Utilitarianism
morally versus what we ‘ought’ to do are sort of connected but not always. J. L. Mackie famously claimed: ‘ There are no objective values. ’ 11
Nietzsche explains how morality is a mess. Some people see the utility of an action as demonstrating its morality whilst others see this as evidence of its immorality (i.e. Kant’s argument that actions are more moral if you are not doing it to bring happiness but because you want to do the right thing, hence a utility-bringing actionwill likely have selfishmotivations). 12 Nietzsche also points out in Beyond Good and Evil how intuition is not a reliable base for moral judgements. 13 We all think giving milk to a child is good, because our intuition says so. But there is no morality in this action merely because we feel there is! We might feel we should give moral weight to this or that, but intuition should not be used as an argument for or against something.
Nietzsche even had an interesting theory of why morality is such a mess, well summarized by Michael Tanner: 14
Morality as it is still practised derives from the Hebraic-Christian tradition, in the largest measure, which means that its origins are to be found in the dictates of the God of a small Middle Eastern tribe, and that its contents remain very much what they were. That immediately transcendentalizes them in two ways. First, their deliverance is a matter of unquestionable commands, for which the punishment for violation was at one time instant divine retribution. Second, since the content was evidently designed for the continuance of the tribe, whose living conditions were vastly different in many ways from ours, it has had to be made more abstract and disconnected from the conditions in which we live. A result has been that morality has in part become unintelligible, and in part has to be coerced into relevance by making us into the kind of beings to whom it would sensibly apply, even though in many respects we know that that is false. I like this quotation because it theorizes not only why morality is a mess, but also proposes that Christian morality originated from a need to survive – the ‘need to survive’ feels suspiciously similar to fulfilling my version of utility. However, it’s better to think of Christian morality as a trait of the tribe, which gave the tribe a survival advantage over other tribes, and that now this trait (of following Christian doctrine) is no longer helpful to your survival, its ‘morality’ is dying back. Morality is therefore an evolution.
If the circularity of morality ’ s many associations, and Nietzsche’s criticisms weren’t enough evidence , the Roman Catholic G. E. M. Anscombe wrote: 15
...the concepts of obligation, and duty – moral obligation and moral duty that is to say – and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’, ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survival, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it.
11 Mackie 1977. 12 Kant 1797: 10. 13 Nietzsche 1990: 12. 14 Tanner 2000: 37. 15 Anscombe 1968.
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