Isn’t Morality Obvious?
If you do not take all your moral teachings from an organized religion, it is very likely that you explicitly or implicitly believe that goodness is the maximization of human well-being. An example of this would be the trolley problem. There is a train barreling down a track towards two potential paths: one with a single person and the other with five people. You must decide which path to send the train down. If your intuition tells you to sacrifice the one person, then you probably accept this maxim. If you are religious, I would ask you to try justifying that decision within the bounds of your beliefs. This maxim offers very straightforward solutions to complex scenarios and feels intuitively correct, so we reason that if we follow this rule, we will be good. But what if that’s wrong?
We will call this maxim, that goodness is the maximization of human well-being, the utility maxim. I will attempt to demonstrate that this maxim calls good people evil and requires inordinate sacrifice.
The first idea that needs to be accepted is that a human being dying does not maximize the well-being of said human. This is intuitive; we believe that in most cases in which people wish to die, they are experiencing some form of mental illness. We also intuitively believe that someone dying is worse than losing something not morally important to us, such as expensive clothing, shoes, or iPhones. For example, you would likely rather save a child than buy a new iPhone. The intuitive belief is that human life is worth more than material items we can comfortably live without. Our final idea is that we can find reliable charities to donate money to that will save lives in developing countries (such as by buying mosquito nets in areas ravaged by malaria or by providing food to starving populations). Let us summarize the ideas established in this paragraph to take stock of our beliefs:
We should maximize the well-being of humans.
Human death does not maximize the well-being of humans.
We can easily prevent the death of humans by donating to charity.
So we conclude:
We MUST donate all our disposable income to charity to be good people.
But wait! 4 is asking a lot of us. We cannot buy a new computer, clothes, shoes, or food and drinks unless it is absolutely necessary for our survival. You are evil if you waste money on anything like this! We could argue that we are not perfect, but we should strive for the ideal. However, this does not apply to anyone who is not making a reasonable attempt at living up to the maxim.
Now I will come clean: I don’t think you are evil. But this should prompt serious consideration for anyone who accepts the utility maxim. Why aren’t you evil? Premise 2 can be objected to on religious grounds (after death we go to heaven, so death can actually increase well-being), but if you do not hold such a belief, you should accept premise 2. Premise 3 is a descriptive claim about reality that is true; in other words, there is no room to disagree. So you must dispute premise 1, our utility maxim. But as we established, this is most people’s most basic belief about goodness.
This topic is what really sparked my interest in ethics and meta-ethics. I hope that it has offered you something to think about in regard to your ideas about right and wrong, good and evil.
