I've realized as I write articles that I have been shying away from certain topics because I can't properly explain how I feel about them. All views have to come back to a source- morality. How can you decide what policy is best if you don't know what is right or wrong, what we should do? There are a bunch of different moral systems to answer these questions. And to understand someone's views, you need to know what their morals are.
Moral systems only make sense when they match up to some extent with our inborn sense of right and wrong- they have to feel right for anyone to truly believe they are doing the ethical thing. I can respect someone who follows their own conscience without any rules to guide it because we all come to similar conclusions. Still, intuitive ethics are inconsistent. We evolved a conscience to promote small group cohesion, not care for a global human race. After considering the problem, I decided about a year ago to become a utilitarian. Specifically, I am a positive total classical utilitarian.
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Here’s what that means. In short, I believe that good should be defined as that which increases utility, which I consider happiness as a classical utilitarian. The word 'total' means that I want to maximize total utility, not the average value across a population. Positive simply means that I am concerned with maximizing pleasure rather than minimizing pain. We sometimes use the Greek sigma as a symbol since total utility is the summation of the emotional states of all sentient creatures. Never before have mathematical series had so much of an appeal to me.
A couple simple notions drove me to be a utilitarian. First, the only meaning of life that makes any sense to me is to be happy. Not just experiencing physical gratification, but obtaining some sort of deep life satisfaction, almost in a spiritual sense. While my form of utilitarianism is sometimes called “hedonic calculus”, actual hedonism doesn't factor into it much- but it does matter! Second, I think a lot about the fact that any other random person experiences pleasure and pain as much as I do, and in that sense matter as much as I. I don't think anyone emotionally understands this; it would be quite a load to bear. Imagine feeling grief for every person who died today! However, utilitarianism strikes a decent balance between caring for others and caring for yourself, by in effect evaluating everyone as equals.
But there are downsides to utilitarianism. And, I suppose, one of the big ones is the consequence of having any sort of moral framework. Our intuitive morality is inconsistent, and it also has some troubling elements. It gives us compassion, but it also gives us a desire for vengeance that simply has no use for a utilitarian. What this all means is that what I consider right doesn't always feel right, and things that feel right aren't always actually right. Situations in which one person suffers so many more benefit can feel quite uncomfortable, even if hurting that one person is the right thing to do. Would you be willing to shove one person in front of a trolley to keep it from hitting and killing five? Most aren't, and I don't blame them. Meanwhile, utilitarianism frustrates our sense of tribalism. We all want to belong to some smaller group: a country, an organization, even a particularly close group of friends. While a little nationalism can keep people together, there's no reason to value the people in your own tribe more than strangers. And there's no reason to develop such biases in favor of a group that may or may not be doing the right thing.
In the end, however, I value consistency over intuition. Utilitarianism gives me some basic moral axioms that really do make sense, though it doesn't always seem that way. And I won't pretend I have all the answers. I have a long way to go towards creating a coherent worldview. Morality only gets you so far. But I have a place to start, and something to work towards. I'm nineteen, really too young to have a comprehensive worldview. But it's nice to know I have an idea of what is right.
