How Far Do I Reach? Utilitarianism Through Another Lens

I create an Instagram post, upload it, and send it into the void. It’s appropriate that the network of servers making up the Internet is called the cloud: I know that my online experiences tie, somewhere, to the ground-level lives of people like me, but the anchor points can be misty. When I post, all that a like or view really tells me is that someone saw what I asked them to see, but it says nothing about their physical experience, how they reacted, or how long they spent looking. I infer these from my own experience as a lurker and hope that others give me a little more energy than I give them.

Social media only looks like a void when I’m thinking about quantity (thinking not quite like an influencer, but maybe a micro-micro-influencer). Most of the time, I am bemused to see a distant acquaintance passing through, leaving footprints on my pictures. Even if I’m glad they stopped by, I’m waiting for someone specific—sometimes ten people, and sometimes one or two. These are the people closest either to that content or to me, and although their view, like, or comment has the same sticker price as any other, I know its value. It’s a digital signpost to thought-space, approval, a smile, or a direct conversation, not just attention.

But Instagram is a platform, and if I just reach towards my friends, am I missing the point of the elevation it gives me? What if I could use it to make the world better?

Means, Ends, and Instagram

The urge to do something to improve life seems to take for granted a utilitarian framework. The gist is that my success has to be based on effects, not intent. If I throw myself into an online forum or moral discourse, utilitarianism will be the default because it provides a seemingly neutral standard. No matter how different I and my compatriots are, and how we might disagree about methods, the good that we ascribe to ourselves can be measured by the well-being we produce.

The rules of global media and the demands of utilitarianism seem to coincide. In the most basic version of the trolley problem—should I flip the lever and kill one person or do nothing and let five people die?—utilitarianism dictates what seems like the intuitive stance, to save more lives. Suppose I can save lives by promoting positivity online (no casualties attached). The next step, to maximize the effect, is already built into Instagram. Articles have suggested that younger users game the system to increase followers, which utilitarianism tells me is not only justified but necessary: the more, the better.

Even the neologism of “social media influencer” lines up with what John Stuart Mill, one founder of utilitarianism, calls a “public benefactor.” An influencer, supposedly, is someone who has a positive inspiration or influence on others; a benefactor is one who, by the root of the word, creates good. It’s true that there is no inherent moral value built into influence (and that the etymology is slightly less promising, deriving from belief in astrological emanations and fluidity), but I trust my own message. The effect is what matters, whether my method is borrowed from the stars, the algorithm, or my own credibility.

I’m lucky to live at a time where my personal capacity for influence seems larger than ever before. Even teenagers can have a thousand followers or a hundred million, and Mill would be astounded. He thought that public benefactors were few and far between. But now comes the test of the theory, duly applied: what are the effects?

What We Say and Sell

Much like the Roman forum, social media platforms offer the exchange of both goods and ideas. The internet is not “Roman” or anything else localized by place or time, though: it’s the hub of the global marketplace and the mouthpiece of global conscience. Influencers blend the two, using ideas to sell products. They hope that being sponsored gives them more capacity to promote their message, or perhaps hope that the product itself does good. An environmental influencer, by partnering with a climate-friendly clothing brand, could reduce deforestation and worker exploitation. But most companies can’t and don’t try to make a profit from moral superiority, so influencers rely on the power of the pen or microphone.   

Here’s a riddle: what does social media influence have in common with solutions to the trolley problem, to systemic racism, and nuclear policy? They’re all focused on abstraction and effects defined solely by our understanding of an “average person.” These questions are so large-scale that they can only account for traits offered by psychology or sociology, not for personal affection or experience. Likewise, algorithms can only assume people as categories (“audiences”), and they can’t control what happens when you log off. The currency of social media influence becomes acknowledgement, awareness, and mindset shifts. These guarantee that any benefit outlives screen time. But “helping other people” is narrowed into an intellectual exercise: changing their minds when they’re wrong, reinforcing them when they’re right.

Even if social media is limited, global influence extends beyond internet discourse. An oil reserve worker in Venezuela helps to power cars in China. A US president could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon to destroy cities anywhere in the world, a weapon that dominates space and time through its blast radius and latent radiation effects. The progression starts to sound something like the lyrics of “Handlebars” by Flobots: “My reach is global / My tower secure / My cause is noble / My power is pure.” This oddly existential hit song, according to the artist, is about “the idea that we have so much incredible potential as human beings to be destructive or to be creative.” I know that the last flap of my wings guarantees that somewhere, clouds gather. Because of the work of my hands, a woman drives home to her family, a war ends.

Love Thy Neighbor

Here’s the problem: my motivation to post on Instagram, and the validation I feel, comes from those people, maybe ten, maybe one or two, that I love. In “Utilitarianism,” Mill made it clear that he thought that good actions are intended “not for the benefit of the world, but for that of individuals, of which the good of the world is made up.” More explicitly, he thought that to be virtuous, it would be sufficient to think about the few people affected by our actions. To be a social media influencer, that’s not enough. I’m constantly told that even small actions have macroscopic moral content, but when I post a video or comment something kind, I’m so many degrees removed from the effect that it’s all but invisible to me.

Globalization has broadened our moral horizons, but it depletes our personal focus and energy. Now what I do can be felt by a person across the world, or by a million people. The trade-off is slightly frightening: the price of being connected to the rest of the world, by consumerism, fuel, satellites, or ideas, is that I am now expected to owe something to the rest of the world—not just to a person a continent away, but to the world in total. Mill told me it would be sufficient to love my neighbor as myself, but he also told me that I must view everyone with equal impartiality. The question “Who is my neighbor?” has new significance now. If everyone can, realistically, be my neighbor, I am overwhelmed by obligations.

Even if my capacity for influence is greater than ever before, the limits of my own psychology mean I am most effective focusing on means, not ends. Precisely because those ends (whether preventing oppression or extinction) can be so huge, my capacity to grasp them slides away. What if videos I create distract a teenager from her friends and isolate her? What if my oil drilling drives a marine species to extinction? What if the bomb that ends the war kills a quarter of a million people and makes a city uninhabitable? What if the war would have ended anyway?

By abstracting, by trying to fix the world, I lose valuable attention for the things close at hand, which is where I am most felt. I may not know how someone across the world views me, but I know when I offend my brother. The breadth of my influence goes farther, but only by drawing from depth. Globalization exposes the flaw in utilitarianism, even though it should, in theory, streamline it.

What About the Big Stuff?

Focusing on a smaller plot of ground isn’t the same thing as abdicating responsibility for the health of the garden. We can’t wish away existential problems, whether the threat of nuclear war or the depletion of natural resources. Utilitarians might point out that if we discount the importance of consequences, we’ll all drift towards moral obligations we think are easy to fulfill.

All the same, identifying the elephant doesn’t make it any easier to eat in one gulp. Calculating what I do based on the effects is an infinitely regressing problem, and my mind is too small for the moral calculus required. Even presidents, law-makers, and CEOs have the same tendency to forget, misunderstand, and estimate wrongly. Maybe the assumption that the hunger for power is self-excusing (“the ends justify me wanting to be the means”) is part of the problem.

It’s not just a question of which problems deserve solutions, but also a question of my own capacity for morality and how to expand it. Obviously, to view every moral problem through self-interest (“I don’t care about anyone except the people near me”) isn’t viable. But maybe the first step in addressing self-interest is this: how am I actually caring for those people? The training grounds for large-scale crises come not from casting my net into the void, but from facing those around me. I may be surprised to find that those people are more foreign to me than I realize, more afflicted by problems that I thought were abstract. I can understand the world through the lens of my friend more easily than I can understand my friend through the lens of the world.

The impartiality demanded by utilitarianism sounds more just, but in my experience, I find that my partiality makes me capable of doing good. After all, it’s usually the people that I want to see my post or story that want to see it, too. When I put my phone down, it’s my responsibility to learn from that digital interaction about what they really want, whether experiences, conversations, or reciprocal interest. 

I understand something about morality when I water a neighbor’s plants, and while that’s not the extent of it, it is the kind of humble behavior in which I spend most of my life. It’s like ethical behavior with training wheels on. The training wheels don’t promise me an easy ride, and I may never outgrow them, but I don’t need the guarantee of power in order to be moral. I may be linked to the rest of the world, but the bumpy street of a cul-de-sac is a better metaphor for how far I can reach than a cloud is.

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