On Utility Monsters

People who oppose utilitarianism always end up, at some point or another, jumping on the problem of utility monsters. If a particular person has such a steep utility curve that giving him additional resources always gives him more utility than giving those resources to anybody else, aren't we obligated to continue feeding him resources? And isn't this idea morally repugnant?

Traditionally, utilitarians always counter this objection by appealing to practical or empirical considerations: Utility monsters are a theoretical objection that has no bearing on the real world, realities of declining marginal utility will prevent there from ever actually being utility monsters, etc. Of course, anti-utilitarians, stubborn as always, object, "But you have to admit the theoretical possibility."




No, I don't. The utility monster objection assumes that we have an absolute scale for interpersonal comparisons of utility. If something will give person A 100 "utils" and person B 200 "utils," we have to it to B. But that's not the way I see utilitarianism as working. Instead, I see utility as having a relative scale. The happiest that any person can be is 1. If I have very modest tastes, meeting my preferences gives me a utility of 1. If I have very extravagant tastes, meeting those preferences still only gives me a utility of 1. If we are to truly treat all people as equals, I cannot see any other way of viewing utilitarianism.

Relative utility scales also are more intuitively plausible. If we believe in some sort of absolute comparison of utility, it would require believing that there is something "out there"—number of neuronal firings in particular serotonin or dopamine nuclei in the brain, or something like that—that is the physical instantiation of "utility." This would be a pretty bizarre claim, for reasons into which I will not delve in this post.

Now, using relative utility instead of absolute utility doesn't necessarily obviate all of the utility monster problems, but it's a good start.