Against negative utilitarianism

Abstract

According to Negative Utilitarianism, you ought to minimize the sum total of pain, whereas, according to (the more standard) Classical Utilitarianism, you ought to maximize the sum total of pleasure minus pain. There are several well-known counter-examples to Negative Utilitarianism. Yet, for many of them, there are analogous counter-examples to Classical Utilitarianism. So these objections have little force when we assess the relative merits of Classical and Negative Utilitarianism. Some further counter-examples to Negative Utilitarianism may, arguably, be resisted if we cling to the intuition that evil and suffering have greater moral import than goodness and happiness. And, some of these counterexamples may be blocked if we modify Negative Utilitarianism so that the sum total of pleasure breaks ties between outcomes which have the same sum total of pain. I present a new counter-example to Negative Utilitarianism which avoids these drawbacks. In addition, I also present counterexamples to suffering-focused variations of Negative Utilitarianism.