Utilitarianism - Part 2: The Advantage of Utilitarianism over Deontological Theories

Here’s the next part of my essay on utilitarianism.

Although utilitarianism seems plausible enough, it should not be accepted without first looking at alternate theories. A comparison with virtue ethics is difficult as virtue ethics examines issues surrounding the character of moral agents while most other theories deal with their behaviour. Since deontological theories are concerned with the behaviour of moral agents, a comparison between them and utilitarianism may be more productive. Although utilitarianism is strictly concerned with outcomes, the behaviour of moral agents does have an effect on these outcomes whereas their character does not (or only does so through their behaviour).

There are several types of deontological theory but two of the most popular are Kantian and contract theories. Kantian theories hold that rules should be followed if and only if it would still be possible to follow that rule if everyone tried to follow it. Consider the rule ‘it is alright to break promises,’ for example. If everyone broke their promises, soon enough it would be meaningless to make promises in the first place and it would no longer be possible to break them. Rules that can be followed by everyone are said to be universalisable. Contract theories are characterised by following rules that would be accepted by everyone in the moral community. Both of these theories contain rules that appeal to rationality. Kantian rules must be self-consistent while contract theory rules must appeal to the rational agents involved in negotiating the contract. Although this seems sensible on the face of it, there is a major problem with ethical theories that appeal to rationality of moral agents. To understand this, we need to first understand the distinction between moral objects and moral agents.

Moral objects are individuals that are capable of having subjective, conscious experiences. Moral agents are individuals that are capable of noticing these properties in others and rationally acting in such a way as to change their experiences for the better. We could say that the defining trait of moral objects is sentience while for moral agents it is rationality. The main thing to notice here is that these are not logically connected; they are neither mutually exclusive nor is one a condition for the other. (Sentience may be a prerequisite for the type of rationality required of moral agents but this is by no means certain. One can imagine rational androids or philosophical zombies that perform moral acts but are themselves incapable of feeling anything.) One can be sentient without necessarily being rational. Table 1 gives examples of all four logical possibilities.

	Moral agent (possesses rationality)	Moral non-agent (lacks rationality)
Moral object (possesses sentience)	Adult humans	Pigs, bats, very young children
Moral non-object (lacks sentience)	Philosophical zombies, androids	Plants, inanimate objects

Table 1: Moral agents and moral objects

Moral agents have duties to moral objects. The problem with deontological theories is that they only look at humans and so do not make the distinction between moral agents and moral objects. In doing so they confuse the two and as a result, they hold that we have duties to people because of their agent-properties rather than their object-properties. That is, we have obligations to other people, not because they are sentient, but because they are rational. Deontological theories that appeal to rationality are flawed because there is no logical connection between something being a moral agent and it being a moral object. Moreover, this confusion leads to animals and young children being overlooked. This alone gives good reason to prefer utilitarianism to Kantian and contract theories.