What follows is a vague explanation of why I think utilitarianism and other simple moral theories that clash with our intuitions are the best moral theories.

Compare the following situations:

Case 1:

A mother of Siamese twins is dedicated to seeing that they have the chance to live a normal life. When doctors in the US refuse to attempt separation surgery because they think the chance of success is too low this mother flies them to a country where they will attempt the operation. If asked she defends her choice by saying, “Any chance, no matter how small, of giving my kids a normal life is worth it.”

It’s my intuition that most people wouldn’t hold this person morally culpable if their children end up dieing. Especially if the mother was a former Siamese twin herself who has strong feelings about how bad it is to grow up that way.

Case 2:

Same situation except in this case the mother can’t find any doctor willing to perform the surgery (the babies only have one hear) so the mother carefully researches painless ways to induce death and eventually gives the babies an overdose of Valium and morphine killing them. Here she defends her actions by saying that her kids are better off dead than growing up as conjoined twins.

It is my intuition that most people would find the mother to be morally blameworthy in the second situation, no matter how genuienly she believes she is doing a kindness. Yet these two reactions seem impossible to reconcile in any plausible (consequentialist) moral theory that tries to only tweak our moral intuitions.

What seems odd about the situation is that standard (my intuition is that case 2 is fine) intuitions are apparently drasticly discontinuous in this case (I’m sure there are better standard examples that illustrate this better). So long as their is a realistic chance of successfully separating the children it doesn’t matter how small this chance turns out to be. Yet any rational individual who prefers any wager between S and D to U, no matter how bad the odds for S must prefer D to U. Surely it can’t be right that taking every instance of the wager between living separated and dieing is morally acceptable but that actually taking the straight out trade between death and an unsuccessful operation is a huge moral harm.

Of course people are likely to object that the ‘realistic’ requirement effectively functions as a bound on how bad a wager you can take. Perhaps it does but not in a way that is particularly useful. For starters this realistic requirement doesn’t seem sensitive to the badness of the condition being avoided. If we make the lives of the Siamese twins 10 times worse the realistic chance threshold doesn’t seem to shift. So long as the act seems like a plausible attempt to separate the children people are okay with it but as soon as it is a clear preference for death rather than this sort of life people reject it. Worse, the realistic requirement doesn’t seem to track real probability. Even if we had a statistician come on TV and explain that in reality the chances for success were astronomically low so long as one of the common cognitive biases we have in evaluating probability made it feel plausible that the operation might be a success I suspect people would still be okay with the choice.

While it’s not a convincing argument these points strongly suggest that what matters is the mother’s intention rather than anything about the actual chances for success or failure that our moral intuitions are tracking. So long as the mother is intending to take a big risk with her children’s lives so they can have a brighter future we are okay with it but once it becomes clear the mother prefers her children to die we reject her actions. Already this seems troubling, how can it be morally acceptable for the mother to have the intention to take any bet of this form no matter how bad but not to accept the rational consequence of these beliefs? Even taking the ‘realistic’ restriction seriously this means the mother is implicitly valuing death as only a slightly worse consequence than living with the disability. But then what happens if her next pregnancy results in children who face a life that is significantly more horrible than these children? Surely we can’t combine the acceptable belief about the first children, with a fact about how much worse the lives of her new children will be to get the ‘unacceptable’ conclusion that she should kill these children.

Now while these intuitions don’t seem to make any sense as serious moral considerations (even in a deontic sense as they seem to punish rationality) they make perfect sense as applied social rules. As a pragmatic manner we aren’t going to be able to agree on risks and harms well enough to second guess the trade offs people choose. However, there is a strong need to prevent people from doing dastardly things under the guise of moral tradeoffs. We don’t want people to get away with putting their aged rich father down when he is unconscious with probably correctable problem on the grounds that any chance of brain damage is worse than death.

If this was an isolated example that would be one thing but this seems to be characteristic of our moral intuitions. Our intuitions just don’t seem to make sense as guides to abstract moral rules, rather they are pretty clearly rules of thumb that when applied in common situations give good results. The upshot of this is that it seems deeply mistaken to try to closely track these intuitions in developing our moral theory. Rather then trying to avoid clashes between our moral theories and intuitions in unlikely cases (killing depressed people on isolated dessert islands) we should be trying to come up with the moral theory with the best theoretical virtues (simplicity etc..) that explains what our moral intuitions have in common when applied in standard circumstances.

In other words we should be looking at very simple theories (like utilitarianism) that capture our intuitions at an extreme level of abstraction (don’t hurt people) rather than trying to closely track each twist and turn of our intuitions. The fact that our theory disagrees with intuitions in uncommon cases is really no problem at all. There was no hope that our moral intuitions could be a close guide to any ‘real’ theory so the fact that our theory radically disagrees with our intuitions in uncommon situations isn’t a failure at all. In particular it seems deeply wrong to twist our theories like Rawls does to make sure they don’t disagree too much with intuition. The explanation that perhaps what morality is about is making the best selfish decision if you were to be randomly assigned to be some individual in society is a good start but we should then take that theory and see where it goes (I think it implies utilitarianism) not try to back fit it to our intuitions so it comes up with the ‘right’ answers.