste of the current debates about free will and moral responsibility, in particular, see e.g. Fischer et al. (2007).

12. The first version of this paper was written for presentation as a Paduano seminar at the Stern Business School at New York University in April 2015. I am very grateful to Rex Mixon and Bruce Buchanan for the invitation and for their very generous hospitality. Subsequent versions were presented at the Australasian Association for Applied and Professional Ethics conference in Auckland in July 2015, the Philosophy Department seminar at the Australian National University in September 2015 and a workshop on collective agency at St Andrews in November 2015. I am very grateful to Tim Dare, Seth Lazar and Samuel Mansell for these later invitations, and to audiences at all four events for very helpful comments.