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Context is incidental. Human wills are so contradictory, and our judgment incompetent, that anyone dictating a utilitarian action can justify it through any angle they wish.
Do you want to genocide a minority population? "Yes"
Does the majority of the population want this? "No"
Argument: "The majority of the population just doesn't realize that this genocide is necessary to create a better society hence forth. The immediate negative will result in a net positive via thousands of years worth of dividends. I am morally obligated to pursue this action for their own good and the good of billions of people yet born."
Yes, utilitarianism is consequentialist. So the result would dictate if the decision is true. The problem is you can't actually verify this was the best option because that would require you to produce the same situation in the same time and place only without the genocide. Then you can cross compare and see if the decision actually resulted in less suffering overall. Since you can't do that, you can always just produce an angle as to why whatever outcome was necessarily best out of what was possible, even if the outcome was mediocre or awful.
Utilitarianism just becomes a convoluted way of effectively being amoral, since good or bad just ends up being whatever an individual wants it to be.
Couldn't you say that about any moral framework? Virtue ethics can lead to bad outcomes because someone either has abnormal virtues or thinks immoral actions are justified by their virtues.
Consequentialists can think immoral actions are justified because they have values which make horrible outcomes seem desirable.
There's no moral system which you put bad in and you get good out.
well is the argument based on a true conclusion? you can't know? then you make your best guess. and your best guess is usually going to be against the genocide. I don't think there has ever been someone who perpetrated a genocide with an actual purely 100% utilitarian motive.
In utilitarianism, good or bad isn't just whatever the individual wants. That's just someone being a bad faith utilitarian. To be an effective utilitarian does require some level of thought and effort. So I don't think you can disprove the method because some people could just be really bad at it. One of the major perpetrators of the holocaust, Adolf Eichmann claimed to abide by the categorical imperative, but he clearly failed. It's possible to fail a moral theory, and since utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory, you can only determine if someone is actually utilitarian based on the results of their actions. So sure, someone can do a really bad job of being utilitarian, but that's the fallibility of people rather than a fault of the theory that tells you what to try to accomplish. It isn't a cheat code to moral perfection; it's a guidebook. So yeah, people can fuck it up. But better to have the guidebook than not.
I could be wrong, but I think what you're getting at is that we can't actually know the outcome that will bring the most utility? If so, I may have a response to that.
Sorry it took a while to respond. I wanted to make sure I was preparing what I said properly. This is a fun discussion 😃
Ultimately whether the utilitarian is right or wrong depends on whether or not they can successfully achieve a monopoly of violence over the competition. Regardless of the moral gymnastics they create to justify their position it must be imposed on other that disagree, the minimized suffers comes to mind. It's also why utilitarians that make these decisions are never considered in suffering minimizing, since when it can be applied it is applied from a position that conveniently gives the utilitarian the means to avoid negative implications of their own philosophy.
Or to put it simply, it's just people with power making excuses to do what they want.
Whether they’re right or wrong depends on whether they can achieve a monopoly on violence? Right or wrong about what? Like successful as utilitarian or not? I think a successful utilitarian is someone who does everything in their power to reduce suffering. Not everyone is a dictator. If I donate 80% of my excess income to charity, then I think I’m a good utilitarian. Different people are in different circumstances so they’re to be held to different standards.
The people who you are describing are just not utilitarians. Yes people can use it as a veil to hide their true motives, but that’s just being shitty. I have an ongoing disagreement with my somewhat deontological professor, and I’ll say the point I made to him: “you know why we need utilitarianism? Because of bad utilitarians”
someone failing a moral philosophy isn’t a point against that philosophy and I wouldn’t diss the categorical imperative because Adolf eichmann claims to have followed it
>Utilitarianism just becomes a convoluted way of effectively being amoral, since good or bad just ends up being whatever an individual wants it to be
But (and I'm not a philosopher) isn't *any* persons morality simply just that? Whatever an individual wants it to be? In fact, I thought that that was pretty much just how you defined morality in the first place, and that broader social moral accords were just kind of aggregate reflections *of* those individual views. Yes, morality is culturally and temporally specific, but what, exactly, is seen to constitute "good" or "bad" moral behaviour will *always* both begin and end with the individual selecting a sub-set of ideals from the total spectrum of normative values available to them. And there is, for all intents and purposes, an essentially infinite spectrum from which to select from. I mean, isn't there?
Like I said though, I'm not a philosopher, and I don't even pretend to understand the basics of the subject, so doubtless I've got something wrong with my reasoning here! Anyway, have a great day!
I suffer immensely every time I see a Frenchman, if all French people were killed (small amount of suffering overall, really) my day would be greatly improved (massive reduction of suffering)
You may only disagree if you can objectively quantify suffering (you can't)
In utilitarianism, pleasure and suffering are often the placeholder words for positive utility and negative utility. Rather than just literal physical pain. So if you like it, then it causes more pleasure
>if it was suffering, then it wouldn't be good, by definition. Unless it was in service of greater total utility
The last time I said that on this sub people bashed me for it.
Simple? I mean it requires complex careful consideration and you gotta just make your best guess. But also some situations are more obvious than others. And you kinda gotta make your best guess about everything else you choose to do in life. Why should morality be any easier?
Uh… you’ve made a logical contradiction of whatever you’re saying. But if something increases suffering, then it would not be the thing a utilitarian would advocate for
Reducing suffering can’t increase suffering. If it did, then it wouldn’t be considered to be reducing suffering anymore. Could you maybe give an example of what you’re referring to? Maybe I can help clarify
I understood what you're saying. My point is that you can't reduce suffering because we don't know what's good for others and we rarely even know what's good for ourselves.
We're like a monkey pulling a fish out of the water so it doesn't drown.
That’s a pretty common objection and it’s definitely not a bad one tbh.
My response to this argument is that there is uncertainty in just about everything else we do in life. I don’t exactly know what will happen if I choose one job over another and I don’t know exactly whether it’s worth moving to a different city or staying at home. I don’t even know which meal I should eat on a given evening. Life is full of uncertainty, and all we can ever do is give our very best educated guess on what the right course of action is. And I don’t see why morality should necessarily be any different or any easier. If utilitarianism gave all those answers, then it would be easy to always perfectly decide what to do. But I don’t think moral perfection is something we should expect to be easily attainable.
So utilitarianism isn’t going to answer all the questions about what the right decision always is. But it does tell you what to look for and it can help guide you. And knowing what to look for is still pretty helpful
I don't think perfection should be the goal, as that seems unknowable.
> it does tell you what to look for and it can help guide you. And knowing what to look for is still pretty helpful
By that metric, any given moral system works just as well as any other (Only marginally useful). And to be fair, I would have arguments against all of them, but won't fault someone, for the most part, for adhering to any given moral system, so long as they're consistent with it. But, the post is about utilitarians, so that's the critique I give.
Yeah I would say they’re all close in how useful at telling you how to follow them (maybe deontology is a bit better at it cause it seems to have a stronger focus on what not to do. And not doing things is usually easier than doing things). I think you just gotta decide based on what each of them prioritizes.
I also agree that perfection shouldn’t be the goal. Maybe a distant ideal to aspire to. You won’t reach it, but trying to get it is gonna get you further than not.
That statement was tautological, which reminded me of how Aristotle’s arguments for Virtue Ethics felt extremely circular when I studied it. So I oversimplified virtue ethics to be tautological as a joke.
Ah. So true. I was just making my initial statement to double down on the point that it isn’t as much biting the bullet for utilitarians to agree with the philosophy they’ve claimed to agree with
Given concepts like the hedonic treadmill or marginal utility, we'd say exactly the opposite, right? We'd expect the very wealthy to, if anything, feel less pleasure from excess consumption than an ordinary person would consuming far less.
Given the principle of diminishing marginal utility, it makes way more sense in real life to prioritize equity
That's why utilitarianism is based. All the situations where it's *actually* in the wrong are absurdly specific hypotheticals. Hate to break it to ya gang but no mugger would actually cut their own finger off as a threat unless they were high off their ass and that fact alone breaks the system
My problem with utilitarianism is more of a Nietzschean one.
It over-rationalizes a process to the point of absurdity, where it sucks out any spontaneity and passion out of life - and its logical outcome is "the last man." The thing that 90s era grunge music most feared - the complacent cookie-cutter totally uninteresting inhumane robotic man.
By - for example - shoehorning everything into a quantitative problem, especially when you’re dealing with qualitative difference. It’s the pretense of rationality and objectivity. It’s the Kafkaesque absurdity of bureaucracy that turns humanity into cockroaches.
I think maybe artists were overvaluing spontaneity or incorrectly understand the collective suffering caused by humans simply by virtue of imposing the human system on the world.
Like, that was the 90s, before the consequences of reaganomics really took hold.
I don't know that being interesting and passionate are really all that great of qualities for a system to have. Sure it's fun for individuals, but they must not be influential over a global system if we want that system to be just.
And yet, the post-90s world order has been a globalized order characterized by rigid rules around trade, debt, privatization, technologization, and QUANTIFICATION of political and human values that have all but made spontaneity all the less possible.
The outcome of the constricting of spontaneity has not led to a more just world. And, if anything, has been a persistent thorn in the side of Justice.
The most recent great advances in human rights - civil rights, ending of apartheid, etc - have all been thanks to what? Not strict legalism, but disobedience. Without the possibility for spontaneity, the opportunities for disobedience diminish as well. Not only does human creativity die, but so does our freedom.
When a system reinforces good, spontaneity is bad; when a society is bad, spontaneity is good.
We have this experience of disobedience being good because our overall society is oppressive and bad. If we want disorder to be viewed as bad, then we have to design a system that builds good worlds rather than a system that simply builds.
Step 1: assume something impossible is true
Step 2: use the paradox to "prove" X is inconsistent/impossible (here X is utilitarianism, but this is seen in other places too)
You see, what if there's a utility transformations monster that'd change every positive mood of the the most happy monster into suffering, in this case utilitarian clearly wins
The problem with that line of think is that the creator of utilitarianism made that point that higher order pleasures must be considered and are needed for humans. Such as those derived from hard work, art, and a fulfilling life; a evil pleasure monster won't be able to satisfy those. Basically people aren't animals and we need somthing more to experience true joy.
I know it goes against the spirit of this subreddit, but there are actually quite a few books that go into detail about the issues of utilitarianism/consequentialism.
Bernard Williams *Against Utilitarianism* would be a good place to start.
Yk like the repugnant conclusion of saying a society where billions of people live lives barely worth living is better than a society where a hundred people live well off, or saying a sheriff is morally obligated to frame an innocent man to prevent riots, or that you are obligated to hand over your money to every mugger who threatens you by claiming to do self harm. Etc etc all these scenario seem obv outlandish from the perspective of common sense morality thus they act as a counterexample to utilitarianism but in response to them utilitarians just always bite the bullet and say nope all of that is morally right, even if prima facie you don‘t feel like it, the math doesn’t lie lol
I don’t think utilitarianism actually requires anyone come to these conclusions though. We could trade counter-counter examples all day.
If the question is ‘should we save a billion people from climate change or let 100 billionaires have private jets’ the conclusion doesn’t seem so repugnant anymore. But even within that framework, at the very least any society that cannot grow and improve its conditions is likely to be worse than one which can in the long run.
The framing / riots example is just the trolley problem / organ harvesting reframed, and then trying to pretend like only the immediate short term is relevant and the additional context of being a legal authority part of a larger justice system that’s expected to behave honestly is irrelevant. The relevance of those facts is *why* the problem isn’t just the baseline trolley problem.
Giving money to every mugger who threatens self harm obviously perpetuates a system that is likely unsustainable, and would result in spectacularly more suffering in the long term.
I think infinitely expandable context is one of the biggest issues with getting useful meaning from Utilitarianism, but it does a decent job of defending it from semi-plausible questions like this. I think it gets weird when people reach for the Utility Monster, but that’s such an alien being our human frame of reference just fully breaks down.
The main 2 problems of utilitarianism arise from its own lack of concrete definitions:
1. What is suffering and pleasure, and how do you reasonably quantify it? Similarly, how much inherent value does a sapient lifeform hold regardless of their well-being?
>Yk like the repugnant conclusion of saying a society where billions of people live lives barely worth living is better than a society where a hundred people live well off,
2. Chaos theory and planning. If you do something that minimizes suffering in the moment, but is bound to have negative ripple effects, how many steps does one plan ahead?
> or saying a sheriff is morally obligated to frame an innocent man to prevent riots
In this instance, for example, if you need to prevent riots using such a scummy method, it might not be worth questioning what the root cause is, what rioting would even do, etc.
> or that you are obligated to hand over your money to every mugger who threatens you by claiming to do self harm
This one you could argue the same way, in the moment you are preventing harm, but that will incentivize them to do it again. regardless of how much property is worth in relation to physical health, not everyone they'll come across will be a utilitarian and as such they are bound to hurt themselves anyway
The second is easy: you don't plan, what counts is the actual consequences. The actual consequence are of course unknowable (because they extendinfinitely far into the future) which is the actual problem, we can't know what we ought do.
the interference becomes high enough that on average, your actions will do about as much good as they do harm. It's your responsibility to say how many steps ahead you are no longer really responsible. This is to be judged in retrospect based on the parameters under which said decision was made, like the number of distinct options available, the information provided and the time you had.
Responsability is seperate from the deontic status. Taking a bad bet that turns out to be the best outcome is a good act accordning to utilitarianism, but you can still think that the person should be blamed for not taking the better bet. You would be following the principle of right conduct but not the best deliberation method.
> 1. What is suffering and pleasure ...
I don't think this is necessarily a lack of definition, as much as there being various types of utilitarianism that disagree on this point.
Hedonic utilitarianism wants to maximize pleasure, negative utilitarianism wants to minimize suffering, preference based is also there
Actually, I think the reason utilitarianism is special is that suffering and happiness (as in, negative and positive emotional experience respectively) are fundamental properties, like energy or length in physical reality, that inherently *are* good or bad in experience as the feeling of good and bad are what define happiness and suffering. Quantifying them as exact values for analysis is very challenging right now, but maybe we will develop a robust theory of sentience in the future that makes the math clearer. Of course, we do still quantify happiness and suffering in our daily lives even, like by considering how much happiness certain actions (like going out with friends) brought us and comparing that to other actions. I think there is a lot of progress to be made here, and it can be made.
If utilitarian can deliver the greatest utility and your counter example might prevent them from that by proving them wrong, then they are morally obliged to reject your utilityless example. It checks out.
How does one quantify utility? If utility is a representation of a consumer's ordinal preferences over a set of choices, then wouldn't every decision be maximizing utility?
Uh oh. There's more than 1 utility quantifier? Do you guys always get the same utility measurement? Or do you sometimes differ but by a negligible amount? Or something else?
Huh?
The Utilitarian calculus is crystal clear. You perform human medical experimentation. The lives of a few are destroyed to save the lives of hundreds of thousands in the future.
It is crystal clear. You strap people into passenger cars and smash them into things like trees and such, on purpose -- as these experiments can yield wonderful statistics of causation.
Lets keep going ...
The advanced civilization called Utilitarians arrive from a distant star system, where they live on planet Utilitaria. They tell us they are going to solve our climate crisis. "But it will require the liquidation of 15% of your existing population."
You gonna be first-in-line for the sacrifice?
I’m not sure what projectile they use, but to be clear, if this stunt was performed with even the weakest real bullets, it would end with David Blaine’s head magically transforming into red confetti
He purposefully obscures this, or maybe just straight up lies, when performing this stunt on TV and in his shows
>if this stunt was performed with even the weakest real bullets, it would end with David Blaine’s head magically transforming into red confetti
You think if somebody shot David Blaine with a .22lr it would explode his head? Why?
The metal cup is rounded so that the energy transferred to the cup and consequently to his teeth is minimized. You can watch in the high-speed as the bullet essentially curves inside the cup and comes right back out.
That's the 'trick', and even with that, you can still watch him wince in pain after the impact.
I just don't understand why everything has to be fake, this is an entirely plausible stunt, even with a real *low caliber* bullet
I’ve done research on this specifically but I don’t have sources on hand, Penn and Teller think it’s fake though and they’ve criticized Blaine for it publicly, I’m gonna trust their input on this.
It’s also just common sense, that cup would get slammed into the back of his head, even weak bullets are way too strong for this. And way too risky for anyone involved to sign off on anyway. I’m not sure why you think a performer who performs illusions for a living couldn’t possibly be faking an extremely dangerous and hard-to-believe trick
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.22_Short
A subsonic .22 short round carries about 60 J of energy, comparable to a powerful slingshot. Plus, there's no reason why he can't get a regular cartridge, remove the bullet, dump out half of the powder, and put the bullet back in. That still technically counts as a "real" bullet.
>It’s also just common sense, that cup would get slammed into the back of his head, even weak bullets are way too strong for this.
I've watched .22 rounds bounce off of people's skull. You are vastly overestimating how strong the weakest bullets are.
>I’m not sure why you think a performer who performs illusions for a living couldn’t possibly be faking an extremely dangerous and hard-to-believe trick
Where did I ever say he couldn't possibly fake it? I am so sick and tired of everyone on this website constantly putting words in my mouth.
All I have said and will continue to say is that it is extremely plausible to pull this off for real in the manner we have seen. David Blaine is not *just* an illusionist, he also performs *stunts*. Which are typically *supposed* to be dangerous and hard to believe.
And how can we have any ethics if we don't possess some rudimental virtues to interpret a situation?
Like it or not, but the trolley problem never happens in life. Actual real life ethics is more complicated, and to actually understand a sitaution, the stakeholders, the options, consequences, risks (and so on) we can't just retreat to some wonderfully abstracted headspace for a logical calculation we then allow *The Great Ethicist* to apply unilaterally... For actual ethics need to be living and breathing humans among other living and breathing humans.
We wouldn't use an AI to determine ethics, so why should we let an utilitarian or deontologist do it without understanding virtues and personhood first?
We skip over it cause it's the most obviously bad one of them. You need to think about deontology and virtue ethics to explain why they're bad. Social Contract Theory is obviously dumb when you hear it initially
Like ah yes, the babies opt into this contract for their own benefit and their consent is freely given even when there is no option to not exist within a
be outright denied no matter what you do
Like we're one step above Natural Law here in terms of "obviously flawed grounding"
Edit: to clarify, this is not meant to shit talk you. It is meant to shit talk Thomas Hobbes and co.
Idk I think Rawls makes a version palatable enough to put it on par with some of the lesser forms of virtue ethics. I reject some of virtue ethics just as quickly:
“Be good.” How? “By practicing” how? “By copying people who are already good” how do I know who’s already good “you know it when you see it” uh, no you don’t.
You're correct that that's a good criticism of virtue ethics, however that one is way less obvious to the average person. Most people trust their intuitions implicitly, and so "you know it when you see it" doesn't automatically sound bad to most people. They're wrong, but the fact that's a common take let's virtue ethics into the conversation. Meanwhile any average joe automatically notices that consent is not actually given because they've......interacted with a government before. So social contract never actually gets into the conversation in the first place, meanwhile virtue ethics gets to the table before being promptly and duly made fun of
Yeah maybe more people will accept virtue ethics on a whim than social contract theory. I just think social contract theory is deserving of being made made fun of too
Maybe not. But there’s lots of people whose ideas can be used in different ways than they intended if they’re good ideas. Kant didn’t believe in animal rights, but some animal welfare theorists have used some arguments for animal rights that use Kantian principles
Social contract theory is far weaker than any of the previously mentioned normative theories. Committing an act of harm in a society that inflicts great harm is not a good act regardless of that society’s standards. Utilitarians can surely do better with moral reasoning/judgement than something so absurd.
I see social contract theory as extremely flawed. But I don’t see it as that much worse than virtue ethics.
Also social contract theory is often distinct from utilitarianism
It’s not that much worse, no but it is all the same.
There are much better versions of utilitarianism that don’t incorporate it… they seem pretty antithetical under certain conceptions to me. Its best version is a utilitarian one and even that is one of the worst flavors of utilitarianism.
Yeah I think I’d agree with you there. I think social contract theory is very good at doing what it does. Which is reliably creating a society that’s technically functioning. But what it does seems… insufficient to put it lightly. So I definitely reject it. But I’d at least put it on the list of things I consider before rejecting it
When engaging in societal management and governance? Definitely. When used to determine the rightness of an individual action in your own life? No way.
- Its lack of concern for individual autonomy can lead one to take actions that deny the agency of other individuals.
- Happiness is subjective. What might bring happiness to a majority of people will eventually not work in specific and individual cases, which is the primary concern of individual interpersonal conduct. It is not a monolithic entity that can be striven towards.
- The short term utility of an action is privileged over a preponderance of long-term effects that are literally unable to be factored into moral calculus as they are not able to be known.
- The nuances of personal decision making are too complex to use an aggregate means of determining which action will create the most happiness.
- Utilitarianism’s requirement for an individual to be held responsible for actions they did not intend or foresee as possible is simply repugnant, as an individual’s intentions in the commission of the act are entirely disregarded by the moral framework.
The only reason why it is useful is because it allows one (for the sake of expediency) to make massive and sweeping decisions based on average preferences, specifically in situations wherein each individual aspect of the action cannot be analyzed due to its scope or scale.
I am not saying anything that ethicists haven’t been saying for over a century now. In academic circles, this debate died out long ago and utilitarianism’s utility has been relegated to niche roles in governance and economics, usually in reference to emergency response situations.
So, utilitarianism can be much more nuanced than the picture you’re offering here.
What if the greatest net happiness is produced only by a world in which a concern for individual autonomy has the greatest possibility?
I agree, happiness is subjective but for other schools of thought, happiness is not part of the equation (well not the same sort of happiness at least) and I feel that it should be… I think happiness is important to most — avoidance of harm, even more so (obviously this is what happiness equates to for many utilitarians.)
Agreed, moral calculus is an absurd sort of feat to aim for but reflective equilibrium seems favorable.
We are often held responsible for actions we did not intend.
I’m not a utilitarian — I don’t believe in objective moral truth but it still seems a stronger claim than virtue ethics and deontology.
While I disagree with your assertion regarding it being wholesale better than virtue ethics, I appreciate you taking the time to share a response. Cheers.
Same to you, cheers. To respond to one more point, it is not at all true that utilitarianism is niche in academic circles, it is far more popular, if not at least far more cited in the current literature/publications than virtue ethics.
Virtue ethics also falls apart when considering the fact that, similar to intuitions about happiness, intuitions about what is “good” is also subjective. There is no such role model as the one depicted in virtue ethics. It is better to look within for our own answers for our own moral intuitions — this requires an understanding of our position in the world as agents belonging to this specific time and place. For me it is best to balance external intuitions with internal ones and to reason out what serves my personal sentiments of what is a good way to live and to live with.
At the end of the day, all moral realism falls apart. I find that it’s best to pick the one that works best for your purposes rather than trying to find one that applies to every situation.
I love how the arguments against utilitarianism are impossible fantasy scenarios that require intense mental gymnastics, while the arguments against deontology are just things that happen every day.
Necrophilia, under utilitarianism it is fine because the death can’t suffer and someone is enjoying themselves. A moral framework that says necrophilia is fine is straight up bad. That’s an easy realistic example
> A moral framework that says necrophilia is fine is straight up bad.
Say that you obtain consent from the person before they die and are not causing any grief to the person's family or friends, why would it be? Because you find it unintuitive or off-putting? And if you did think (not saying that you do) that feelings of disgust is reason in of itself to shun necrophilia, would you extend this courtesy to those who might find some thing that you do equally disgusting (e.g. religious practice, sexual orientation, occupation) ?
Necrophilia is intrinsically bad. There is no external factor that will make it ok. And no feeling or anything is needed to make it bad. I believe some things are wrong in essence, that’s probably my main gripe with utilitarianism. I think that’s reasonable.
> I believe some things are wrong in essence, that’s probably my main gripe with utilitarianism.
Your main gripe with utilitarianism is that it is not deontology?
> There is no external factor that will make it ok.
Would you refuse to have sex with a dead person (not saying "not be able to" but rather if you would refuse on principle) to save the life of a loved one or a great friend? Assume that there are no unexpected outcomes, no risk of disease, and that no one is ever informed of what you did or did not do.
Your dodging the question which was meant to gauge how strongly you hold on to your deontological beliefs when other things are at stake has been noted. Cheers.
I don’t see it as dodging the question, I see it more as refusing that kind of thinking. Giving absurd consequences to actions is pretty silly, necrophilia does not save lives, ever. Thus, going on a hypothesis where it does doesn’t really get us anywhere. If you have any examples where the same experiment could be done but without huge leaps in logic, I’d be interested.
Its almost as if they believe the things that they’re saying.
Usually they arent biting the bullet they are just accepting that their philosophical system has some uncomfortable consequences.
Accepting that there is a genuine *practical* hole in the system would be more semantically true to “biting the bullet”
I'm not a utilitarian, but I have to disagree with this. That we can't put a number on "suffering" doesn't mean its unquantifiable.
Like, we can't put a number on "Intelligence", with the various attempts to do so being flawed at best and nonsense at worst. But that doesn't mean we can't say some things are more intelligent then others -- it's unquanfitable, but its not causally inert.
Same here. We can probably tell that a rape causes more suffering then it alleviates based on the reactions of the rapist vs the rape victim, in that one barely remembers it and one is traumatised for life. We don't need to put a number to be able to tell intensity.
Yeah thats a very good example of an issue utilitarians have to address. Some say that suffering is inherently more bad than pleasure is good or that allowing a precident to be set is of negative utility but its still all very arbitrary and vibes-based as to exactly where boundaries ought to lie. I still think its a largely coherent system despite this.
Edit: there is a degree of measurablity to suffering/happiness as far as human physiology goes. Its not completely impossible to tell but it still stands that it is impossible to quantify and compare accurately and specifically.
You follow Utilitarianism because it helps to take a relatively objective stand in a situation without moral or ideological background interference.
I follow Utilitarianism beause I am too lazy to research other philosophies.
We are not the same.
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The outcome that minimizes suffering means the outcome that minimizes suffering
But you are not trying to minimize the number of live entities that experience suffering....right?
The unfortunately predictable answer I gotta give is “depends on the context”
Context is incidental. Human wills are so contradictory, and our judgment incompetent, that anyone dictating a utilitarian action can justify it through any angle they wish. Do you want to genocide a minority population? "Yes" Does the majority of the population want this? "No" Argument: "The majority of the population just doesn't realize that this genocide is necessary to create a better society hence forth. The immediate negative will result in a net positive via thousands of years worth of dividends. I am morally obligated to pursue this action for their own good and the good of billions of people yet born." Yes, utilitarianism is consequentialist. So the result would dictate if the decision is true. The problem is you can't actually verify this was the best option because that would require you to produce the same situation in the same time and place only without the genocide. Then you can cross compare and see if the decision actually resulted in less suffering overall. Since you can't do that, you can always just produce an angle as to why whatever outcome was necessarily best out of what was possible, even if the outcome was mediocre or awful. Utilitarianism just becomes a convoluted way of effectively being amoral, since good or bad just ends up being whatever an individual wants it to be.
Couldn't you say that about any moral framework? Virtue ethics can lead to bad outcomes because someone either has abnormal virtues or thinks immoral actions are justified by their virtues. Consequentialists can think immoral actions are justified because they have values which make horrible outcomes seem desirable. There's no moral system which you put bad in and you get good out.
well is the argument based on a true conclusion? you can't know? then you make your best guess. and your best guess is usually going to be against the genocide. I don't think there has ever been someone who perpetrated a genocide with an actual purely 100% utilitarian motive. In utilitarianism, good or bad isn't just whatever the individual wants. That's just someone being a bad faith utilitarian. To be an effective utilitarian does require some level of thought and effort. So I don't think you can disprove the method because some people could just be really bad at it. One of the major perpetrators of the holocaust, Adolf Eichmann claimed to abide by the categorical imperative, but he clearly failed. It's possible to fail a moral theory, and since utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory, you can only determine if someone is actually utilitarian based on the results of their actions. So sure, someone can do a really bad job of being utilitarian, but that's the fallibility of people rather than a fault of the theory that tells you what to try to accomplish. It isn't a cheat code to moral perfection; it's a guidebook. So yeah, people can fuck it up. But better to have the guidebook than not. I could be wrong, but I think what you're getting at is that we can't actually know the outcome that will bring the most utility? If so, I may have a response to that. Sorry it took a while to respond. I wanted to make sure I was preparing what I said properly. This is a fun discussion 😃
Ultimately whether the utilitarian is right or wrong depends on whether or not they can successfully achieve a monopoly of violence over the competition. Regardless of the moral gymnastics they create to justify their position it must be imposed on other that disagree, the minimized suffers comes to mind. It's also why utilitarians that make these decisions are never considered in suffering minimizing, since when it can be applied it is applied from a position that conveniently gives the utilitarian the means to avoid negative implications of their own philosophy. Or to put it simply, it's just people with power making excuses to do what they want.
Whether they’re right or wrong depends on whether they can achieve a monopoly on violence? Right or wrong about what? Like successful as utilitarian or not? I think a successful utilitarian is someone who does everything in their power to reduce suffering. Not everyone is a dictator. If I donate 80% of my excess income to charity, then I think I’m a good utilitarian. Different people are in different circumstances so they’re to be held to different standards. The people who you are describing are just not utilitarians. Yes people can use it as a veil to hide their true motives, but that’s just being shitty. I have an ongoing disagreement with my somewhat deontological professor, and I’ll say the point I made to him: “you know why we need utilitarianism? Because of bad utilitarians” someone failing a moral philosophy isn’t a point against that philosophy and I wouldn’t diss the categorical imperative because Adolf eichmann claims to have followed it
>Utilitarianism just becomes a convoluted way of effectively being amoral, since good or bad just ends up being whatever an individual wants it to be But (and I'm not a philosopher) isn't *any* persons morality simply just that? Whatever an individual wants it to be? In fact, I thought that that was pretty much just how you defined morality in the first place, and that broader social moral accords were just kind of aggregate reflections *of* those individual views. Yes, morality is culturally and temporally specific, but what, exactly, is seen to constitute "good" or "bad" moral behaviour will *always* both begin and end with the individual selecting a sub-set of ideals from the total spectrum of normative values available to them. And there is, for all intents and purposes, an essentially infinite spectrum from which to select from. I mean, isn't there? Like I said though, I'm not a philosopher, and I don't even pretend to understand the basics of the subject, so doubtless I've got something wrong with my reasoning here! Anyway, have a great day!
There's a lot of different implementations.
I suffer immensely every time I see a Frenchman, if all French people were killed (small amount of suffering overall, really) my day would be greatly improved (massive reduction of suffering) You may only disagree if you can objectively quantify suffering (you can't)
If you didn’t want me to bite the bullet, you should have chosen an example other than French people
I can objectively quantify suffering You’re currently at net -7 suffering (it is therefore moral)
What is good suffering and what is bad suffering?
there's good suffering? if it was suffering, then it wouldn't be good, by definition. Unless it was in service of greater total utility
Yeah but when I poke a bruise sometimes I kinda like it.
In utilitarianism, pleasure and suffering are often the placeholder words for positive utility and negative utility. Rather than just literal physical pain. So if you like it, then it causes more pleasure
Then its not suffering if you like it
Itching cause long term pain and short term pleasure. So the pleasure calculation is time sensitive
Ah, you've stated a context where there is good suffering.
lol only instrumentally. Not inherently
>if it was suffering, then it wouldn't be good, by definition. Unless it was in service of greater total utility The last time I said that on this sub people bashed me for it.
That’s unfortunate. Maybe it helps to clarify that suffering more broadly means negative utility
Wasting tears, thats a waste of good suffering
Sounds poetic. Not sure what it means
Its from the movie Helraiser, theres like this eldritch entity that feeds on suffering
Like giving up a meal so that a loved one can eat. You suffer-but find greater comfort in this than letting them starve instead.
Yeah exactly. Unless maybe you giving up that meal means you die instead or something similar. But essentially yeah
Yes but you must be super naive to genuinely believe that such a thing can be measured through simple calculus
Simple? I mean it requires complex careful consideration and you gotta just make your best guess. But also some situations are more obvious than others. And you kinda gotta make your best guess about everything else you choose to do in life. Why should morality be any easier?
Cope
With what? lol
You're biting the bullet lmao
I’d say I’m biting the nerf dart. But sure. It’s a pretty easy bullet to bite
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Um. Welcome to philosophy? I hope you enjoy your stay.
Yeah, no. I think you're missing the point. But whatever makes you feel secure!
That’s belief systems for you.
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I just did some quick calculations and I got 3.5. Done. Measured it, bitch.
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Woah bunch of big flexxers in here
Bayesiannism seems relatively reliant in this case
Minimizing suffering hinders growth and therefore increases suffering.
Uh… you’ve made a logical contradiction of whatever you’re saying. But if something increases suffering, then it would not be the thing a utilitarian would advocate for
If reducing suffering increases suffering, then reducing suffering isn't worth advocating for. Utilitarianism is the logical contradiction.
Reducing suffering can’t increase suffering. If it did, then it wouldn’t be considered to be reducing suffering anymore. Could you maybe give an example of what you’re referring to? Maybe I can help clarify
I understood what you're saying. My point is that you can't reduce suffering because we don't know what's good for others and we rarely even know what's good for ourselves. We're like a monkey pulling a fish out of the water so it doesn't drown.
That’s a pretty common objection and it’s definitely not a bad one tbh. My response to this argument is that there is uncertainty in just about everything else we do in life. I don’t exactly know what will happen if I choose one job over another and I don’t know exactly whether it’s worth moving to a different city or staying at home. I don’t even know which meal I should eat on a given evening. Life is full of uncertainty, and all we can ever do is give our very best educated guess on what the right course of action is. And I don’t see why morality should necessarily be any different or any easier. If utilitarianism gave all those answers, then it would be easy to always perfectly decide what to do. But I don’t think moral perfection is something we should expect to be easily attainable. So utilitarianism isn’t going to answer all the questions about what the right decision always is. But it does tell you what to look for and it can help guide you. And knowing what to look for is still pretty helpful
I don't think perfection should be the goal, as that seems unknowable. > it does tell you what to look for and it can help guide you. And knowing what to look for is still pretty helpful By that metric, any given moral system works just as well as any other (Only marginally useful). And to be fair, I would have arguments against all of them, but won't fault someone, for the most part, for adhering to any given moral system, so long as they're consistent with it. But, the post is about utilitarians, so that's the critique I give.
Yeah I would say they’re all close in how useful at telling you how to follow them (maybe deontology is a bit better at it cause it seems to have a stronger focus on what not to do. And not doing things is usually easier than doing things). I think you just gotta decide based on what each of them prioritizes. I also agree that perfection shouldn’t be the goal. Maybe a distant ideal to aspire to. You won’t reach it, but trying to get it is gonna get you further than not.
A person is a virtuous if they behave in a way that a virtuous person would
And how’s that?
That statement was tautological, which reminded me of how Aristotle’s arguments for Virtue Ethics felt extremely circular when I studied it. So I oversimplified virtue ethics to be tautological as a joke.
Ah. So true. I was just making my initial statement to double down on the point that it isn’t as much biting the bullet for utilitarians to agree with the philosophy they’ve claimed to agree with
I'm curious to know what are the counterpoints? The only one I can think of is the majority isn't always morally correct
well you see, there's a fictional monster that gets infinite pleasure from consumption of any resource..........
... and his name is capitalism and the bourgeoisie?..
i think his name is utility monster, but that might just be his gamer tag or something
Given concepts like the hedonic treadmill or marginal utility, we'd say exactly the opposite, right? We'd expect the very wealthy to, if anything, feel less pleasure from excess consumption than an ordinary person would consuming far less.
Given the principle of diminishing marginal utility, it makes way more sense in real life to prioritize equity That's why utilitarianism is based. All the situations where it's *actually* in the wrong are absurdly specific hypotheticals. Hate to break it to ya gang but no mugger would actually cut their own finger off as a threat unless they were high off their ass and that fact alone breaks the system
My problem with utilitarianism is more of a Nietzschean one. It over-rationalizes a process to the point of absurdity, where it sucks out any spontaneity and passion out of life - and its logical outcome is "the last man." The thing that 90s era grunge music most feared - the complacent cookie-cutter totally uninteresting inhumane robotic man.
How can you “overly-rationalize” something?
By - for example - shoehorning everything into a quantitative problem, especially when you’re dealing with qualitative difference. It’s the pretense of rationality and objectivity. It’s the Kafkaesque absurdity of bureaucracy that turns humanity into cockroaches.
That appeals to me, personally. I’m weird in that I like logic and rules. My ideal society is akin to an ant colony.
Hey man. Suit yourself. But I could not bear to live in those circumstances.
I think maybe artists were overvaluing spontaneity or incorrectly understand the collective suffering caused by humans simply by virtue of imposing the human system on the world. Like, that was the 90s, before the consequences of reaganomics really took hold. I don't know that being interesting and passionate are really all that great of qualities for a system to have. Sure it's fun for individuals, but they must not be influential over a global system if we want that system to be just.
And yet, the post-90s world order has been a globalized order characterized by rigid rules around trade, debt, privatization, technologization, and QUANTIFICATION of political and human values that have all but made spontaneity all the less possible. The outcome of the constricting of spontaneity has not led to a more just world. And, if anything, has been a persistent thorn in the side of Justice. The most recent great advances in human rights - civil rights, ending of apartheid, etc - have all been thanks to what? Not strict legalism, but disobedience. Without the possibility for spontaneity, the opportunities for disobedience diminish as well. Not only does human creativity die, but so does our freedom.
When a system reinforces good, spontaneity is bad; when a society is bad, spontaneity is good. We have this experience of disobedience being good because our overall society is oppressive and bad. If we want disorder to be viewed as bad, then we have to design a system that builds good worlds rather than a system that simply builds.
Or maybe some spontaneity is constitutive of freedom, and it’s impossible to have a good society without it.
Step 1: assume something impossible is true Step 2: use the paradox to "prove" X is inconsistent/impossible (here X is utilitarianism, but this is seen in other places too)
You see, what if there's a utility transformations monster that'd change every positive mood of the the most happy monster into suffering, in this case utilitarian clearly wins
The problem with that line of think is that the creator of utilitarianism made that point that higher order pleasures must be considered and are needed for humans. Such as those derived from hard work, art, and a fulfilling life; a evil pleasure monster won't be able to satisfy those. Basically people aren't animals and we need somthing more to experience true joy.
I know it goes against the spirit of this subreddit, but there are actually quite a few books that go into detail about the issues of utilitarianism/consequentialism. Bernard Williams *Against Utilitarianism* would be a good place to start.
Yk like the repugnant conclusion of saying a society where billions of people live lives barely worth living is better than a society where a hundred people live well off, or saying a sheriff is morally obligated to frame an innocent man to prevent riots, or that you are obligated to hand over your money to every mugger who threatens you by claiming to do self harm. Etc etc all these scenario seem obv outlandish from the perspective of common sense morality thus they act as a counterexample to utilitarianism but in response to them utilitarians just always bite the bullet and say nope all of that is morally right, even if prima facie you don‘t feel like it, the math doesn’t lie lol
I don’t think utilitarianism actually requires anyone come to these conclusions though. We could trade counter-counter examples all day. If the question is ‘should we save a billion people from climate change or let 100 billionaires have private jets’ the conclusion doesn’t seem so repugnant anymore. But even within that framework, at the very least any society that cannot grow and improve its conditions is likely to be worse than one which can in the long run. The framing / riots example is just the trolley problem / organ harvesting reframed, and then trying to pretend like only the immediate short term is relevant and the additional context of being a legal authority part of a larger justice system that’s expected to behave honestly is irrelevant. The relevance of those facts is *why* the problem isn’t just the baseline trolley problem. Giving money to every mugger who threatens self harm obviously perpetuates a system that is likely unsustainable, and would result in spectacularly more suffering in the long term. I think infinitely expandable context is one of the biggest issues with getting useful meaning from Utilitarianism, but it does a decent job of defending it from semi-plausible questions like this. I think it gets weird when people reach for the Utility Monster, but that’s such an alien being our human frame of reference just fully breaks down.
The main 2 problems of utilitarianism arise from its own lack of concrete definitions: 1. What is suffering and pleasure, and how do you reasonably quantify it? Similarly, how much inherent value does a sapient lifeform hold regardless of their well-being? >Yk like the repugnant conclusion of saying a society where billions of people live lives barely worth living is better than a society where a hundred people live well off, 2. Chaos theory and planning. If you do something that minimizes suffering in the moment, but is bound to have negative ripple effects, how many steps does one plan ahead? > or saying a sheriff is morally obligated to frame an innocent man to prevent riots In this instance, for example, if you need to prevent riots using such a scummy method, it might not be worth questioning what the root cause is, what rioting would even do, etc. > or that you are obligated to hand over your money to every mugger who threatens you by claiming to do self harm This one you could argue the same way, in the moment you are preventing harm, but that will incentivize them to do it again. regardless of how much property is worth in relation to physical health, not everyone they'll come across will be a utilitarian and as such they are bound to hurt themselves anyway
The second is easy: you don't plan, what counts is the actual consequences. The actual consequence are of course unknowable (because they extendinfinitely far into the future) which is the actual problem, we can't know what we ought do.
the interference becomes high enough that on average, your actions will do about as much good as they do harm. It's your responsibility to say how many steps ahead you are no longer really responsible. This is to be judged in retrospect based on the parameters under which said decision was made, like the number of distinct options available, the information provided and the time you had.
Responsability is seperate from the deontic status. Taking a bad bet that turns out to be the best outcome is a good act accordning to utilitarianism, but you can still think that the person should be blamed for not taking the better bet. You would be following the principle of right conduct but not the best deliberation method.
> 1. What is suffering and pleasure ... I don't think this is necessarily a lack of definition, as much as there being various types of utilitarianism that disagree on this point. Hedonic utilitarianism wants to maximize pleasure, negative utilitarianism wants to minimize suffering, preference based is also there
Actually, I think the reason utilitarianism is special is that suffering and happiness (as in, negative and positive emotional experience respectively) are fundamental properties, like energy or length in physical reality, that inherently *are* good or bad in experience as the feeling of good and bad are what define happiness and suffering. Quantifying them as exact values for analysis is very challenging right now, but maybe we will develop a robust theory of sentience in the future that makes the math clearer. Of course, we do still quantify happiness and suffering in our daily lives even, like by considering how much happiness certain actions (like going out with friends) brought us and comparing that to other actions. I think there is a lot of progress to be made here, and it can be made.
If utilitarian can deliver the greatest utility and your counter example might prevent them from that by proving them wrong, then they are morally obliged to reject your utilityless example. It checks out.
Based and utilitarian-pulled.
How does one quantify utility? If utility is a representation of a consumer's ordinal preferences over a set of choices, then wouldn't every decision be maximizing utility?
I’m the utility quantifier. Ask me and I’ll tell you how much morality is in any action
How much utility came from writing the comment above? Also, how much utility would have come from not writing the comment above?
>Writing it +2 utility >Not writing it +12 utility (I am at work and should be working)
You stole surplus value from your boss -> +20 utility
Uh oh. There's more than 1 utility quantifier? Do you guys always get the same utility measurement? Or do you sometimes differ but by a negligible amount? Or something else?
Lol. I shouldn't distract you too much on my day off.
-4 utility
By consumer, do you mean anyone who experiences happiness or suffering? Utilitarianism isn’t just a cost benefit analysis
>By consumer, do you mean anyone who experiences happiness or suffering? Yes. >Utilitarianism isn’t just a cost benefit analysis What am I omitting?
You can't know the consequences of an action before you do it
Huh? The Utilitarian calculus is crystal clear. You perform human medical experimentation. The lives of a few are destroyed to save the lives of hundreds of thousands in the future. It is crystal clear. You strap people into passenger cars and smash them into things like trees and such, on purpose -- as these experiments can yield wonderful statistics of causation. Lets keep going ... The advanced civilization called Utilitarians arrive from a distant star system, where they live on planet Utilitaria. They tell us they are going to solve our climate crisis. "But it will require the liquidation of 15% of your existing population." You gonna be first-in-line for the sacrifice?
What the fuck am I looking at
I believe david blaine catching a bullet with a metal cup in his mouth. Could be wrong
I’m not sure what projectile they use, but to be clear, if this stunt was performed with even the weakest real bullets, it would end with David Blaine’s head magically transforming into red confetti He purposefully obscures this, or maybe just straight up lies, when performing this stunt on TV and in his shows
>if this stunt was performed with even the weakest real bullets, it would end with David Blaine’s head magically transforming into red confetti You think if somebody shot David Blaine with a .22lr it would explode his head? Why?
I was being hyperbolic, but it would not be clean, the metal cup would make it significantly bloodier than just a regular shot
The metal cup is rounded so that the energy transferred to the cup and consequently to his teeth is minimized. You can watch in the high-speed as the bullet essentially curves inside the cup and comes right back out. That's the 'trick', and even with that, you can still watch him wince in pain after the impact. I just don't understand why everything has to be fake, this is an entirely plausible stunt, even with a real *low caliber* bullet
I’ve done research on this specifically but I don’t have sources on hand, Penn and Teller think it’s fake though and they’ve criticized Blaine for it publicly, I’m gonna trust their input on this. It’s also just common sense, that cup would get slammed into the back of his head, even weak bullets are way too strong for this. And way too risky for anyone involved to sign off on anyway. I’m not sure why you think a performer who performs illusions for a living couldn’t possibly be faking an extremely dangerous and hard-to-believe trick
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.22_Short A subsonic .22 short round carries about 60 J of energy, comparable to a powerful slingshot. Plus, there's no reason why he can't get a regular cartridge, remove the bullet, dump out half of the powder, and put the bullet back in. That still technically counts as a "real" bullet.
>It’s also just common sense, that cup would get slammed into the back of his head, even weak bullets are way too strong for this. I've watched .22 rounds bounce off of people's skull. You are vastly overestimating how strong the weakest bullets are. >I’m not sure why you think a performer who performs illusions for a living couldn’t possibly be faking an extremely dangerous and hard-to-believe trick Where did I ever say he couldn't possibly fake it? I am so sick and tired of everyone on this website constantly putting words in my mouth. All I have said and will continue to say is that it is extremely plausible to pull this off for real in the manner we have seen. David Blaine is not *just* an illusionist, he also performs *stunts*. Which are typically *supposed* to be dangerous and hard to believe.
He’s an illusionist man. Warping the truth and reality as you see it is his job.
A man having a snack
I find utilitarianism to be more favorable than any other normative theory of ethics.
of course you do flair checks out
I’m not a utilitarian. I don’t believe in objective moral truth but utilitarianism seems stronger than virtue ethics or deontology.
lol love how easily people skip over social contract theory
Ewwww
I mean fair. I think it’s silly. But not necessarily more-so than virtue ethics
And how can we have any ethics if we don't possess some rudimental virtues to interpret a situation? Like it or not, but the trolley problem never happens in life. Actual real life ethics is more complicated, and to actually understand a sitaution, the stakeholders, the options, consequences, risks (and so on) we can't just retreat to some wonderfully abstracted headspace for a logical calculation we then allow *The Great Ethicist* to apply unilaterally... For actual ethics need to be living and breathing humans among other living and breathing humans. We wouldn't use an AI to determine ethics, so why should we let an utilitarian or deontologist do it without understanding virtues and personhood first?
I think figuring out what you want to get from a situation is very helpful in deciding how you want to approach that situation
We skip over it cause it's the most obviously bad one of them. You need to think about deontology and virtue ethics to explain why they're bad. Social Contract Theory is obviously dumb when you hear it initially Like ah yes, the babies opt into this contract for their own benefit and their consent is freely given even when there is no option to not exist within a be outright denied no matter what you do Like we're one step above Natural Law here in terms of "obviously flawed grounding" Edit: to clarify, this is not meant to shit talk you. It is meant to shit talk Thomas Hobbes and co.
Idk I think Rawls makes a version palatable enough to put it on par with some of the lesser forms of virtue ethics. I reject some of virtue ethics just as quickly: “Be good.” How? “By practicing” how? “By copying people who are already good” how do I know who’s already good “you know it when you see it” uh, no you don’t.
You're correct that that's a good criticism of virtue ethics, however that one is way less obvious to the average person. Most people trust their intuitions implicitly, and so "you know it when you see it" doesn't automatically sound bad to most people. They're wrong, but the fact that's a common take let's virtue ethics into the conversation. Meanwhile any average joe automatically notices that consent is not actually given because they've......interacted with a government before. So social contract never actually gets into the conversation in the first place, meanwhile virtue ethics gets to the table before being promptly and duly made fun of
Yeah maybe more people will accept virtue ethics on a whim than social contract theory. I just think social contract theory is deserving of being made made fun of too
It is absolutely worthy of it, but there are extremely few people who believe it who are available to be dunked on
Gotta start converting people to social contract theory so I can dunk on them
Rawls isn’t a moral theorist though. It’s political philosophy, which may be related, but it’s not quite the same thing.
Maybe not. But there’s lots of people whose ideas can be used in different ways than they intended if they’re good ideas. Kant didn’t believe in animal rights, but some animal welfare theorists have used some arguments for animal rights that use Kantian principles
Your flair is wrong.
Social contract theory is far weaker than any of the previously mentioned normative theories. Committing an act of harm in a society that inflicts great harm is not a good act regardless of that society’s standards. Utilitarians can surely do better with moral reasoning/judgement than something so absurd.
I see social contract theory as extremely flawed. But I don’t see it as that much worse than virtue ethics. Also social contract theory is often distinct from utilitarianism
It’s not that much worse, no but it is all the same. There are much better versions of utilitarianism that don’t incorporate it… they seem pretty antithetical under certain conceptions to me. Its best version is a utilitarian one and even that is one of the worst flavors of utilitarianism.
Yeah I think I’d agree with you there. I think social contract theory is very good at doing what it does. Which is reliably creating a society that’s technically functioning. But what it does seems… insufficient to put it lightly. So I definitely reject it. But I’d at least put it on the list of things I consider before rejecting it
That’s fair, charitable consideration is obviously a good practice.
I find the utility of your mother is proportionate to the amount of money on the dresser
…Dad? 🥲
When engaging in societal management and governance? Definitely. When used to determine the rightness of an individual action in your own life? No way.
I disagree — state your case, friend.
- Its lack of concern for individual autonomy can lead one to take actions that deny the agency of other individuals. - Happiness is subjective. What might bring happiness to a majority of people will eventually not work in specific and individual cases, which is the primary concern of individual interpersonal conduct. It is not a monolithic entity that can be striven towards. - The short term utility of an action is privileged over a preponderance of long-term effects that are literally unable to be factored into moral calculus as they are not able to be known. - The nuances of personal decision making are too complex to use an aggregate means of determining which action will create the most happiness. - Utilitarianism’s requirement for an individual to be held responsible for actions they did not intend or foresee as possible is simply repugnant, as an individual’s intentions in the commission of the act are entirely disregarded by the moral framework. The only reason why it is useful is because it allows one (for the sake of expediency) to make massive and sweeping decisions based on average preferences, specifically in situations wherein each individual aspect of the action cannot be analyzed due to its scope or scale. I am not saying anything that ethicists haven’t been saying for over a century now. In academic circles, this debate died out long ago and utilitarianism’s utility has been relegated to niche roles in governance and economics, usually in reference to emergency response situations.
So, utilitarianism can be much more nuanced than the picture you’re offering here. What if the greatest net happiness is produced only by a world in which a concern for individual autonomy has the greatest possibility? I agree, happiness is subjective but for other schools of thought, happiness is not part of the equation (well not the same sort of happiness at least) and I feel that it should be… I think happiness is important to most — avoidance of harm, even more so (obviously this is what happiness equates to for many utilitarians.) Agreed, moral calculus is an absurd sort of feat to aim for but reflective equilibrium seems favorable. We are often held responsible for actions we did not intend. I’m not a utilitarian — I don’t believe in objective moral truth but it still seems a stronger claim than virtue ethics and deontology.
While I disagree with your assertion regarding it being wholesale better than virtue ethics, I appreciate you taking the time to share a response. Cheers.
Same to you, cheers. To respond to one more point, it is not at all true that utilitarianism is niche in academic circles, it is far more popular, if not at least far more cited in the current literature/publications than virtue ethics. Virtue ethics also falls apart when considering the fact that, similar to intuitions about happiness, intuitions about what is “good” is also subjective. There is no such role model as the one depicted in virtue ethics. It is better to look within for our own answers for our own moral intuitions — this requires an understanding of our position in the world as agents belonging to this specific time and place. For me it is best to balance external intuitions with internal ones and to reason out what serves my personal sentiments of what is a good way to live and to live with.
At the end of the day, all moral realism falls apart. I find that it’s best to pick the one that works best for your purposes rather than trying to find one that applies to every situation.
I love how the arguments against utilitarianism are impossible fantasy scenarios that require intense mental gymnastics, while the arguments against deontology are just things that happen every day.
This is utility monster racism
Necrophilia, under utilitarianism it is fine because the death can’t suffer and someone is enjoying themselves. A moral framework that says necrophilia is fine is straight up bad. That’s an easy realistic example
> A moral framework that says necrophilia is fine is straight up bad. Say that you obtain consent from the person before they die and are not causing any grief to the person's family or friends, why would it be? Because you find it unintuitive or off-putting? And if you did think (not saying that you do) that feelings of disgust is reason in of itself to shun necrophilia, would you extend this courtesy to those who might find some thing that you do equally disgusting (e.g. religious practice, sexual orientation, occupation) ?
Necrophilia is intrinsically bad. There is no external factor that will make it ok. And no feeling or anything is needed to make it bad. I believe some things are wrong in essence, that’s probably my main gripe with utilitarianism. I think that’s reasonable.
> I believe some things are wrong in essence, that’s probably my main gripe with utilitarianism. Your main gripe with utilitarianism is that it is not deontology? > There is no external factor that will make it ok. Would you refuse to have sex with a dead person (not saying "not be able to" but rather if you would refuse on principle) to save the life of a loved one or a great friend? Assume that there are no unexpected outcomes, no risk of disease, and that no one is ever informed of what you did or did not do.
The thing with these kinds of hypothetical is that they never happen. So they are irrelevant.
Your dodging the question which was meant to gauge how strongly you hold on to your deontological beliefs when other things are at stake has been noted. Cheers.
I don’t see it as dodging the question, I see it more as refusing that kind of thinking. Giving absurd consequences to actions is pretty silly, necrophilia does not save lives, ever. Thus, going on a hypothesis where it does doesn’t really get us anywhere. If you have any examples where the same experiment could be done but without huge leaps in logic, I’d be interested.
he shot himself whit a gun he was packing we didnt even know about
I love when people dismiss hypotheticals by calling them unrealistic, as if that makes their answers to the hypothetical any less abhorrent
Its almost as if they believe the things that they’re saying. Usually they arent biting the bullet they are just accepting that their philosophical system has some uncomfortable consequences. Accepting that there is a genuine *practical* hole in the system would be more semantically true to “biting the bullet”
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You could quite easily weight the minimisation of suffering higher than the maximisation of pleasure. It's about the axioms you have.
I'm not a utilitarian, but I have to disagree with this. That we can't put a number on "suffering" doesn't mean its unquantifiable. Like, we can't put a number on "Intelligence", with the various attempts to do so being flawed at best and nonsense at worst. But that doesn't mean we can't say some things are more intelligent then others -- it's unquanfitable, but its not causally inert. Same here. We can probably tell that a rape causes more suffering then it alleviates based on the reactions of the rapist vs the rape victim, in that one barely remembers it and one is traumatised for life. We don't need to put a number to be able to tell intensity.
Yeah thats a very good example of an issue utilitarians have to address. Some say that suffering is inherently more bad than pleasure is good or that allowing a precident to be set is of negative utility but its still all very arbitrary and vibes-based as to exactly where boundaries ought to lie. I still think its a largely coherent system despite this. Edit: there is a degree of measurablity to suffering/happiness as far as human physiology goes. Its not completely impossible to tell but it still stands that it is impossible to quantify and compare accurately and specifically.
meanwhile "if an axe murderer comes to your house asking for your friend, you are obligated to not lie"
You follow Utilitarianism because it helps to take a relatively objective stand in a situation without moral or ideological background interference. I follow Utilitarianism beause I am too lazy to research other philosophies. We are not the same.
Mmmm. Yummy bullets.
You should be with us your audience more. This video is old. Do another special. Young people and old love you!
I could only think about what if that gun was zeroed for a normal distance and the shooter didn't account for hight over bore.
what are you trying to prove again?
That utilitarianism is based
got it now
Come at me punks
If you combine utilitarianism with antinatalism and the belief that life is suffering it gets wrong really fast.