Utilitarianism is flawed

Morality Morality was unfortunately not defined. Morality has different meanings to different people and what is or is not moral is defined differently by various personal beliefs and asserting something to be moral or immoral quickly becomes subject to our respective biases. I personally no longer believe in defining individual actions moral or immoral but I recognize that many people can’t help but make the distinction and so for arguments sake, based on what I used to believe I would say that utilitarianism could accept some immoral acts for the greater good. Because to me the rule of morality was along the lines of "Do unto others what you want others to do unto you", I don't want to be tortured so torture is immoral. Let us examine this example, my opponent puts out the argument that a man who “Tortures babies for fun” could be construed as a moral act. I don’t believe anyone would view torturing a child as a moral act in itself. However my position as a utilitarian is not to debate morality of certain actions but the overall balance of happiness and unhappiness resulting from the said action. To demonstrate my opponent’s example on how torturing a child can be utilitarian I present this scenario. A terrorist has vital information that can be used to prevent a disaster causing hundreds of casualties, due to time constraints the interrogator kidnaps the terrorist’s only family, his son and uses him, to extract that information quickly in order to save lives, the plan succeeds and hundreds of people are saved. Even if say the interrogator was a sadist and actually enjoyed the act of torturing the child to illicit compliance from the terrorist, the pain inflicted upon the two is justified by preventing the deaths of hundreds of people and the resulting pain to every one of their family members for their losses, many whom would also be fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and children. Thus in this scenario the action of torturing a child while distasteful and immoral to most if not everyonel, has created the best possible outcome of reducing overall pain. I would reference happiness as defined by this challenge… Happiness: a mix of pleasure, contentedness, joy and absence of pain I would assert that preventing hundreds of deaths would be for the betterment of society as opposed to sparing a single child from torture. Let us not forget that fatherless/motherless children resulting from the casualties could be considered an even worse form of torture to many children. Now my opponent made another argument in regards to what is and not is moral and that the overall good result must be moral to utilitarians while I disagree because I reject morality, I do not wish to dismiss it despite my own views so I shall address his view of morality as well, if he believes that anything justified should be moral then I would conclude that by his views and deferring to this scenario that... Torturing a child in this scenario was moral because it saved many more lives and prevented much pain. and Not torturing the child in this scenario would be immoral because it would effectively be discarding the opportunity to save many more lives and prevent much pain when it was in ones capability to do so. Non-responsibility In this situation I disagree with my opponent’s analysis of the situation, while my suggestion to go to the beach was a factor that led to the loss of ice cream, blaming others in this situation does not serve utilitarianism. My friend could have done any number of things to prevent the result like simply watching where he was going, blaming me for something so petty could result in a loss of friendship and greater pain while accepting responsibility and maintaining the friendship would likely result in greater happiness, and less pain of injuries down the road by learning from his mistake. Overall accepting responsibility eventually leads to learning and indepedence which both contribute to happiness, so I refute the notion that utilitarianism leads to Non-responsibility. The problem of the subjectivity of values Here my opponent seems to propose that happiness is not the goal of every person and thus utilitarianism does not serve their interests. Monks and hermits are used as an example of people who seek righteousness through toil and labor or perhaps some form of abstinence, some monks believe that by abstaining from worldly pleasures they can achieve a higher form of enlightenment in the afterlife, I never viewed these people as adverse to happiness but rather people who derived satisfaction from their journey to enlightenment or the desire to be happy in the afterlife by achieving enlightenment, and hermits are generally content or prefer to live alone. Once again deferring to the given definition of happiness… Happiness: a mix of pleasure, contentedness, joy and absence of pain For the benefit of a more relatable example, some devout Christians abstain from sexual pleasure among other things because they believe through their sacrifices they can secure happiness in heaven, and the belief that they will go to heaven for their actions gives them peace and satisfaction. I would assert that people seek their own happiness even if it seems like an unhappy existence by our personal standards. The problem of infinite consequences and impossible calculations In this argument my opponent asserts that utilitarianism is impractical due to our lack of ability in predicting every possible outcome for the ultimate balance of happiness over unhappiness. While I acknowledge our human limitations in implementing utilitarianism, that doesn’t mean its worthless and impractical, many systems we employ like our Justice and Education systems are rife with imperfections and human error yet despite this we use them anyway because it’s the best we have right now and the benefits of using them outweigh the cost of not., so we use them and simply learn from our mistakes and refine our methods to achieve better results. Utilitarianism is much the same, we may not always achieve the perfect outcome, but overall analyzing situations to the best of our ability for the purpose of maximizing happiness is a more practical approach to the betterment of society, certainly better than just rolling the dice or going with our gut (feelings of morality). Self-ownership objection This “right” is more of a moral argument in which I have made my position clear on the torture example, sometimes hurting someone can be justified by the end result. I would however point out that losing ownership of oneself contributes to unhappiness as well and must be taken into consideration in balancing happiness. Communism for example doesn’t work or make people happy because while the intentions are to sacrifice personal property for the good of the many this has been demonstrated to damage productivity and causing overall dissatisfaction in a society, it is not utilitarian. Back to Motive I will now move to attack my opponent’s alternative of using motive based morality to pursue moral actions, and demonstrate its inferiority to utilitarianism. In this example let’s say two hitmen are out to kill their victim, but the second hitman misses inadvertently killing the first hitman, blowing his own cover and getting caught. Clearly this bad motive has resulted in a positive effect. Now lets go back in time and for purpose of this argument lets say we knew exactly how the events were going to unfold just as the second hitman passes by, a person subscribing to the motive philosophy would be morally inclined to stop the act, thus allowing the first hitman to kill the victim. A utilitarian on the other hand would permit the hitman to perform his evil deed knowing it would result in sparing the target, killing one criminal and busting the other, achieving the best possible result. I would assert that a practical and reasoned approach in analyzing a situation is superior than subscribing to some “morality” for the purposes of the betterment of society.