A Critique of Utilitarianism

A philosophical examination

M. D. Kwak

You’re standing in the midst of train tracks; a lever in your hand. A trolley is about to come and kill the five people lying on the train track – that is unless you pull the lever and divert the trolley to another track where there is only one person that will be killed. 

The question in this thought experiment is whether or not the action of pulling the lever is a moral one. I would wager that a lot of people – maybe even the majority – would posit it to be. Some may even argue that not pulling the lever – a form of inaction as opposed to action – is immoral and akin to murder. Others might try to outsmart the thought experiment and ask about the character and nature of the people trapped on the tracks. They might seek alternatives – such as derailing the train. Regardless, the framework of utilitarianism is commonly applied when it comes to trade-offs and decisions. 

Utilitarianism is all about seeking to gain the most amount of utility for the most amount of people. It’s a way of thinking that’s predominantly focused on the outcome and how much utility it entails. It’s not too complex, it’s intuitive and in many cases it works fine. Interestingly however, there is a side of utilitarianism that’s borrowed by supervillains and rejected by heroes. Thanos? – a classic display of utilitarian thinking. Batman? – his refusal to kill the Joker and save countless potential victims is a surprising rejection of utilitarian morality. I’ve encountered far more people who gravitate towards the utilitarian framework and for that reason here are three problems with it. 

First is the problematic nature of defining utility. Most utilitarians try to escape this by preaching the equality of everyone’s experiences and utility. However, this is simply untrue as there is no universal definition of utility. For some it’s fulfillment, for others their happiness and utilitarian calculus is impossible to reconcile. 

Similarly, utilitarianism can be logically flawed when we ask ourselves about where the end point of the utilitarian calculation lies. For example, going back to the trolley problem, let’s say you make the initial calculus and save the five people. However, if one of them is a serial killer that will cause many deaths, what happens then? Further, if the killer is known to exclusively kill oil corporation CEOs that contribute to climate change and the deaths caused by that, how do we act then? Just from this simple example, it’s evident that calculating all the possibilities in the infinitely long-time scale is impossible. Human interactions are far too complex and numerous and far-reaching, that one can never gauge the impact their actions will have and especially how much of a ‘good’ is produced versus the ‘bad’.

However, there’s a more fundamental problem with utilitarianism. At its core, it treats humans as instruments. Individuals are no more than a means to an end – an end that seeks to maximise utility. They can be treated however one wants as long as the outcome is – on balance – more favourable than not. You might say, that’s fine, as long as more people are happy than not, right? However, as soon as one is part of the minority that is forced to bear the ethical sins of a society, as soon as one is the unfortunate sacrifice for the greater good, utilitarianism turns into a brutal, scary and suffocating system. The individual has no value. It is only the collective mass of utility that does.