Alienation, Consequentialism and the Demands of Morality by Peter Railton | Notes & Summary
Summary
There is a dilemma in ethics: the normative directions which morality posits earn their authority by being rooted from a universal and detached view — a view which threatens strong personal affections and commitments which constitute the good life.
The goal of this article is to identify whether this alienation proves deadly for consequentialist ethical theories.
There is a cost to not treating things as ends in themselves. Consequentialism focuses on the importance of subjective states which alienates us from the inseparable objective states. Undervaluing the objective progress of bodybuilding for example would paradoxically lead the person to find less fulfillment in the subjective state. Consequentialism also collapses everything into happiness which alienates us from other emotions and experiences that are in-and-of-themselves Good. The author shows how optimization is categorically alienating because it separates means from the ends, causing us to devalue the means. (If you loved writing but then started doing it for GPA, it would appear less inherently meaningful) It is important to select the right ends in and of themselves.
The most devastating form is alienation from others. Utilitarianism forces you to step back from your close commitments and examine the world from a detached perspective. Any enlightened self-interest theory only encourages you to act if you can collapse other-interest into self-interest in some way, adding unnecessary barriers between self and others which is detrimental to your self-interest.
Just as we can see the limits of rationality through rationality, we can see the limits of self-interest through self-interest.
The proposed solution is objective act consequentialism. As opposed to subjective consequentialism which makes every decision on a consequentialist framework, the objective act consequentialist develops dispositions, traits, rules, heuristics such that he actually maximizes whatever Good is pursued. Many times, this means to prevent reasoning from a consequentialist perspective. The beauty of this theory is that it enables us to borrow the intuition from rule or trait consequentialism while being flexible. In short, we need to use prudence to examine the best strategies and stick to them (to a certain degree) instead of optimizing on every decision which is unnatural to humans. The objective consequentialist develops rules such as the golden rule by observing it’s utility.
Now, non-alienation should be given consideration but shouldn’t be prevented at all costs at the expense of other values. In fact, subjecting our first order heuristics to the base layer of consequentialist optimization from time to time is both healthy and productive.
The biggest criticism to this theory is that it causes a fragmentation of the moral agent. There are certain rules and boundaries where we must lie to ourselves to hold. “I will never do X” is incoherent in this model because it is always subject to the judgement of the second order optimization of consequentialism. It requires us to hold a multifaceted view of the psyche that we can believe in different and sometimes contradictory systems of thought. On the political level it seems to encourage noble lies.
Lastly, the author proposes what appears to be a great objectively consequentialist way to view our relationships by arguing against both the extremes of purely selfish Hobbesian atomic individuals as well as utilitarians who have an a priori duty to all other beings. Instead, he identifies that we are thrown into a social world with commitments and identities and there are close relationships where it is impossible to distinguish the vector between self and other concern.
It’s not that everything collapses into selfishness, but the sphere of “self” expands. “Our identities exist in relational, not absolute space, and except as they are fixed by reference points in others, in society, in culture, or in some larger constellation still, they are not fixed at all.”
Summary
Introduction
Living up to the demands of morality may bring with it alienation from personal commitments, one’s intuitions and feelings, as well as from morality itself. This alienation cannot be defined other than “roughly as a kind of estrangement, distancing, or separateness (not necessarily consciously attended to) resulting in some sort of loss (not necessarily consciously noticed).” This alienation is best explained through examples.
A primary part of this essay is to determine whether this alienation shows consequentialist theories of morality to be self-defeating.
This essay is a response to a famous piece critiquing utilitarian theories in general by Bernard Williams. His critique is that to engage in any form of utilitarian theories is alienating because it forces us to step on an abstract moral plane and view things from the perspective of an objective observer which is not tied to any of the human bonds we seem to hold dear.
1. John and Anne and Lisa and Helen
John, a model husband of Anne, when asked about his behavior replies “I’ve always thought that people should help each other when they’re in a specially good position to do so. I know Anne better than anyone else does, so I know better what she wants and needs. Besides, I have such affection for her that it’s no great burden-instead, I get a lot of satisfaction out of it. Just think how awful marriage would be, or life itself, if people didn’t take special care of the ones they love.”
Helen, a great friend of Lisa, explains her reason for helping “you deserved it. It was the least I could do after all you’ve done for me. We’re friends, remember? And we said a long time ago that we’d stick together no matter what. Some day I’ll probably ask the same thing of you, and I know you’ll come through. What else are friends for?”
2. What is Missing?
John and Helen seem to be moral exemplars reasoning from rightfully grounded consequentialist and deontological arguments respectively. Yet it is the personal dimension — what they don’t say — which makes their statements uncanny.
In the case of John’s wife, “she is being taken into account by John, but it might seem she is justified in being hurt by the way she is being taken into account. It is as if John viewed her, their relationship, and even his own affection for her from a distant, objective point of view-a moral point of view where reasons must be reasons for any rational agent and so must have an impersonal character even when they deal with personal matters. His wife might think a more personal point of view would also be appropriate, a point of view from which “It’s my wife” or “It’s Anne” would have direct and special relevance, and play an unmediated role in his answer to the question “Why do you attend to her so?””
Both actors show alienation rooting from a universalized point of view which erases the personal dimension. “It is as if the world were for them a fabric of obligations and permissions in which personal considerations deserve recognition only to the extent that, and in the way that, such considerations find a place in this fabric.”
“John and Helen are not uninterested in their affections or in their intimates; rather, their interest takes a certain alienated form. While this alienation may not itself be a psychological affliction, it may be the basis of such afflictions-such as a sense of loneliness or emptiness-or of the loss of certain things of value-such as a sense of belonging or the pleasures of spontaneity. Moreover, their alienation may cause psychological distress in others, and make certain valuable sorts of relationships impossible.”
The problem is partially caused by the false dichotomy between rationality and emotions. John’s deliberate self seems divorced from his affections. Yet, human nature is not so clean cut and deliberation and affection not so unproblematically separated. “His affection for Anne does seem to have been demoted to a mere “feeling.” For this reason among others, we should not think of John’s alienation from his affections and his alienation from Anne as wholly independent phenomena.” In other words, John’s alienation from his wife is caused by the perceived bifurcation between deliberation and affection which renders the latter a subordinate.
3. The Moral Point of View
There is a dilemma in ethics: the normative directions to the good life which morality posits earn their authority by being in a universal and detached view — a view which threatens strong personal affections and commitment which constitute the good life.
“Morality is made for man, not man for morality.” Thus if a certain morality led to irreconcilable conflict with aspects central to human flourishing, this should give us good reason to doubt its claims. It isn’t even that we need to give value to non-alienation in existing theories because the problem “seems to be the way in which morality asks us to look at things, not just the things it asks us to look at.”
4. The Paradox of Hedonism
To consider whether there is a necessary connection between being moral and alienation in a way detrimental to human flourishing we should consider a related problem which may suggest a way of steering around obstacles.
The paradox of hedonism states that people who pursue it directly can not maximize it. The hedonist when compared to someone who optimizes for his family, career, community seems to lead a less pleasurable life and he ought not be a hedonist to accomplish hedonist ends.
This paradox just becomes a tricky pragmatic problem once you separate hedonism into subjective (make decisions and view the world using a hedonistic criteria) and objective (act and view the world in the way which actually maximizes pleasure in the long run). We would call someone who pursues the latter a sophisticated hedonist.
The sophisticated hedonist must figure out how to act in order to achieve maximum happiness instead of carrying out hedonistic calculations all the time. The answer would be complex and contextual, learned from observing the modes of thought and actions of those who are successful in the hedonist endeavor.
The sophisticated hedonist might pursue a friendship for its own sake, realizing that calculations create less happiness. “There is no such natural exclusion between acting for the sake of another or a cause as such and recognizing how important this is to one’s happiness.” “He may also recognize that if it had not seemed likely to make him happy he would not have entered it, and that if it proved over time to be inconsistent with his happiness he would consider ending it.” This contingency and the fact that happiness supersedes/overrides the friendship does not render the relationship less genuine or effective because contingency is not expendability. The sophisticated egoist is not subjecting his affections and commitments to egoistic calculation all the time, simply because this expendable nature of viewing friendship is not conducive to the aim.
We can already define why its morally wrong to view friends as instruments: at the very least, it lowers YOUR overall wellbeing. Flourishing comes from meaning and meaning comes from responsibility.
Q: what if, in a certain scenario, betraying our friends will maximize our happiness?
A: the objective Hedonist would say that if your closest friendships are so loose such that you happily betray them at the first opportune moment, then you were never truly optimizing for your happiness.
5. The Place of Non-Alienation among Human Values
The quest for non-alienation is just one that needs to be given consideration to, not the absolute objective function to sacrifice everything else for. Non-alienation may conflict with duty to other familial values or relationships when the relevant sentiments have given out. Furthermore, to fully act on sentiments can be illogical and it might be beneficial to achieve some distance e.g. to examine our core values and commitments.
In response to William’s criticism of consequentialism, Railton says that alienation, while problematic when overblown, should not be pursued at the sake of everything else. In fact, a bit of alienation might be healthy from time to time. It may not be great for us to never step back from our commitments and examine if they make sense to us.
In effect, he is questioning whether it is so deeply wrong to consider our most intimate relationships from the perspective of a moral agent. Perhaps it is healthy even invigorating if sometimes we consider them from the position of an outsider.
6. Reducing Alienation in Morality
The most plausible morality is consequentialist in form, assessing rightness in terms of contribution to the good. Consequentialism is plagued by two forms of alienation. First, the belief that no things other than subjective states have intrinsic value overlooks the importance of the objective reality which is tied to those subjective states. This creates alienation from the exact objective states which grant us well-being, because we feel like everything needs to collapse into the subjective. Second, the tendency to collapse and reduce all intrinsic values into happiness, alienates us from ends in themselves e.g. friendship (human values are too complex to be reduced without losing sufficient descriptive power). Instead we will examine morality and alienation using a consequentialist theory which recognizes a plurality of goods.
We can again define subjective/objective consequentialism and a sophisticated consequentialist who pursues the latter. Such a person would believe he should act for the best but does not deem it appropriate to bring a consequentialist calculus to bear on his every act. And subjective hedonism is truly impossible for it entails you must to decide how much time to optimally allocate to make a decision, and how much time to allocate to make the decision of time allocation, ad infinitum.
Instead the sophisticated consequentialist develops heuristics: standing dispositions (e.g. character trait of openness), meanings and hierarchies of value (this is changeable e.g. the value of agency), and routines (e.g. the habit of working out).
“The sophisticated consequentialist need not be deceiving himself or acting in bad faith when he avoids consequentialist reasoning. He can fully recognize that he is developing the dispositions he does because they are necessary for promoting the good.” Furthermore objective consequentialism is not too vague as to provide inadequate guidance. It sets a definitive and distinctive criterion of right action (contribution to the good), it just turns it into an empirical question of the best modes of decision making as well as the best actions.
Morality and alienation are not always correlated, only when used poorly. For example, the willingness to ask moral question prevents an alienation from other beings beyond one’s intimate ties. “Individuals who will not or cannot allow questions to arise about what they are doing from a broader perspective are in an important way cut off from their society and the larger world. They may not be troubled by this in any very direct way, but even so they may fail to experience that powerful sense of purpose and meaning that comes from seeing oneself as part of something larger and more enduring than oneself or one’s intimate circle. The search for such a sense of purpose and meaning seems to me ubiquitous.”
Q: this ethical theory seems to preclude the ability for the moral agent to take upon any view or act in any way in the form of either “I will never not do/be/say X” or “I am doing this for your good” (if the consequentialism is to optimize for a personal good) even if both of these stances result in the best objective outcome. This is because there will always be a little voice in your head that tells you that whatever first order moral heuristic/rule/character you have inherited can be overridden by the second order consequentialist optimization. So you will start doing/being/saying X when it fails to be beneficial and you will stop doing the altruistic action if it ceases to do Good.
A: Firstly, it is plausible that we are of multiple minds most of the time. That we have different views and dispositions which are not fully congruent with each other so you can switch between modes of thinking.
Secondly, it is again called into question how bad alienation from time to time really is. Should a good moral theory propose absolutes as “I will never not do/be/say X?” in the first place without it being subject to some form of authority?
Q: Sometimes this ethical theory can’t be publicized. Think about human rights for example, it is arguably better for society’s function if we believed that humans had unalienable rights which must never be violated. This can be the outcome of applying objective consequentialism to the political level. “It might be objected that, unlike other theories, ethical theories must meet a condition of publicity, roughly to the effect that it must be possible under all circumstances for us to recognize a true ethical theory as such and to promulgate it publicly without thereby violating that theory itself.” But the proliferation of objective act consequentialism would break its own proposal (e.g. people would recognize that human rights are not in fact eternal and securely grounded). On the political level this view recommends that agents lie to themselves and engage in make believe plays that don’t reflect moral truth. It seems to be a bad result for a moral theory if it councells agents to lie to themselves?
A: That is not quite the picture the objective consequentialists would want to provide. It is not to actively deceive ourselves as agents but that we have different part of ourselves that can be used to our advantage e.g. on the daily and political level to speak of human rights while still violating it (interrogating terrorists) when necessary. But yes, leaders would be obliged to spin Platonic noble lies.
Q: The case where one visits the hospital and gives his reasoning “I am here because you are my spouse, and it would be the best if everyone treated their spouses this way thus I am here.” Isn’t there something profoundly alienating about this?
A: The moral agent has no need to think the latter part of his thought. That is one thought too many.
Q: what is the difference between truth-criteria and acceptance-value of an ethical theory?
A: truth-criteria is whether the ethical theory abides by moral truth. Acceptance-value is whether we should accept a statement. In objective consequentialism the two are disjoint. E.g. humans have unalienable rights meets the acceptance-value but not truth-criteria of morality.
7. Contrasting Approaches
There are many different types of consequentialism e.g. rule/trait and the objective/subjective divide splits between all of them. Subjective rule consequentialism holds “that in deliberation we should always attempt to determine which act, of those available, conforms to that set of rules general acceptance of which would most promote the good.” While objective rule consequentialism “sets actual conformity to the rules with the highest acceptance value as his criterion of right action, recognizing the possibility that the best set of rules might in some cases-or even always-recommend that one not perform rule-consequentialist deliberation.”
Yet, objective act consequentialism is superior because it optimizes on the most granular piece of pursuing good: every single action. It is also able to capture the intuition that have made rule/trait consequentialism appealing. In other words, it recognizes “part of the attraction of these indirect consequentialisms is the idea that one should have certain traits of character, or commitments to persons or principles, that are sturdy enough that one would at least sometimes refuse to forsake them even when this refusal is known to conflict with making some gain-perhaps small-in total utility. Unlike his subjective counterpart, the objective act-consequentialist is able to endorse characters and commitments that are sturdy in just this sense.” Objective act consequentialism is more suitable to the way people naturally make decisions (dispositions and commitments rather than calculus) as well as learn to be good (by empirically examining and observing).
The difference between objective act vs rule/trait consequentialism is that the latter still judges the rightness of an action as to whether it contributes mostly to the good rather than whether it stemmed from the optimal rules/traits.
Thus we run into a dilemma, a sophisticated act consequentialist realizes that certain goods are reliably attainable only if people have well-developed characters, dispositions, and commitments. Yet it is precisely these heuristics which make him miss opportunities for further optimizations. E.g. the monk who swears off killing does not kill baby Hitler.
Q: so what is our criteria for evaluating the rightfulness of an action?
A: We can resolve the paradox like such: since objective act consequentialism measures the good of an act as the overall contribution to the good, and any agents contribution to the good must be based on his sturdy decision heuristics, we should not condemn actions that do not seemingly maximize for the good if it conforms to sturdy dispositions the violation of which will cause the agent to be incapable of contributing to the good in the future. “In those rare cases in which the performance of even one exceptional (purportedly optimizing) act would completely undermine the agent’s standing (optimal) disposition, it might not be possible after all to say that the exceptional act would be the right one to perform in the circumstances.”
Thus we must take into account how an act affects one’s disposition into our moral judgements. (e.g. cheating on your wife with a girl who is about to die (wife will never find out and the boost of the girls happiness will be incredible) will be judged good by subjective act consequentialism for it contributes to the good, but judged bad by objective act consequentialism because it breaks your commitment to your wife, and the future good that will produce).
In this lens the ability to double think and intuition of when to eschew commitments seems like the greatest virtue albeit potentially impossible.
Q: Don’t these levels of optimization make it impossible for the average person to decide what to do and how to act?
A: On the contrary it makes it much more easy that subjective consequentialism because it enables us to have these first order heuristics and gives a pass to people who have conventional moral intuitions, so the person who doesn’t kill the person he loves for the sake of many isn’t penalized. Because that is precisely the disposition that will, on average, benefit someone in the long run.
8. Demands and Disruptions.
Due to the fact that consequentialist criteria of rightness is linked to maximally contribution to the good, one can be “negatively responsible” for any shortfall in total well-being that results. It is thus deemed very demanding.
“But just how demanding or disruptive it would be for an individual is a function-as it arguably should be-of how bad the state of the world is, how others typically act, what institutions exist, and how much that individual is capable of doing.” In a world where disaster relief is systematized it would make little sense and add little utility for us to help. Thus by altering social and political arrangements we can lessen how disruptive morality is. Furthermore in order to truly benefit society, we must secure our own physical and psychological wellbeing.
9. Alienation from Morality
Giving a convincing answer to the question “why should I be moral?” must involve diminishing the extent that morality appears alien.
We have a universal urge to “rationalize our acts and lives attests our wish to see what we do as defensible from a more general point of view.” Even if this is rooted purely from a game-theoretical process of hypocrisy, it is now part of human nature. Our commitments, if regarded by others as moral and valuable may deepen its value for us, “and may also make it possible for us to feel part of a larger world in a way that is itself of great value.”
The dominant modes of moral reasoning share a structural problem: they conceive of “a presocial, rational, abstract individual as the starting point, and the task is to construct proper interpersonal relations out of such individuals.” Reality, however appears to be inverted: we find ourselves, from the very beginning, in a network of interpersonal relations
On the one hand, “morality may be conceived of as in essence selfless, impartial, impersonal. To act morally is to subordinate the self and all contingencies concerning the self’s relations with others or the world to a set of imperatives binding on us solely as rational beings. We should be moral, in this view, because it is ideally rational.” In this conception it seems distinctly alien, as it removes us “from our actual existence, enmeshed as we are in a web of “particularistic” commitments-which happen to supply our raisons d’etre.”
On the other, we have Machiavellian optimization for the self. “Hobbesian atomic individuals are posited and appeal is made to game theory to show that pay-offs to such individuals may be greater in certain conflict situations-such as reiterated prisoners’ dilemmas-if they abide by certain constraints of a moral kind.” Not only is this not satisfying, as it appears best to appear moral while circumventing norms, but morality seems to be central to Man and “central to morality is the idea that others’ interests must sometimes be given weight for reasons unrelated to one’s own advantage.” Thus it may seem alien when we have to reduce to selfishness “why I should care for the direct interests of my friends/family/children.”
If we correct the structural problem and instead look at “individuals situated in society, complete with identities, commitments, and social relations.” “When one studies relationships of deep commitment-of parent to child, or wife to husband-at close range, it becomes artificial to impose a dichotomy between what is done for the self and what is done for the other. We cannot decompose such relationships into a vector of self-concern and a vector of other-concern, even though concern for the self and the other are both present. The other has come to figure in the self in a fundamental way or, perhaps a better way of putting it, the other has become a reference point of the self. If it is part of one’s identity to be the parent of Jill or the husband of Linda, then the self has reference points beyond the ego, and that which affects these reference points may affect the self in an unmediated way.”
Furthermore self and other interest aren’t so neatly separable. In this view, the self is defined and constructed by its relationship with others. Now of course we can still say: “this relationship is no longer satisfying for me, I should leave.” And also choose between whether to divert resources to a friend or to ourselves just as we choose to spend money on a class for dance or philosophy. Here is the subtle and important difference: the conception and mental model between self and other is in and of itself a way of alienation. This world view is necessarily alienating. It’s not “I should help my wife because that will make me happy and fulfilled” but more so “The relationship I have with my wife is an important, inseparable, and fantastic part of me and I should do all I can to benefit this relationship.” This may seem a trivial difference but it has profound consequences.
It’s not that everything collapses into selfishness, but the sphere of the “self” expands. The greater the sphere of self the more meaning, the more responsibility. That is why we cant differentiate the vectors of self from other concern, because self and other fundamentally become less of a dichotomy. To a degree this is backed up by empirical evidence there are implicit association tests which show that spouses consider each other as part of the self. Thinking about relationships as part of one’s being is very different from viewing it as an instrument to happiness because that view necessarily has to collapse that instrument to your Good Life which is alienating. Similar to how conceiving of the Good of everything as happiness is alienating: you need to collapse some activities Good in and of themselves into happiness (Developmentalism on the other hand chooses something just at the right layer of abstraction).
“Our identities exist in relational, not absolute space, and except as they are fixed by reference points in others, in society, in culture, or in some larger constellation still, they are not fixed at all.” Thus, meaning in life and meaning in language shares the structural similarity that they reside to a crucial degree in referential systems. Just as the meaning of a word is built up through references of other words, the meaning of one’s life is cannot be constructed independently from the social and historical context (think the Buddhist’s notion of dependent origination and how identity is created through reference).
“If the self loses significance for others, this threatens its significance even for itself; if others lose significance for the self, this threatens to remove the basis for self-significance. It is a commonplace of psychology and sociology that bereaved or deracinated individuals suffer not only a sense of loss owing to broken connections with others, but also a loss in the solidity of the self, and may therefore come to lose interest in the self or even a clear sense of identity. Reconstructing the self and self-interest in such cases is as much a matter of constructing new relations to others and the world as it is a feat of self-supporting self-reconstruction. Distracted by the picture of a hypothetical, presocial individual, philosophers have found it very easy to assume, wrongly, that in the actual world concern for oneself and one’s goals is quite automatic, needing no outside support, while a direct concern for others is inevitably problematic, needing some further rationale.”
Of course Man can live without caring about others, but it could be described as a worse life. Our answer to “why should I be moral” must not only consist in the indirect “wise selfish” benefits of caring about others, but to show how denying the significance of anything beyond the self may obliterate any basis of significance to construct the self.
“If we are prepared to say that a sense of meaningfulness is a precondition for much else in life, then we may be on the way to answering the question “Why should I be moral?” for we have gone beyond pure egocentrism precisely by appealing to facts about the self.” In a Frankl-esque manner, we have resolved the problem: if you want to live the good life, meaning is an inescapable necessary condition to be fulfilled, meaning only comes when you are responsible for some other.
“By adopting a non-alienated starting point-that of situated rather than precocial individuals-and by showing how some of the alienation associated with bringing morality to bear on
our lives might be avoided, perhaps we have reduced the extent to which morality seems alien to us by its nature.”
Q: what are the greatest objections to this theory?
A: This theory is very karmic. Karma is the belief that the moral degree of actions have future hedonistic consequences. We can simply use a promise of the Good life to guide people’s actions. But it is not quite clear that this is enough to restrain us to what our conscience demands of us.
The fractioning of the moral agent is the biggest crime one can accuse of this theory. Only if you embrace a multifaceted view of the human psyche and affirm it in a normative capacity can you agree with this view.
On the political level it seems to recommend disingenuity and deception.