Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I am not a utilitarian

fakenous.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 102 posts

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#31

Post by i_cannot_hack »

Utilitarianism will not lead to counterintuitive answers if the broader consequences of each action is taken into account. For me, this is the true defence of utilitarianism. Each of the examples are completely stripped of societal consequences, which is wholly unrealistic. A utilitarian doctor will not kill their healthy patients in a real hospital, in a real society, where their actions will have major consequences on countless more than the 6 people presented in the text, and far into the future.

They are comparable to to the question "But if you want to live a happy life, why not inject yourself with heroin and feel super happy for a few hours? It would be the best way to live a happy life today."

Upholding personal rights, predictability and principles will maximise human happiness in the long term, while optimising for short-term happiness will often cause suffering in the long term.

Some examples:

> 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?

A society where people are deathly afraid of sending loved ones to the hospital, for fear they might be killed and used for organ harvesting, will lead to the collapse of healthcare and cause far more suffering than temporarily increasing the supply of organs will prevent.

> You’re the sheriff in a town where people are upset about a recent crime. If no one is punished, there will be riots. You can’t find the real criminal. Should you frame an innocent person, causing him to be unjustly punished, thus preventing the greater harm that would be caused by the riots?

If this framing of the innocent is discovered, which is not unlikely, it will lead to complete distrust in law enforcement, and over time the corruption of law enforcement will cause far more suffering than stopping this specific riot will prevent. And the unjust punishment might cause riots for a different reason, anyway.

This might even match 1-to-1 with your intuition, if your intuition is "This seems logical on paper, but I don't want to live in a society where this happens, so I'm against it."

TL;DR: We live in a society.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#32

Post by danbruc »

a_t48 wrote: post #30
danbruc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is murdering one to save billions justified? No.

Without the support of human civilization they are probably a bit boned anyhow. :)

Sure, but that doesn't really help to justify killing them. Can I walk around and kill random people? I mean sooner or later they will all die for one reason or another, I am not really changing the outcome for anyone...

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#33

Post by IsTom »

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?

If it comes to idealised organ harvesting: I honestly don't know morally which side of the trolley problem (which this one is an instance of) is the one to be picked, so it's unclear to me what side is the right one. Remember that you're a few times more likely to receive an organ than to donate all organs in this case.

When it comes to "real" case: it causes distress to the whole population and transplanted organs have consequences (e.g. immunosupressants) that lower their value.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#34

Post by _0ffh »

I'm afraid the utilitarian vs deontological argument will never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction, because ultimately it depends on what axioms you choose to believe in. Personally, I stick by my conviction that utility cannot be assigned a cardinal, but only an ordinal number. You can't do math with ordinals apart from comparison operations, therefore dooming any attempt at a calculus of utility from the get-go.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#35

Post by lanternfish »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #27
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…

> Most ‘don't be utilitarian’ arguments are really ‘don't be a stupid utilitarian’ Someone being a "stupid utilitarian" a subjective judgement. > then you are NOT actually summing up all the resulting negative utility in your so-called-utilitarian calculations Well that's the trick isn't it. What's the correct calculation? There is no objective answer to this. You can change the calculation to suit your opinion.

The question of how one actually resolves the utility calculation (once weighing bases are determined) is a question of applied ethics, not normative ethics.

Consider: it could be entirely consistent for a Utilitarian to make the utility justified decision that utility calculus is outside of their capability, and a Deontological framework would serve as their best in-situ heuristic. They would still be a Utilitarian, even thought their black-box criteria resembles a deontology.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#37

Post by lanternfish »

danbruc wrote: post #26
roenxi wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, those unrealistic scenarios make it easier to see the problems without having to deal with all the real world complications. Many of the examples just try to point out that utilitarianism allows you to treat one group as badly as you want as long as you overcompansate their suffering by just making another group happy enough. It's a stupid idea in its pure form.

A utilitarian would absolutely say that causing one group severely negative utility is worth a corresponding positive utility in another group. However, they'd also say that these are useless examples to apply knee-jerk aesthetic analysis to, because they're practically impossible.

The aversions we have to this kind of inhumane utility juggling are because we instinctually recongize the second order and knock-on effects without needing to specify them. Dehumanization, inequality, precedence - these are all utility-real things which a responsible utilitarian incorporates into their utility calculus as major negative impactors.

When you strip the situation of any practical relevance, of course the conclusions are 'stupid' because the criteria you apply to determine that stupidity are based on a practical reality.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#38

Post by Proven »

causality0 wrote: post #24

Should you murder the healthy patient so you can distribute his organs, thus saving 5 lives? This question is constantly trotted out and it's a great example of the deeply unreal world ethicists insist on operating in. In the real world, you don't, because making people people live in a world where that happens costs more than doing it would benefit you. Doing the murder is therefore not , I repeat, not the utilitari…

No post body was provided.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#39

Post by ZephyrBlu »

lanternfish wrote: post #35
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most ‘don't be utilitarian’ arguments are really ‘don't be a stupid utilitarian’ Someone being a "stupid utilitarian" a subjective judgement. > then you are NOT actually summing up all the resulting negative utility in your so-called-utilitarian calculations Well that's the trick isn't it. What's the correct calculation? There is no objective answer to this. You can change the calculation to suit your opinion.

The question of how one actually resolves the utility calculation (once weighing bases are determined) is a question of applied ethics, not normative ethics. Consider: it could be entirely consistent for a Utilitarian to make the utility justified decision that utility calculus is outside of their capability, and a Deontological framework would serve as their best in-situ heuristic. They would still be a Utilitarian,…

Sure, but that still contradicts with the GP saying "just don't be stupid and calculate the utility properly".

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#40

Post by cardanome »

Isn't the main problem with the utilitarian views presented here that they are deeply hedonistic?

Yes, if you only care about pleasure, you will make horrible moral choices.

Now if we include in our definition of goodness things are are actually important like survival, stability of order, justice and fairness, scientific and personal progress and so on, we might get more practical. Of course then these decision become multi-dimensional and and highly dependent on your personal priorities but that is the real world for you.

Post reply on HN