Costs and Benefits

Even if we could predict these outcomes with some degree of certainty – how do we quantify costs and benefits beyond the monetary costs involved? For example, how many negative utils should we assign to a customer being required to take the time and trouble to opt in to access currently available by default? How many positive utils can we assign to a predicted reduction in sexual aggression against young women? While the utilitarian approach forces us to weigh the negatives and positives against one another, it seems clear that at least some aspects of human experience, including a sense of security against unwanted and unjustified aggression, defy straightforward quantification. Hence, weighing pros and cons becomes very uncertain indeed.

Third: recall the debates regarding causal linkages claimed to exist between consumption of online SEMs and aggressive attitudes toward women. While the evidence for these linkages may be better established in more recent research, it’s always possible that new experimental approaches may be devised in 5 or 10 (or 50) years down the road that would provide us with more reliable evidence one way or another. It is also perfectly possible that little to no further progress along these lines will be made. In short: the future, and with it our future knowledge, are, by definition, uncertain.

In the meantime, however, we have to make our judgments and decisions nonetheless. The best we can do (so far) is to judge and decide based on the best evidence we have (so far), but this still leaves us facing the first two problems attending any utilitarian approach – namely, uncertainty about predicting outcomes, and the very great difficulty of quantifying outcomes in order to balance them against one another in a cost–benefit analysis.

As we see in chapter 6, these sorts of limitations mean that utilitarianism doesn’t always bring us very far in our efforts to grapple with complex moral issues. And, precisely because of these sorts of limitations, many ethicists argue we must expand our ethical decision- making frameworks to include deontology and, often, virtue ethics. This turn is exemplified in the next analysis.