Phenomenological Non-Aggregationism as a challenge to Strict Utilitarianism

Nobody loves using big words more than I do.

I am writing this philosophical treatise to you as the Good Kush flows through my veins. It is a working-theory I have that challenges the standard utilitarian approach to morality that permeates our culture.

Consider the following scenario:

One person gets into a car accident on the highway. In order to help that person, 5000 other people on the highway must sit in traffic for 20 minutes longer than they would otherwise in order to accommodate the ambulance.

The utilitarian way we might evaluate this situation is by saying person X is experiencing 100 units of suffering, while 5000 people experience 10 units of suffering each. The moral calculus amounts to something like:

1 person x 100 suffering units = 100 total suffering units experienced
5000 persons x 10 suffering units = 50000 total suffering units experienced

Since 100 < 50000, we ought to be more concerned about inconvenience of the drivers in traffic because there is more total suffering units experienced by the the 5000 inconvenienced drivers.

Phenomenological Non-Aggregationism is the ChatGPT-inspired name of a specific challenge to this way of thinking, one that recognizes that suffering is not a collective substance. It cannot be poured into a shared bucket, nor does it fuse across minds into some larger “total” experience. Suffering is always felt individually, as a first-person phenomenology.

In other words, those 5000 drivers are not together experiencing 50,000 units of suffering. They are each experiencing 10, where the person in the accident is experiencing 100.

Even if there were 100,000 slightly-annoyed drivers, each one would still only feel 10 units of suffering. None would come close to Bob’s 100. The number of inconvenienced people doesn’t outweigh the intensity of the one severe harm, because one person can only experience a maximum of 10 units of suffering from this inconvenience.

This is obviously an overly-simplified example, because you could say that if one of those 5000 people is late to work and gets fired, they are experiencing more than 10 units suffering. I’m also not accounting for whether or not your individual suffering is made worse or better by knowing everyone around you is suffering the same way.

However, this framework still accounts for the problem of prioritizing the needs of the few over the needs of the many.

If person X suffers 10 units of suffering to alleviate 30 units of suffering for someone else, doing the same for A, B, C, and D stacks into 40 units for X. In that case, X eventually suffers more than any single person they helped.

There’s a chance that everything I am saying is self-evident, unoriginal, or already been accounted for. In which case, feel free to let me know. Otherwise, thank you for entertaining this brief schizo-autist rant about utilitarian philosophy.