On Utilitarian and Categorical Morality: Utility Prevails

This article was first published in 27 October 2020. It is made public for the first time here. It describes hypothetical scenarios. There is absolutely no intention of implementation of any ideas expressed.

Key Points:

• Morality can be categorized into societal level and individual level
• By theory of evolution, societal morality must be utilitarian morality
• Individual level of morality can be classified into individual categorical morality and individual utilitarian morality
• The sum of individual morality leads to achieving societal utilitarian morality
• The legal system should be revolutionized to remove the taints of individual categorical morality and instead focus on societal utilitarian morality.

The trolly problem is a common example used by many teachers to introduce students to the ideas of utilitarian and categorical morality.

I present in ascending order the variations of the trolly cart problem:

• You are at the helm of a trolly cart, hurtling towards 5 men working on the tracks. If you do nothing, the trolly cart will crash into the 5 men and kill them. There is a side track with 1 man working on the track. Will you turn the steering wheel to go on the side track?
• You are at the side of the train track and you see a trolly cart hurtling towards 5 men on the tracks. There is a lever which, if pushed, will guide the trolly cart to a side track with 1 man working on it. Will you push the lever?
• You are on the top of a bridge across a train track. Beside you is a very fat man. You see a trolly cart hurtling towards 5 men on the track. If the fat man is pushed onto the track, he will be killed but he is cause the trolly car to stop before killing the 5 men on track. Will you push the fat man?
• You are a doctor in the Emergency room. There has been a horrible trolly car wreck and 6 patients are brought in. 5 of them sustained moderate injuries and one is severely injured. You can choose to spend all your time caring for the one severely injured victim, but in that time 5 will die. You could also look after the five, restore them to health, but during that time, the one severely injured person would die. What would you do?
• You are a transplant surgeon in the Operating Room. You have 5 patients each in deperate need of an organ transplant in order to survive. One need a heart, one a lung, one a kidney, one a liver and the fifth a pancreas. But you have no organ donors. You are about to see them die when you see a perfectly healthy guy in the next room who came in for checkup. When he is taking a nap, you could very quietly take out the five organs, killing the person, but save the five. Would you do it?

While the level of involvement in these 5 cases are different, the utilitarian principles of the case has not changed. It is about maximizing overall happiness even if it entails a smaller sacrifice. Many students who were presented this case would agree to kill for the greater good, but would stop at some point in the variations of the problem. They are taught that the reason why they are unable to bring themselves to kill the healthy patient to save other 5 is due to the idea of categorical morality. Categorical morality argues that there are some actions in the world are universally wrong, regardless of the outcome of the action. Therefore, even if killing a healthy patient saves 5 lives, it is still wrong to do so.

I argue that humanity, as a collective entity, should fervently denounce categorical morality and instead embrace unwavering utilitarianism. But humans, as an individual, should use categorical morality as a limited tool.

Understanding humanity’s societal utilitarian morality

First, the question we must ask ourselves is: What is the purpose of morality? To answer this, we go back to the fundamental theory of evolution. Darwin’s theory of evolution suggests that same variations within a population confers a competitive advantage, leading to greater chance of survival and hence greater chance for reproduction. Over millions of years, this leads to the changes in the characteristics of organisms and if significant enough, may lead to a formation of a new species. Humans are arguably the most successful species on the planet. I argue that one of the reasons for humanity’s success is its sense of morality. Human’s having a sense of morals ensures that each individual human does not undertake actions that harm other humans and hence harm the species as a whole. Therefore, morality can be seen as an “anti-self-harming” mechanism of the sentient human species. Being “anti-self-harming” confers a competitive advantage against other species which wastes resources harming themselves. This competitive advantage contributes to the establishment of human dominance on planet earth.

In this context, the answer to the purpose of morality for humanity is simple: to maximize utility for the human race. The fundamental objective of a species is to survive. It is reasonable to believe that the basic features of a species (ie. morality) are present to maximize the probability of the continuity of the species.

We have now established that societal morality should be based on utilitarian principles. The overall resultant utility must be maximized in all decisions made. But what about individual morality? Is societal morality the same as individual morality?

Understanding individual morality

With the understanding of societal morality, we can attempt to understand individual morality through a reverse engineering process. For the reverse engineering process, we can take inspiration from the emergent concept of multicellular organisms. The emergent concept is the idea that a multicellular organism can perform more functions than the functions of each of the cells combined. For example, the individual heart muscle cell is able to lengthen and shorten. However, the heart, as an organ, does more than just lengthening and shortening. It is able to pump blood in a coordinated manner. Understanding the emergent concept, we can now apply it to reverse engineering societal morality to understand individual morality.

After undergoing this reverse engineering process, we arrive at two parts of individual morality.

1. Individual utilitarian morality
2. Individual categorial/deontological morality

Individual utilitarian morality is individual calculations on the resultant utility of ones actions. It is important to note that these utility calculations made by the individual is based on the information perceived by the individual. This means that even if that information is, in retrospect, found to be insufficient or inaccurate to make a proper utility calculation, at the point in time, the individual is right if he makes the decision to maximize utility based on his own calculations. Because information perceived by a single individual is often inaccurate and insufficient, the “right” decision made based on individual utilitarian morality, can differ greatly from the “right” decision made based on societal utilitarian morality. Applying the concept of individual utilitarian morality to the 5 trolly cart problem scenario, the “right” thing to do will be kill 1 man to save 5 others, ceteris paribus.

However, individual utilitarian morality relies on information gathering, logical thinking, logical reasoning and eventual judgement. But humans are not always logical creatures. Humans are also instinctual creatures. Instincts are similarly developed during the evolutionary and natural selection process. Instinct provides a competitive advantage in critical situations where it enables us to make split second decisions which can mean life or death. This is especially crucial before the formation of civilizations, where humans had to fight in the wild to live another day. Instincts are in a sense similar to cognitive biases, it serves as a form of heuristic shortcut, enabling us to arrive at our conclusion and act in a much shorter amount of time. However, similar to cognitive biases, instincts do not always guarantee the best outcome. Without careful consideration of environmental information and without detailed and logical reasoning, the probability of a successful outcome is lower. However, the ability of instincts to make quick and split second decisions more than compensates for the lowered success rate. On the whole, human instincts improves the survivability of the species and confers a competitive advantage.

I would then argue that individual categorical morality is part of our instincts. Categorical morality is a set of moral rules that are ingrained in us (like instincts) when we are born. Categorical morality serves as a heuristic shortcut for our moral decisions. There are many times when a particular situation presents the individual with too much information. In these situations, the individual may not have enough processing power to draw a conclusion or does not have enough time to do so. In such cases, individual utilitarian morality fails while individual categorical morality prevails.

We can view individual categorical morality as a hard coded programme, which runs the information presented in a series of gated “yes” and “no” channels and then automatically derives a conclusion. We can imagine this “hard coded programme” as like a dichotomous key.

We can view individual utilitarian morality as a machine learning algorithm. This machine learning algorithm in our brains, combines the data presented in front of us with information we have experienced from the past. Using this combined information, this “machine learning algorithm” in our brains then makes predictions about the future. Following which, the brain evaluates this data to decide on the action that maximizes utility.

As can be seen, individual categorical morality is a much faster and simpler process, while individual utilitarian morality is a much more complex and resource intensive process. It is therefore, pertinent for individual categorical morality to come in when time-sensitive moral decisions have to be made.

Interplay between individual categorical morality and individual utilitarian morality

How then does one view the interaction between individual categorical morality and individual utilitarian morality? In the examples I have presented above, it seems that individual utilitarian morality always takes precedence, and it is only in time-sensitive critical situations where individual categorical morality comes into play. But this is not true. This is because, when students were presented with the 5 variations of the trolly problem, they are perfectly calm and they had the luxury of time to make their decision. Why then did some of them choose to use individual categorical morality when they have the time to make their utilitarian calculations? Why did some students, even when presented with calculated utilitarian facts, still decide to abide by individual categorical morality?

The answer lies in the nuance of how individual categorical morality and individual utilitarian morality interacts with each other. These two forms of morality are like Ying and Yang, constantly fighting for dominance. We have previously established that on a societal level should always operate on utilitarian morality (for the sake of the survival of the species). As logical individuals, our goals should also be to achieve individual utilitarian morality. Consider individual utilitarian morality as the ideal, something each human strives for. However, individual categorical morality serves as barrier to achieve that utilitarian ideal.

Categorical/deontological morality deals with rules. We should then apply our experiences with everyday rules to better understand categorical morality. I propose two points regarding rules,

1. Rules are made to be broken
2. Not all rules are created equal, rules do not operate an all or none system

Before we embark on the journey on exploring how human constructed rules applies to morality, it is important to note the fundamental difference between instinctual rules (categorical morality) and man-made rules (not eating in the library). As mentioned before, instinctual rules are hard coded in us, it is in our genes — an example being the article “Epigenetics and the evolution of instincts”. This is fundamentally different from man-made rules which are spoken to us because man-made rules are coded verbally, and this coding is much weaker than the hard coded rules in categorical morality.

Now, on the first point: “Rules are made to be broken”. The rule breaking culture is prevalent in many places, in schools, at work, or even at the cinema. The antagonist to rule-breaking, is the enforcement of punishment. As a result, the process of rule-breaking becomes a very logical decision. An individual will consider the benefits gained from breaking a rule while considering the risk of getting caught and the severity of the punishment involved. If an individual weighs the benefit of rule-breaking as greater than the risk and the cost of getting caught, he will break the rules.

We can now apply this logical thinking process to understand the interaction between individual utilitarian morality and individual categorical morality. We should see the benefit of rule-breaking as individual utilitarian morality. We should see the cost of rule breaking as individual categorical morality. To further elucidate this interaction, let me go back to the trolley problem. The categorical rule is: “killing is morally wrong”. Therefore, pushing the lever and pushing the fat man are all considered categorically wrong. By breaking this rule, we are faced with the punishment of immense guilt. But the benefit of breaking this rule is to save 5 other lives. When deciding on a course of action to take, individuals will first consider the cost of breaking the rule — to go against the hard coded instinct and also experience the guilt afterwards. Then the individual will consider the utilitarian benefit of saving 5 lives. Perhaps, with the utilitarian benefit of saving 5 lives, the individual does not have the courage to break his instinctual hard coded rules and hence will decide on inaction. However, if we were to increase the utilitarian benefit, from 5 lives, to 5 thousand lives, 5 million lives, 5 billion lives. The individual may now find the moral courage to kill a person to save the masses. It is immensely difficult to go against our hard coded instincts, and hence it requires a more than proportionate utilitarian benefit to give an individual the courage to do so.

Onto the second point: “Not all rules are created equal”. I refute the idea in categorical morality that instinctual rules are seen as either black or white without any grey area. There are nuances to categorical rules and these nuances affects how much weight and individual places on the “cost” of breaking that rule. For example, the 5 scenarios presented for the trolly cart problem, the act of killing is done in 5 different methods:

1. Steering the steering wheel
2. Pushing a lever
3. Pushing a fat man
4. Not tending to the severely wounded
5. Cutting a healthy man open and extracting his organs

We can then rank these 5 different methods of killing based on perceived severity. It is reasonable to say that “cutting a healthy man open and extracting his organs” is the most categorically wrong. From this example, we can see that for the general categorical rule: “killing is morally wrong”, there are similarly variations to the rule to distinguish the severity of the act.

“Not tending to the severely wounded” is morally wrong.

“Cutting a healthy man open and extracting his organs” is extremely and inexplicably morally wrong.

These nuances of severity in individual categorical morality explains why some students adopt are willing to adopt individual utilitarian morality in one scenario but adopt individual categorical morality in another scenario.

We will now combine and synergise two aforementioned concepts:

1. Individual categorical morality serves as a heuristic shortcut to make instantaneous moral decisions in critical situations
2. Interaction between individual categorical morality and individual utilitarian morality depends on the balance between costs and benefits.

In time-sensitive, high-pressure situation, point 1 dominates. Individual categorical morality will take over regardless. In time abundant, and calmer situations, point 2 dominates. The careful interaction between individual categorical morality and individual utilitarian morality is at play.

However, one may also wonder: in a time abundant, calmer situations, doesn’t categorical morality serve as more as hindrance to maximizing utility? The answer is yes. Indeed, in time abundant situations, categorical morality is merely a hindrance and we should, to the best of our ability, abide only by individual utilitarian morality. We should see the role that individual categorical morality plays in point 2 is merely a unwanted side-effect in order to achieve the goals of point 1. Let me explain further. In order for the human mind to achieve the instantaneous and split-second moral decisions seen in individual categorical morality, these categorical morality rules must be extremely potent, able to spring into action anytime anywhere. But because categorical morality rules are so potent, it affects our judgement in time abundant times even when we do not want to rely on it.

From individual morality to societal morality with the emergent concept

Now, having full understanding of the specifics and details of how individual morality operates, we now go back to the point the emergent concept, and understanding how individual morality relates to societal morality.

Societal morality can be viewed in the perspective where it utilizes the mechanisms of individual morality to ensure that the outcomes of individual moral decisions result in maximizing the outcome for the society. To explain this further, we can ask the question: If I was a person overlooking all individual actions, how can I ensure that the outcomes of the sum of individual actions is the most positive? The answer would be to use whatever individual moral decision making systems that statistically results in the most positive outcome. Based on the theory of evolution and natural selection, we can then believe that the interplay between individual categorical morality and individual utilitarian morality results in the aggregate of maximizing humanity’s utility. In other words, the sum of individual categorical morality and individual utilitarian morality results in achieving humanity’s utilitarian morality.

With this concept of humanity utilitarian morality in mind, the entire legal structure should be revolutionized.

The current legal system is tainted by principles of categorical morality — which really should only be relevant on the individual-level. The legal system is a societal function, and hence it should utilize societal-level of morality — which is utilitarian morality. The legal system should adopt the position to maximize societal utility and make judgements based on that.

However, there is also another important distinction to be made. While the legal system should make decisions to maximize utility of the society, the culpability to the accused and the severity of the punishment given should take into consideration individual morality. The judge, to decide the severity of the punishment given, should run through individual moral reasoning process (its mechanisms elucidated above) to determine if the accused was morally wrong at any stage of his reasoning.

To end, I maintain my stand that humanity, as collective entity, should fervently denounce categorical morality and instead embrace unwavering utilitarianism. But humans, as an individual, should use categorical morality as a limited tool.