Utilitarianism, rights, integrity, and political expediency

[Alcibiades]

Here’s an effort to bring a bit more moral philosophy to this board. Below is a thought experiment which happened to pop into my head during a period of idle reflection, which I think throws up a lot of very interesting and important ethical questions surrounding consequentialism and its alternatives. If you are sceptical of the value of thought experiments in philosophy, I ask you to suspend your apprehension for a moment and try to engage at least with the questions this one brings out.

A president is in the midst of a tight race for re-election. Shortly before election day, he is asked to approve the execution of two criminals; under his country’s system, executions cannot go ahead without presidential approval. The problem is that the president is convinced of the immorality of the death penalty (and indeed there seem strong utilitarian grounds for such a belief; if you are not personally opposed to the death penalty, imagine that you are for the purposes of this thought experiment). However, the vast majority of voters in the country strongly support the death penalty, and refusing to sign the death warrants could well prove decisive in him losing re-election. Furthermore, he believes — and is justified in believing so — that his opponent winning would have broad, seriously negative consequences for the country as a whole, and she is a staunch supporter of the death penalty who would probably expand executions. In other words, it seems clear that the consequences of not executing the criminals would be worse than those of executing them. What should the president do?

The utilitarian answer to this would of course seem to be that the president should execute the criminals (note: there may be rule or multi-level utilitarian arguments against executing them, but I think there are many problems with the consistency of such accounts with the basic principles which underly utilitarianism). I am not going to run down the attractions of utilitarianism here — which I think, regardless of whether or not you ultimately agree with it are considerable — but suffice to say I’m sure you can all understand why someone might answer in this way. Equally, though, the problems with this line of reasoning should also be apparent, some of which I will list below:

• The simplest objection to the utilitarian answer is that some actions — such as executing people — are simply always wrong.
• A rights-based objection to the utilitarian would be that the criminals have the right not to be executed, which supersedes considerations of general social welfare. Put even more strongly, the criminals’ rights function as trumps against utilitarian considerations, to use Ronald Dworkin’s phrase. If the president executes the criminals, he is instrumentalising them in the service of the general welfare, which fails to respect them as persons.
• A version of the integrity objection: requiring the president to execute the criminals alienates him from his most fundamental moral convictions, undermining one of his core life projects. The utilitarian doctrine of negative responsibility is unreasonable: he is not morally responsible for his opponent’s actions if she wins.
• Perhaps both options are morally acceptable, but utilitarianism is overdemanding and leaves no room for supererogation; even if you think the president morally may sign the death warrants, it seems to go too far to say he must — but the utilitarian seems committed to the latter view.

Do you find any of these objections convincing? Do you have your own? Or maybe you agree with the utilitarian here?

_{PS: Those of you with good historical memories may have realised which actual example from American politics I based this thought experiment off.}

[Alcibiades]

I'm going with your last bullet point. Honestly, one of the things that makes virtue ethics so appealing to me is precisely that it doesn't give you a definitive answer for these kinds of thought experiments. Utilitarianism and deontology both claim to be complete moral theories that give you unambiguous answers for any given set of facts (at least in theory - in practice, as you note, people can easily tweak them to say one thing or the other). This approach just doesn't respect our basic intuition that there's no easy answer here, and that good people can legitimately come to different conclusions. It provides the veneer of moral clarity, but at the cost of thinking about morality in a dangerously dogmatic way. Because virtue ethics is interested in the motivations for actions rather than just the actions in themselves, it can recognize that both courses of actions could be driven by virtue (a desire to uphold the convicted criminal's rights or concern from the general public who might suffer under the opponent's policies) and both could also be driven by vice (narcissistic callousness about the consequences of one's actions or selfish desire for reelection). To be able to judge that president, then, you actually need to have a sense of what is truly motivating them.

I’m not the biggest fan of virtue ethics because I think it’s too vague, but I very much share your sentiment here. I don’t think any one overarching moral theory is likely to be correct, and so I lean towards a form of moral pluralism which accommodates parts of both consequentialism and deontology (for instance, right-based theories seem to be obviously deontological, but they are not necessarily incompatible with consequentialism — they just take a very different view of how to weigh up consequences from utilitarianism). Finding a theory which strikes the right balance between aligning with our moral intuitions and being able to challenge them when they are wrong — what Rawls called “reflective equilibrium” — is one of the central problems of ethics.

[Alcibiades]

The historical case you based this thought experiment off had to be almost completely rewritten for this to even be vaguely realistic. The actual (historical) execution took place in January, i.e. nearly a year before the election, not the day before; during the primary campaign, not the general election campaign, and it clearly served said individual's presidential ambitions, not the greater good of the nation, which is of course why it is often very aptly described as a deeply psychopathic act not uncommon for the politician we’re talking about here.

What's the historical example?

I asked Alcibiades this in another setting and he was thinking of Bill Clinton presiding over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector during the 1992 Presidential campaign, although Clinton was of course a governor at the time rather than the incumbent president. I agree with all of IndyRep's objections to directly analogizing it to this thought experiment, but Alcibiades just said "based on" without saying how closely so I still think it's reasonable.

Yes, this is supposed to be loosely inspired, rather than directly based off, it. Clinton’s decision was pretty straightforwardly wrong, in my view, whereas this thought experiment is much thornier.