Thanks for the elaboration; while I am familiar with some of that terminology, it's good to be on the same page.
You posit that a utilitarian philosophy must be universal, maximalist, and consequentialist. I might quibble at certain aspects of the definition but for the sake of argument I'll accept this.
Given this, I would claim that Harris's philosophy, at least to the extent it's expounded in the video, does not fit the first two criteria, and barely fits the third.
Harris is quite explicit at one point that he does not view all moral entities as equal--he believes that the reason we care about entities in a moral sense is because certain creatures are exposed to a "greater range of potential happiness and suffering". There is not a simple threshold where some creatures are moral and some are not; they can be placed on a gradient. This is of course consistent with ordinary common sense, where a person might be willing to eat an animal but not torture it.
Harris is also explicit about not being maximalist. Starting at about 5:10, he talks about a "moral landscape", and is clear that not all areas of the landscape are accessible, either through science or other means. A while later he does speak a bit about finding maxima on the landscape, but given his examples (such as food vs. poison) it's clear that he's not talking about absolute global maxima but rather ones that are merely similar in height.
As for consequentialism, it's not clear to me from the video what his stance is. Obviously, using science implies a data-driven approach that does seem likely to be focused on outcomes. But any complete moral framework must necessarily include a practical decision mechanism, and it's clear that the rule-systems we come up with (maxims, rights, laws, etc.) act as a kind of computational shortcut. Harris almost certainly knows this, and I'd suspect would agree that some rules can be quite useful even if they occasionally lead to undesirable outcomes.
It's a specific kind of consistent value judgment, though. Kant would have you make consistent value judgments about which acts were right and which were wrong, and would have you do right acts and eschew wrong acts. That's consistent but he quite firmly rejects all consequentialist thinking - Kant is consistent, in fact, in holding that concern with outcomes is one of the things that we should not let distract us from what he saw as real morality.
Again, this is just semantic quibbling on my part, but I would says that a Kantian is merely a certain kind of consequentialist. All acts must necessarily have an immediate outcome, and a philosophy which operates on acts can be equivalently rephrased to act on immediate outcomes. The difference with a conventional consequentialist is that the latter is likely to look at longer-term outcomes.
or if it is, it's a kooky corner case that is utilitarianism only in a fairly debatable semantic sense.
I'm happy to agree with that. But I don't think it's an entirely useless exercise. When pitting things against each other, such as moral systems, it can be helpful to put them in a common framework so one can evaluate their properties consistently.
I think any moral theory that needs a spreadsheet is definitely open to criticism on the grounds that it's of limited usefulness, and even relatively straightforward utilitarian systems (like the
QALYs used to make health care decisions) are already somewhat open to criticism on such grounds.
Indeed. That was perhaps the first conclusion I came to in my college philosophy class. These systems can be fun in a theoretical sense but are impossible to use in a practical sense. Occasionally I play around with moral systems that take time and computation into account, but it's a hard problem.
I hope I answered this satisfactorily earlier, but if I didn't I'm happy to take another try at it.
You did, and thanks again. I'd like to hear if you disagree with my classification of Harris's philosophy.
- Dr. Trintignant
