There are multiple scenarios where deontology utterly fails to provide adequate solutions to problems otherwise considered trivially simple by utilitarians. Combined with my increased credence in utilitarianism (which I may write an article on later), I find these problems to be quite decisive in making deontology less plausible for me, so here are 3 straightforward scenarios that are troubling for deontologists.
1. Universalized trolley problems.
Consider a scenario in which a society of 10 billion people was faced with 2 billion trolley problems—each involving 5 people on track A and 1 person on track B (classic trolley problem). This is set up in a way where the problems are nested, so the 1 person on track B in one scenario could also be part of the 5 people that another trolley would kill in another scenario, and vice versa. All 10 billion people have their lives at stake here.
Consider the trolley problem universalized. 2 billion observers are now each assigned to 1 of the trolley problems. They happen to all be deontologists. All of them allow the trolley to run over the 5 people, saving 1 person; that person happens to be part of the 5 people that another deontologist allows to die, and so on. With 10 billion lives at risk, all 2 billion scenarios would cause a combined 2,000,000,000 * 5 deaths, leaving all 10 billion people dead.
When you universalize the act of letting 5 people die to preserve 1, it causes total annihilation and ends up creating an outcome that nobody in the hypothetical society would desire, even if they happen to be staunch deontologists.
Deontologists will rationalize the lack of universalizability as simply creating a contradiction in will, not a contradiction in conception—it doesn’t create an error in logic like everyone murdering everyone does, so it can cause everybody to die, but the avoidance of rights violations is deontologically sound. It’s just that rational people wouldn’t prefer to live in a world in which deontologists universalize their “solution” to the trolley problem.
The scenario must be simply presuming consequentialism and analyzing deontology through a consequentialist lens, which morally pure deontologists reject!
Except it doesn’t. If patient X is saved by one deontological observer not pulling the lever, another trolley instance would have X be part of the 5 people the trolley is heading towards, and another deontologist observing the scenario would choose to let X, along with his 4 buddies on the first track, get run over by the trolley to preserve Y. But Y is also dying to another deontologist refusing to pull, as the deontologist doesn’t want to violate Z’s rights.
Z is going to die due to yet another deontologist’s refusal to save the greater number of people, and this pattern keeps repeating—every single patient saved by the deontologist keeping their hands clean is ultimately going to die to another deontologist keeping their hands clean. Since the scenario is inclusive of everybody in the society, every person who gets to be the sole survivor of one trolley problem is guaranteed to not be so lucky in the next; in short, everybody will die.
This creates a logical contradiction. In a single, isolated instance, preserving one person’s right to not be murdered can allow a deontologist to keep their hands blood-free, similarly to how a single pickpocketing allows a criminal to serve his/her own interests without any contradiction.
When you universalize letting 5 people die to save 1, your attempt to preserve the rights of 1 person and keep them out of an unfortunate chain of events only contradicts itself, as another person will only allow that 1 person to die. Protecting 1 agent doesn’t prevent their death at all; it only delays their death by a fraction of a second as another trolley runs over them.
The outcome is Pareto-suboptimal, since it causes every single person in the interaction to be significantly worse off.
2. Rights violations as consequences.
Imagine person A can kill an innocent civilian to prevent persons B and C from killing an innocent civilian. If A can perform 1 rights violation to stop 2 rights violations happening, deontologists are forced into a double-bind where they can either:
Concede you ought to bring about worlds with fewer rights violations, or
Assert that you’re once against presuming consequentialism, and morally equate 1 rights violation to 1 million rights violations (or impose arbitrary limits on when the amount of violations starts to matter).
Option b) is already counterintuitive from a deontologist standpoint—preventing murders stems from protecting the ultimate interests of a person (survival, as denoted by x) and their right not to be used as tools to achieve a certain state, denoted by y (allowing prioritization of strong rights violations over strong negative outcomes). If 5 people each have interest x and 1 person has interests x, y, one can make the case that serving interest y precedes all instances of interest x, as deontologists do.
But if >1 people have interests x, y and 1 person has interests x, y, it’s completely counterintuitive to make the case that the interests are equal; neither is it logical to make the case that the interests of multiple people only outweigh the interests of 1 person when the number of people vastly outnumbers 1 or exceeds a certain threshold.
Assuming that option a) is conceded and multiple rights violations should be prevented over 1, the deontologist can be confronted with 3 states:
A kills 1 person to stop B and C from killing a total of 2 people.
A doesn’t kill, but B and C proceed with killing a total of 2 people.
In this case, 1 is better than 2. There is a moral preference that deontologists have to express for scenario 1. Combining this with the intuitive premise that you have a moral obligation to bring about morally preferable states, deontologists now have an obligation to go running around, preventing the greatest amount of rights violations possible.
This starts to sound awfully contradictory to their main quips against consequentialism—that you’re using people as a means to an end, that no one should be obligated to sacrifice their “agency” to maximize good, etc.
Deontologists seem trapped here, unless they embrace quiet deontology, which brings about more issues than it resolves. Wildly nonsensical is the claim that you have a moral preference for scenario 1, but it’s morally abhorrent for you to bring out scenario 1. If a utilitarian came along, you should be praying that they kill a person to stop B and C from killing 1 person each, even though it’s morally wrong just like utilitarianism.
Quiet deontologists also can’t be expected to proactively stop utilitarians from causing scenario 1, even though they think it to be morally abhorrent to do so, as you wouldn’t stop someone from doing a thing that brings about a state you desire, even if you could do it with minimal cost and effort.
“If X is a morally good state, you have a morally good reason to bring about X” is an obvious truism that all ethical theories derive obligations from by virtue of defining what constitutes a morally good state; quiet deontology violates that foundational premise. Preventing 2 rights violations by means of saving 1 is a morally good state, but quiet deontologists have a moral reason against X, but also can’t actively match up that moral reason to desire a state of not X.
3. Voting scenarios.
4 deontologists and 1 utilitarian walk into a hospital. At the entrance, they all collectively vote whether or not it’s morally permissible to kill 1 patient, harvest their organs, and use the stolen organs to save 5 other patients from death. A robot is hooked up to the voting booth and performs the actions that the majority of the voters desire—the action entailed by the winning option.
The 1 utilitarian obviously wants to vote yes, making the robot kill a patient to save 5. As good deontologists, the 4 others know that they have to vote no based on their personal moral views. Due to 4 deontologists, who reject abstaining from voting by means of the act-omission distinction, being present to vastly outnumber the 1 utilitarian who votes yes, the utilitarian couldn’t have murdered the sole patient.
According to deontologists, the utilitarian committed a murder—he had the intent to murder, the tools needed to perform the murder, and would’ve otherwise committed the murder had the deontologists not voted against murdering 1 patient. This should be analogous to a gunman trying to assassinate an important political figure whose head turned at an angle at the last second, thwarting the assassination.
It’s by pure moral luck that the deontologists were there and stayed around to prevent the utilitarian’s murder attempt, just like how it’s by pure moral chance that the assassin failed to kill his intended target despite hitting him in the ear. Deontology aims to weed out moral luck through intent, so the utilitarian is basically a murderer in this case.
If we agree that murderers deserve to be punished accordingly, the utilitarian deserves to be treated like a murderer with a 20-year jail sentence! That’s completely absurd—someone who votes for a policy that you believe to be morally wrong and murderous shouldn’t be sentenced to any form of punishment.
Deontologists attempt to resolve this scenario by bringing up the lack of an actual murder that happened. States shouldn’t charge people with crimes based simply on “ill will” or a bad conscience; they should only charge people with attempted crimes that resulted in actual consequences. Punishing the utilitarian would even be a grave violation of his rights, as you’re violating his autonomy by throwing him in jail, so the counterintuitive conclusion is avoided.
This attempt, however, fails to neutralize the actual problem in 2 distinct ways. First off is that murder is a moral sin, so someone who has indulged in a sin morally identical to murder is a murderer. To not sentence the utilitarian who voted for the organ transplant to happen is to reject the claim that all murderers must be punished; the utilitarian by all counts is a murderer.
Secondly, deontology succumbs to moral luck just like consequentialism by trying to dodge an absurdly devastating conclusion by leveraging the lack of consequences. If the utilitarian is literally a murderer but can’t be punished in this situation because his ill intent yielded no real-world consequences, realize that it’s only because the 4 deontologists outvoted the utilitarian.
If the utilitarian was alone when he walked into the hospital and cast the sole vote in that decision, 1 patient would’ve been murdered that day—which satisfies the real-world consequences needed to actually punish a supposed murderer. He only got lucky thanks to the efforts of 4 deontologists voting against him, efforts that the utilitarian would’ve preferred to have not been present.
Any consequentialist has easy solutions to all 3 of these scenarios—they would just pull the lever with their fellow consequentialist in the trolley scenario, actively bring about the better world in which fewer rights violations occur, and dismiss any voter with ill intent as morally neutral so long as their vote never led to their desired consequences. Deontologists, however, don’t seem to have very compelling responses to these scenarios (at least to my knowledge).
“The wrongdoing of others does not provide moral absolution for our own.”
Alex, the second puzzle strikes me as especially troublesome because it forces deontology to distinguish between protecting rights and minimising rights violations. If violating one person’s rights prevents two equivalent violations, refusing to act preserves the agent’s moral cleanliness rather than the rights supposedly being defended. At some point, keeping one’s hands clean begins looking morally consequential too.
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Thank you for the work you put into that. Your confidence is rightly earned. The complexity reminds me of another thought experiment; in physics. Suppose the sun magically disappeared. It would take eight minutes for the earth to find out. In those eight minutes the sun would be both there and not there; until the system de-coheres at minute eight and new calculations send the earth to the void. My problem with this thought is in how do you make the sun disappear? You could say the magic cancels out by isolating the system in your mind. Or, you could admit there is no magic and this thought is just a way to indicate more work needs to be done to understand gravity. The trolly problem is similar to this problem in that calculating the there/ not there’s flowing from the premise is not the fruitful work that needs to be done. I would like to hear how one solves the trolly problem with only two people, clones in fact, who are at risk. In such a case, would there be any difference between the outcomes from either point of view?