Guybrush

Humans have an inbuilt moral compass. All social animals do. To varying degree, it is derived by evolution through natural selection and so the very basics of moral is somewhat predictable. For example, you would expect humans and other animals to generally not like being stolen from because genes that accept being stolen from won't be as successful, won't be competitive and proliferate and so will get weeded out. Similarly, we should f.ex. expect men to want their female partners to remain sexually loyal because if you spend your resources raising someone elses kids, your altruistic genes are not going to get passed on as much. We should expect humans to want kindness to be reciprocated and so on.

Then, so you don't think I'm a complete idiot, I should add that there's of course morals derived from culture on top of that which can potentially attempt to reprogram our base morals, like what might happen in very religious environments like a cult.

Generally, everyday human interactions is something we've adapted to by natural selection. For good or bad, this (along with culture/experience) does equip us with a knee-jerk sense of morality which is what most of us operate on in our daily lives. However, evolution has not necessarily equipped us with a way to figure out big issue stuff like politics, so that's where I think moral theory is valuable.

Morals is a social thing in that if you were the only person in the world, you wouldn't have a need for morals. If you think of the nature of humans, being social is kind of our super power. Long before we became Homo Sapiens, we did it because through cooperation, our fitness will increase. Natural selection drove us to become more social. Because morals regulate social interactions, it also made us more morally minded.

So we know why humans have morals. We know what naturally selected morals are attempting to achieve, which is roughly speaking all those social interactions that has historically let us proliferate our genes into the future. Each person instinctually knows what these things are. Humans are social animals, so we want to have positive and meaningful relations with others. Humans are programmed to act in a way that leads to reproduction, so we want sex. We are programmed to avoid pain, so we want to be healthy and not suffer. And so on. Normal, healthy people want these things, consciously or not. We form societies and cooperate to better achieve them.

In utilitarianism, happiness to me is just the simplest way to represent these things that we naturally want. Getting them satisfies our natures and so makes us happy. However, it's not perfect because we also want some things that we don't need. Like some of us want heroin. Hence, I like to sometimes add a time perspective (long term) because I think that tends to distill utilitarianism a little more into what really matters as described above. I personally could just go for a more long-winded principle (my own version of utilitarianism), but I see the value of making it simple ("happiness").

Something which is nice with a consequence-based moral theory is that it can be empirically tested. Let's say you study life satisfaction compared to income and you find good evidence that satisfaction rises until a household earns 150 000 USD, but then the curve flattens out or even becomes negative. You could use that information to try to make a society which makes 10 households earn 150 000 instead of one household that makes 1 500 000 and 9 that makes nothing. That's an example of how I think utilitarianism should be used.

To me, the question is not that difficult, but also the end goal of utilitarianism is not so simple. Take a democrat and a republican. Both could have utilitarian ideals for society, but have two different and perhaps even opposing ideas of how to achieve it.

A slight side note, I also like the some of the ideas of social contracts as I find them quite descriptive. A society is a bunch of humans getting together. In order for everyone to do better, they agree to abandon certain freedoms. For example, everyone can on average can do better if everyone agrees not to murder and not to steal from eachother. The goal of society is to raise up those who adhere to the social contract. That is done through cooperation and also the removal of the freedoms that would put otherwise everyone down.

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