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Consider the following scenarios:

1. A designer is asked by a major soft drink manufacturing concern to create the packaging and ad campaign for their new soft drink. This drink, created from organic ingredients and without refined sugar, could supplant the role of sugary soda in many tens of thousands of peoples lives in an unhealthy America. The organic substitute has to be harvested in a poor region of South America, and if production increases to planned levels, will displace one or more small villages.
2. A designer is offered a significant sum of money to design compelling, “younger” packaging for a cigarette company. As it happens, this designer also has an ailing mother in dire need of expensive medical treatment. No alternatives for generating that level of income are apparent.

These scenarios are meant to highlight a problem with mixed-criteria maximizing.

Justice, or the distribution of utility

Consider the terms that our hopelessly beleaguered designer might consider in her decision whether to take the engagement in the first scenario:

1. Call (a) the total number of people whose health would potentially be incrementally improved by changing from soda to the new drink.
2. Call (b) the total number of people who might be displaced, assuming a market size (a). Assume (b) scales linearly alongside (a), and assume (a) > (b) by a wide margin.
3. Call (c) the designer’s sense of the direness of consequence (b) relative to consequence (a). (e.g. It’s 1000 times more negative to lose your home than it is positive to incrementally improve your health, so c=1000.)
4. Finally, call (d) the designer’s personal interest in the money, the notoriety, the promise of future work, etc.

The point is that there is a very reasonable possibility that (a)+(d) > (b)*(c). However, I imagine that most of us would intuitively balk at the idea of taking this engagement, despite the fact that the consequentialist scales balance in favor of our doing just that. The reason for this, it strikes me, is that maximizing just doesn’t have a provision built in for distributing utility evenly. Rather, it maximizes brutely.

Let’s hold that thought and look at our second scenario.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Christ Blessing the Children, c. 1535–40. (Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main)

Weighing our personal projects

In the first scenario, we ran up against a situation in which, despite the fact that a certain outcome seems to be maximally preferential, it still feels wrong to bring it about. The possibility of encountering this problem is brought out even more sharply by our second scenario.

Consider the following features of our second scenario:

1. The design engagement is clearly unethical, and has an enormous negative utility value.
2. The personal project (getting money) has a relatively very low positive utility. Even on our most self-lenient days, it would be hard to value (say) an absolute maximum of utility for two people - the designer and her parent - against a significant negative utility for many thousands.

Despite this, most of us would do almost anything that was within our power to save a loved one’s life. Almost certainly we would attempt to rationalize our decision (”If I don’t do it, someone else will, so I might as well,” etc.), but at the end of the day, the consequentialist scales will simply never balance in favor of the personal project. Regardless, I am sure, many of us would take up the engagement.

And few would blame us for doing so. Indeed — as we hinted at above, and articulated explicitly in our discussion of satisficing (or mixed-criteria maximizing) — a practical consequentialist algorithm for evaluating the rightness of an action intuitively puts choices in preference order rather than in an impartial order of maximal utility. Since this is the case, apparently if a personal project is important enough to us, a satisficing algorithm can deliver us any result we want. This means that algorithms of this type, despite delivering highly intuitive results, tend to be rather unedifying.

This, combined with the fact that neither form of consequentialism seems able to vouchsafe the equal distribution of utility, implies that neither is particularly well-equipped to handle the problem of justice. This strikes me as a relatively significant handicap. I’ll introduce a possible alternative on Wednesday.