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Why I am not a utilitarian

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Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#11

Post by whatamota »

pdonis wrote: post #6
IsTom wrote: post #4

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. 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?

Second order effects. If the past few decades have shown anything, its the second order effects that are much more important than any single effect.

What is the second order effect in this case? "Humans might be killed for organ harvesting. This leads to widespread uncertainty over who would be killed next. And uncertainty leads to other issues."

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#13

Post by nathias »

> It’s not good because utilitarianism, like all ethical theories, rests on ethical intuitions.

This is not the case, if it would be philosophy wouldn't exist instead we would just have people un-necessarily explicating their intuitions, like the article.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#14

Post by asplake »

I am not a utilitarian either, but who in reality actually is? Seems to me that arguments either way are sterile if they’re devoid of questions of identity and strategy. I do what I do because of who I am and what I want to achieve as much as any action-by-action decision making, which would be paralysing anyway.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#15

Post by feoren »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #5

I'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…

That conundrum is rather easily solved by noting that the "pleasure" a person gets from watching someone be tortured is clearly not the kind of pleasure we're talking about. Celebrating the torture of another human being is likely to lead to yet more torture, so whatever little "pleasure" a masochist might get from watching torture is quickly offset by increasing their desire to continue to torture. Clearly the universe which maximizes total pleasure is one in which the Jewish person goes untortured and the masochistic Nazis receive psychological help.

Just like most ethical conundrums, these basically all rely on carefully controlling the bounds of the hypothetical to be both short-sighted and unrealistic to the point of farcical. How does the sheriff know for certain there will be riots if he doesn't hang an innocent person? He doesn't. How will all those sports fans feel if they learn that an innocent man needlessly died to avoid interrupting their feed for 10 seconds? They would probably feel terrible. Are we really just going to accept these extremely unrealistic hypotheticals where the author assures us his two options and consequences are genuinely the only possibilities? How is the surgeon going to feel if he murders someone as part of his job? It wouldn't take long for him to burn out and commit suicide, adding another needless death and depriving the world of a presumably talented surgeon.

In general most of the examples seem to imply that a utilitarian would do the very short-sighted option that has the biggest immediate increase in pleasure, while completely ignoring all the other negative long-term effects of their decision.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#16

Post by salmonellaeater »

The purpose of moral intuition is to help you be a good ally. That's it. This is why those close by seem more morally salient - they're the ones who you can actually be an ally to. In Singer's thought experiment about the drowning child vs. the children starving in Africa, he's trying to overcome people's natural intuition to favor those close by. Utilitarianism in general is trying to overcome a lot of intuitions about who you can realistically be an ally to - treating every person as equally morally important regardless of their relation to you.

Many of the examples in the article are constructed to omit outside observers. In the real world, this is very unrealistic. Our intuitions about the importance of acting consistently reflect the risk that we'll be discovered doing something abhorrent. Reputation is important.

In fact, if we make the examples more abstract and impersonal, then it's much easier to see how utilitarianism makes sense. What if there was no actor making a choice; instead, the two possible outcomes happen by chance or natural causes. Say the healthy patient dies from a freak accident, allowing other patients to be saved. This seems like a better outcome than five people dying, all else equal. It's only the possible effect on the doctor's reputation that makes the original a moral dilemma.

Similarly, in the riot example, if the innocent person was implicated by accident, that would be a better outcome than many innocent people dying to the mob. It's only introducing the sheriff and his reputation that makes it a dilemma.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#17

Post by taneq »

Veedrac wrote: post #10

Most ‘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 peop…

> 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.

This is a really good point and one that doesn’t get raised enough.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#18

Post by roenxi »

Veedrac wrote: post #10

Most ‘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 peop…

And in the "don't be stupid" line of thought - the examples are fundamentally unrealistic because examples have to be.

For example, the murdering doctor example assumes that there are no dangerous second order consequences to randomly murdering people. That isn't a safe assumption. A doctor might reasonably conclude there is enough value in having trustworthy institutions that the locally optimum choice is different from the globally optimum choice after evaluating the risks.

A utilitarian could make either choice in any of those examples if they disagree with the assumptions implicit in the question - which isn't really allowed in this sort of thought experiment. The situation is artificial because the author is allowed to create certainty and constraints which don't map to the reality where these problems will be encountered. Any moral framework will give weird results if applied to artificial situations, so the construction of artificial situations where the author objects the utilitarian answer is unless as evidence.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#19

Post by lnxg33k1 »

Well, I am not sure if I can see the counterintuitiveness(?), because

> pleasure/enjoyment (and the absence of pain), > Say you’re a surgeon. You have 5 patients who need organ transplants, plus 1 healthy patient who is compatible with the other 5. Should you murder the healthy patient so you can distribute his organs, thus saving 5 lives?

How is murdering a guy, not painful for the guy? So I guess that's clear how utilitarianism handles that

I think if we consider the frustration and pain there is nothing that is not clear

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#20

Post by function_seven »

whatamota wrote: post #11
pdonis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Second order effects. If the past few decades have shown anything, its the second order effects that are much more important than any single effect. What is the second order effect in this case? "Humans might be killed for organ harvesting. This leads to widespread uncertainty over who would be killed next. And uncertainty leads to other issues."

Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance[0] is a fantastic tool for evaluating these things.

For the organ harvesting scenario, if you were behind the veil and had to choose what society you'd enter, would you choose to go to the one where a yearly physical might end up with you dead while you're parted out for others in the hospital—and also might mean you get your organ replacement lickety-split should you need one—or would you rather go to the one where this does not happen?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

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