Utilitarianism: an unfalsifiable ethic
The previous section has therefore given us an example of what a falsifiable ethic was like. What would an unfalsifiable ethic look like?
Consider utilitarians like Peter Singer, who backslide from obvious counterexamples to their own ethics. I refer once again to that wonderful TPM Portal Article. Singer was presented with the counterexample to his ethics where if you were to withhold insulin from children with diabetes, the result would be fewer diabetics in the future. Fewer diabetics would mean greater opportunities for the satisfaction of preferences, so why don't we withhold insulin from children with diabetes?
Singer is committed not to ruling out practices like this in principle, so he is forced to say that it simply wouldn't be a problem in practice. On the one hand, he says, you have the cost of providing insulin to future generations of diabetics up to the point where we find a way of curing diabetes. On the other hand, you have the suffering to the children and families who are denied insulin in the meantime. He thinks that the latter cost would be far greater than the former.
I honestly have no idea how he can come to such a conclusion from the utilitarian rationale he claims to employ. I seem to have just as much reason prima facie to believe that the cost of the latter would be as much as the former, or even less so, as that it would be greater. But one thing I do notice is that Singer simply seems to have overcome the problem by producing a result coextensive with a deontological rationale.
I think that what is therefore happening here is that he is exploiting a state of moral confusion. The source of that confusion is the commonly made observation that we simply cannot know most of the time what really will maximise the overall satisfaction of preferences. This allows a utilitarian like Singer to denounce seemingly deontologically wrong actions that he claims will not maximise preference satisfaction. Yet the only motive that he seems to have for arguing that this action will not maximise preference satisfaction is simply that it seems deontologically wrong. Furthermore, I think that that is the only reason that we ever buy into these defences of utilitarianism to begin with: Part of us simply does not want to believe that a deontologically wrong action could ever maximise the overall satisfaction of preferences. Yet there seems to be no reason a priori to believe that it would not, under certain circumstances. In any event, such thought will inevitably be misleading, because that surely is not the reason for abstaining from such actions to begin with. Correct moral thinking would thus not have us considering the consequences of deliberately withholding insulin from children in the first place.
This, then, is why utilitarianism is unfalsifiable. Because it is in fact impossible to tell which actions will really conduce to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the greatest overall satisfaction of preferences, or whatever other common standard of utility there is. If one cannot verify which action has the greatest utility, then one cannot falsify the claim of whether any given action maximises that utility--QED. A utilitarian can thus backslide away from any morally dubious action whatsover on the grounds that it simply will not be most useful--because the claim about the action's utility is unfalsifiable!
Consider utilitarians like Peter Singer, who backslide from obvious counterexamples to their own ethics. I refer once again to that wonderful TPM Portal Article. Singer was presented with the counterexample to his ethics where if you were to withhold insulin from children with diabetes, the result would be fewer diabetics in the future. Fewer diabetics would mean greater opportunities for the satisfaction of preferences, so why don't we withhold insulin from children with diabetes?
Singer is committed not to ruling out practices like this in principle, so he is forced to say that it simply wouldn't be a problem in practice. On the one hand, he says, you have the cost of providing insulin to future generations of diabetics up to the point where we find a way of curing diabetes. On the other hand, you have the suffering to the children and families who are denied insulin in the meantime. He thinks that the latter cost would be far greater than the former.
I honestly have no idea how he can come to such a conclusion from the utilitarian rationale he claims to employ. I seem to have just as much reason prima facie to believe that the cost of the latter would be as much as the former, or even less so, as that it would be greater. But one thing I do notice is that Singer simply seems to have overcome the problem by producing a result coextensive with a deontological rationale.
I think that what is therefore happening here is that he is exploiting a state of moral confusion. The source of that confusion is the commonly made observation that we simply cannot know most of the time what really will maximise the overall satisfaction of preferences. This allows a utilitarian like Singer to denounce seemingly deontologically wrong actions that he claims will not maximise preference satisfaction. Yet the only motive that he seems to have for arguing that this action will not maximise preference satisfaction is simply that it seems deontologically wrong. Furthermore, I think that that is the only reason that we ever buy into these defences of utilitarianism to begin with: Part of us simply does not want to believe that a deontologically wrong action could ever maximise the overall satisfaction of preferences. Yet there seems to be no reason a priori to believe that it would not, under certain circumstances. In any event, such thought will inevitably be misleading, because that surely is not the reason for abstaining from such actions to begin with. Correct moral thinking would thus not have us considering the consequences of deliberately withholding insulin from children in the first place.
This, then, is why utilitarianism is unfalsifiable. Because it is in fact impossible to tell which actions will really conduce to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the greatest overall satisfaction of preferences, or whatever other common standard of utility there is. If one cannot verify which action has the greatest utility, then one cannot falsify the claim of whether any given action maximises that utility--QED. A utilitarian can thus backslide away from any morally dubious action whatsover on the grounds that it simply will not be most useful--because the claim about the action's utility is unfalsifiable!
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