Why Can't We All Just Get Along? Uncertain Biological Basis of Morality (2013)

Individualism and Collectivism aren't moral frameworks. You could have both an individualist and a collectivist both be deontologists, utilitarians, or some other framework.

The Chinese not under the CCP dictatorship in places like Taiwan, Singapore or the US mostly seem hard working democratic and easy going.

I'm a utilitarian for general policy making, especially when statistical data is at play, but I cannot understand utilitarians who believe that all of morality should be utilitarian. Even elaborate versions are flawed, even e.g. Harsanyi's utilitarianism where you are supposed not to know who you are in society (similar to Rawl's "veil of ignorance" but formally worked out in his framework).

It's way too easy to find counter-examples that do not match our moral preconception and it takes a huge leap of faith to just ignore these. For example, it is easy to find real-world and fictitious scenarios in which utilitarianism would tell us to torture or murder someone, yet existing laws and traded morality strongly go against these recommendations.

Another huge problem is that utilitarians rarely take into account human agency, but we do that all the time in our lives. There is a gigantic difference between risking your own life and telling someone else to risk his or her life. Most utilitarians don't even try to model these differences, and I personally suspect that there could be an impossibility theorem hiding in versions of utilitarianism that attempt to take agency formally into account. (Not that I have investigated this in detail yet, it's just a hunch.)

The biggest flaw of utilitarianism is my view that it oversimplifies values. It is often based on the assumption of value monism but in reality we base our judgments on multiple value categories that are often in conflict with each other.

Related to that, all utilitarians I know of suggest compensatory decision methods but there are many good reasons why we should sometimes use noncompensatory outranking methods. The idea is crazy that you can murder someone as long as that allows you to give n people $1 each, yet it is implied by any compensatory value aggregation method.

You can see this, for instance, in American politics. There is no agreement to compromise in general. When compromises happen, they are temporary tactical maneuvers. Afterwards, both sides will continue to fight for what they believe to be moral.

(This example is a bit outdated, but just imagine American politics in 1980. I'm not sure both sides today believe in moral principles.)

The idea of a meta system where you judge each case individually is not a compromise between individualism and collectivism, it's a new morality that is neither one. Basically, it's pragmatism.

Pragmatism tends not to work in the long run, because there isn't any good way to judge each individual case without reference to more general principles. The need for more general principles is why you have moral systems (other than pragmatism) in the first place.

However this must only be if doing so does not pose any risk to the helper. See [0] for a list of countries with similar laws.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue#Regulations_by_...