On Utilitarianism - Can pleasure reduce the evil of an action?

I was just reading a text on utilitarianism from Kymlicka and I encountered an argument against rule-utilitarianism which I agreed with and I think most people who read the text would tend to agree as well, but at the same time I realised most people do that which the writer was arguing against. So it seems people are not very critical of their own actions; their actions do not align with their morals and values. Let me explain what it is all about.

To quote the beginning of the passage:

“Shifting to rule-utilitarianism may change the outcome of the utility calculations, but it does not change the inputs into the calculations. The rule utilitarian is still committed to including all preferences, no matter how morally illegitimate they may appear. Focusing on rules rather than acts may make it less likely for illegitimate preferences to win the pay, but they still count on a par with all other preferences. Moreover, this has the perverse consequence that the more people enjoy harming others or violating their rights, the less evil is their action. For example, while rule-utilitarianism is unlikely to edorse a liferstyle involving raping and pillaging, it does imply that the enjoyment people take in raping and pillaging counts in the calculus, and the more enjoyment they get, the less the overall wrongness of their action.”

And later on “their enjoyment seems to offset some of their evil: it is a positive quantity in the balance sheet which compensates for some of the suffering of the victims”.

The author argues that this conflicts with our ordinary moral convictions and thus that this should not be the case. It should not even be taken into account, let alone that it could ever justify it. I agree and I think most people have this intuition. It is very clear with an example such as rape or murdering of humans, but what about animals?

In all my many conversations with people about eating animals, it almost always comes down to the point where they do it because they enjoy the taste. They get sensory pleasure from the eating of the animal’s body parts. But how can sensory pleasure justify the killing of innocent animals? They can suffer just as we can and they can be happy, have their own desires and preferences and are afraid to die. So in utilitarian terms there is no distinction between us and them that would justify us to draw a line between us and them. If sensory pleasure can’t justify raping, enslaving and murdering of humans, then it can’t justify it for animals either.

Somehow people have a distorted vision of the whole matter because they often participate in it themselves, which stops them from looking at it rationally. For even when it comes to the killing of animals, apparently sensory pleasure from our taste buds are an acceptable reason to slit their throat, but audible sensory pleasure is not; I would be deemed a psychopath if i slit their throat just because I enjoyed the sound of their screaming and suffocation in their own blood. They might say it is insane because I have no necessity to do so and so their suffering was needless. Well, to be fair, the exact same goes for the eating of them. We don’t need it. We can get all the nutrients, and even the taste, from plants, so killing them for food is just as unnecessary.

Besides, to bring forth neccesity shows that it is not the sensory pleasure that justifies it, they hope necessity does. We all feel that sensory pleasure is not a good moral justification for pretty much anything when it involves a victim. Necessity however negates other moral obligations, such as how killing in self defense is viewed different from killing out of sensory pleasure. But like I said, eating animals is not a necessity for most of us nowadays and thus we have run out of justifications for the horrors we are complicit in.

It should be clear that we have a double standard here. There is a clear case of cognitive dissonance where we have conflicting beliefs and actions and we desperately try to find ways out, but unable to find it, just ignore the matter, shut down our rational mind and try to hide in ignorance.

If that is you as well, take a good moment to reflect upon your own beliefs and actions and perhaps make an effort to align them.