Why I am not a utilitarian
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Why I am not a utilitarian
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Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#2This is a a good article
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#3The gist of the argument is that utilitarianism provides unintuitive responses in certain cases therefore, we should default to deontology. The utilitarian edge-cases are not unfamiliar to me, however deontological systems suffer from failures too. Perhaps the author is not familiar with the nuts and bolts of deontology?
Deonological failures present themselves as conflicts of duty or moral dilemmas. It's not difficult to contrive these ourselves or easily find a ready-made list. To that end, the author's conclusion of defaulting to deontology is logically inconsistent - it merely avoids them by not bringing them up at at all.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#4Most, if not all, of these problems can be done away with if you don't assume that utility is linear, but e.g. logarithmic.
Then things like enjoing one cookie slightly more than somebody else isn't a problem, because enjoyment of ten cookies is not much greater than enjoyment of nine cookies and you can have a spare one for somebody else.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#5I've always felt this line of argumentation makes a lot of unimaginative assumptions about the way in which we weight pleasure vs. displeasure. Take the example from the article:
> There is a large number of Nazis who would enjoy seeing an innocent Jewish
> person tortured – so many that their total pleasure would be greater than the
> victim’s suffering. Should you torture an innocent Jewish person so you can
> give pleasure to all these Nazis?
This makes sense if the weight of pleasure is uncapped, but imagine a utility function where lots of pleasure still only has a bit of utility (say 10) whereas very extreme displeasure could have much more negative or nearly uncapped negative utility (say, -(10^20) for torture). Then no number of Nazis that could ever physically exist would be able to cause this situation to have negative utility.
Thinking in those terms, I find the criticism weak.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#6Most, if not all, of these problems can be done away with if you don't assume that utility is linear, but e.g. logarithmic. Then things like enjoing one cookie slightly more than somebody else isn't a problem, because enjoyment of ten cookies is not much greater than enjoyment of nine cookies and you can have a spare one for somebody else.
> Most, if not all, of these problems can be done away with if you don't assume that utility is linear, but e.g. logarithmic.
Really? You picked the easiest example in the article. Try a more interesting one, like, say, organ harvesting: how does logarithmic utility deal with that?
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#7I've always felt this line of argumentation makes a lot of unimaginative assumptions about the way in which we weight pleasure vs. displeasure. Take the example from the article: > There is a large number of Nazis who would enjoy seeing an innocent Jewish > person tortured – so many that their total pleasure would be greater than the > victim’s suffering. Should you torture an innocent Jewish person so you can > give…
Why should the negative weight of displeasure be uncapped but not the positive weight of pleasure? Having the capping symmetrical (either both capped or neither) would seem to be preferred by Occam's Razor.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#8The gist of the argument is that utilitarianism provides unintuitive responses in certain cases therefore, we should default to deontology. The utilitarian edge-cases are not unfamiliar to me, however deontological systems suffer from failures too. Perhaps the author is not familiar with the nuts and bolts of deontology? Deonological failures present themselves as conflicts of duty or moral dilemmas. It's not difficu…
> The gist of the argument is that utilitarianism provides unintuitive responses in certain cases therefore, we should default to deontology.
I'm not sure I see the argument of the article that way (even though the author does end by stating that we should default to deontology). I would phrase the core of the argument this way: utilitarianism is a form of deontology! Utilitarianism ultimately rests on the ethical intuition that maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain is the only value that should be pursued. That's not an alternative to deontology: that is a deontological claim. And, once it's put baldly like that, it's a pretty questionable claim: is maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain really the only value that should be pursued? The article is simply posing scenarios in which some other deontological value conflicts with that value.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#9I've always felt this line of argumentation makes a lot of unimaginative assumptions about the way in which we weight pleasure vs. displeasure. Take the example from the article: > There is a large number of Nazis who would enjoy seeing an innocent Jewish > person tortured – so many that their total pleasure would be greater than the > victim’s suffering. Should you torture an innocent Jewish person so you can > give…
Why should the negative weight of displeasure be uncapped but not the positive weight of pleasure? Having the capping symmetrical (either both capped or neither) would seem to be preferred by Occam's Razor.
"Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other." —Arthur Schopenhauer
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#10Most ‘don't be utilitarian’ arguments are really ‘don't be a stupid utilitarian’. If a course of action where you do some amount of harm to mitigate a larger amount of harm would clearly result in a worse world, then you are NOT actually summing up all the resulting negative utility in your so-called-utilitarian calculations.
It is in fact the case that we do often do bad things for more important goals. We kill people in wars. We support legal systems that we know sometimes imprison innocent people. The government takes money from people against their will for their own purposes, which isn't stealing mostly only because it's written in law.
What's the difference? Well, in those latter cases, it is actually considered better in sum for that action to be taken. For most of the examples in the post, there are simple and clear arguments that it is not better in sum, and the only reason the article is claiming otherwise is that the author is pretending to be dumber than they are by not mentioning the rest. So don't do that.
(And for some cases, though you wouldn't know it from the article, the full utilitarian calculus does actually say that uncomfortable things are the right thing to do, and in those cases you should just bite the damn bullet.)