Morality Part 5: Moral math

PAIN/PLEASURE CALCULUS

For argument’s sake, let’s select some objectively immoral actions and see how they stand the test. Granted that I seem to be skipping past the proof to the conclusion if I say I already have some objectively immoral actions we can test, but realistically there are actions that are universally held to be wrong by all religions and all cultures. That is, certain actions have already been tested by experience and been universally accepted as wrong/bad/immoral. Stealing, murder and lying would fall into this category, or at least they would fall into this category if we specify stealing something we don’t need from someone who does need it, murdering an innocent child at random, and lying about an innocent person to cover our own guilt.

Stealing something we don’t need from someone who does need it should be a confined enough wording of a commandment against stealing to be fairly unshakeable. If Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving family, one might be able to condone the action. But a rich guy stealing a loaf of bread from Jean Valjean’s sister’s starving family is pretty nasty, and that’s what we’re evaluating. In terms of pain, we are inflicting a lot of pain on a number of people, in return for the rather minor pleasure of the act of stealing by the rich guy plus that rich guy’s enjoyment of the bread. His enjoyment of the bread < sister’s family’s enjoyment of the bread, so his enjoyment of the bread < pain of sister’s family not having the bread. No matter how you evaluate the math, the act of stealing the bread seems to result in more pain than pleasure, so by the (admittedly vague) measure of the calculus we’re using, it would be an immoral act.

Murdering an innocent child at random takes the act of murder and removes any chance of it being justifiable, as in, say, self-defense. The murder of the innocent child causes the pain of that death plus the pain of the loss felt by the child’s family, which is easily measurable as less than the pleasure of the presumably psychotic killer performing the action. No matter how you evaluate the math, the act of murdering an innocent child at random seems to result in more pain than pleasure, so by the measure of the calculus we’re using, it would be an immoral act.

Lying about an innocent person to cover our own guilt, like the other two examples, is worded in such a way that there can be no doubt, instinctively, that it is an immoral action. But does it satisfy our calculus? Let’s assume that a crime was committed by Person A. Person B, for some reason, was arrested for the crime and is now on trial. Guilty Person A is called as an eyewitness to the crime, and fingers innocent Person B as the perpetrator. As a result, Person B is found guilty, and punished for the crime. Person A enjoys a certain amount of pleasure, while Person B suffers a certain amount of pain. But what if the situation is reversed and the guilty Person A is arrested and the innocent Person B testifies, and Person A is found guilty and punished? Isn’t the amount of pleasure and pain identical? According to the calculus as we’ve presented it, wouldn’t the lying here give us no net surplus on either side? Sure, you might be able to dig up some extra pain, for instance the guilty conscience bothering Person A after the fact, but that’s stretching it. Take it on face, and it’s pleasure = pain. Since pleasure and pain are being churned up, we couldn’t call this amoral, but we would, with no other tools to judge by, be unable to perform the required measurement calculus on the action.

You will suggest that our example is faulty, and that is the problem. But I would reply that, even if you can find a flaw here, sooner or later we could come up with a flawless example that would lead to the same conclusion. That pleasure and pain might be undeterminable doesn’t even become an issue at the point where, even if they are determinable, we can’t see how something we “know” is patently immoral does not register as immoral when we analyze it. Pleasure and pain alone do not seem to be enough to measure the morality of the action.

What is missing in the example of the false witness? Simple enough: culpability. The wrong persons receive both the pain and the pleasure. They have not earned these results. Their pleasure and pain are not warranted.

Can we throw something into our vague calculus to cover this contingency? Can we add that the pleasure and pain must be warranted? It seems that we have no choice. But the problem is that we’re getting further and further from a workable formula for determining morality. We’ve already sailed past the indeterminate nature of some pleasure and pain, and now we’re adding that the pleasure and pain must be deserved. That’s asking an awful lot of an attempt at a simple formula. Yet we need a simple formula; a complicated, Byzantine calculus would not be particularly useful to the moral practitioner, and would only satisfy the ruminator with lots of time and, perhaps, no horse in the race.

Killing one innocent person to save the lives of more innocent people, the 2008 Sept-Oct resolution, seems to succeed on the overall less pain premise but fail on the warranted pain premise. The one innocent person, by virtue of the inherent innocence, has done nothing to warrant the pain of being killed, aside from fitting the calculus of 1 < more than 1. By this logic, killing one innocent person would be immoral on face, the other innocent persons notwithstanding. The example of one innocent and totally healthy person being eviscerated for transplantable body parts for five other innocent albeit sick persons epitomizes this category: there’s a net gain in pleasure or a net loss of pain, but the one healthy person has not warranted being eviscerated.

Nevertheless, plenty of complicated situations can be evaluated through the pleasure/pain calculus. Is it moral to sacrifice your own life to save the lives of many other people? If we can assume a base of equal innocence, then this would seem to result in a net gain of pleasure over pain. If I am very old and the others are very young, it almost seems to become a mandate, given the vast amount of potential pleasure > my personal old-guy pain. And plenty of situations seem to resist evaluation through the pleasure/pain calculus. Even if we knew every single aspect, every single variable of the pleasure and pain on all sides, we wouldn’t be able to make it work unless we also included warrant in the calculation. This can, perhaps, be done, but by no math easily available to the rational person attempting to make a moral decision on the fly. And let’s face it: many moral decisions must be made quickly. Practical philosophers may not have a lifetime to choreograph all the angels dancing on the head of the proverbial pin. There is no value to tests of morality that are virtually impossible to perform.

So, pleasure/pain can be used. Sometimes, in some very clear or very simple circumstances. Sometimes, however, it does not appear as if it will work. We need to look somewhere else.