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Why I am not a utilitarian

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Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#51

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

roenxi wrote: post #18
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…

"Don't be stupid" unfortunately is not a practical rule for making judgements, as you have no way to determine what is stupid. It is just a hand-wavy dismissal of the argument.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#52

Post by mkl95 »

Utilitarianism can be a powerful philosophy in some situations. Without a fake contract, the experiments that led to Pong wouldn't have taken place [1].

Also, if you have been in the software industry long enough, you have probably been in a situation where you had to deliver buggy or incomplete software because your customer wanted it yesterday.

Personally, I'd rather let someone know the stuff they are getting is not as good as it should be (yet) than fail to meet a deadline and permanently damage our relationship.

This is of course heavily dependent on the problem domain. The failure of a seismometer and a hypercasual puzzle game have very different consequences.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/pong

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#53

Post by boomboomsubban »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #50
boomboomsubban wrote: post #49

I hate this type of article. "Let's condense a philosophical idea that people have spent centuries developing into one sentence and then wrote several paragraphs attacking that sentence."

It can't possibly be wrong because people thought about it for centuries? Lots of such theories are wrong. I think it is good to point out the flaws in a short and concise way. An achievement, really. It is more difficult to be short and concise than to write long articles.

It's entirely possible the idea is nonsense, attacking a straw man version of it doesn't show that an idea is nonsense. An idea developed over that period can't be meaningfully summed up in a sentence.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#54

Post by belval »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #50
boomboomsubban wrote: post #49

I hate this type of article. "Let's condense a philosophical idea that people have spent centuries developing into one sentence and then wrote several paragraphs attacking that sentence."

It can't possibly be wrong because people thought about it for centuries? Lots of such theories are wrong. I think it is good to point out the flaws in a short and concise way. An achievement, really. It is more difficult to be short and concise than to write long articles.

He said nothing of the sort, he claims that the author is oversimplifying utilitarism.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#55

Post by belval »

cardanome wrote: post #40

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 beco…

Bentham or Mills did actually introduce a concept of "quality" to pleasure. Where an intellectual pleasure was considered more desirable than basic "animalistic" ones.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#56

Post by randallsquared »

pdonis wrote: post #8
kelseyfrog wrote: post #3

The 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 in…

> utilitarianism is a form of deontology

Systems of morals can all be expressed as rules, outcomes, or goals, so each can be phrased to subsume the others.

> Utilitarianism ultimately rests on the ethical intuition that maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain is the only value that should be pursued.

That sounds more like hedonism. Utilitarians don't necessarily believe that pleasure is perfectly aligned with utility.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#57

Post by UncleMeat »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #50
boomboomsubban wrote: post #49

I hate this type of article. "Let's condense a philosophical idea that people have spent centuries developing into one sentence and then wrote several paragraphs attacking that sentence."

It can't possibly be wrong because people thought about it for centuries? Lots of such theories are wrong. I think it is good to point out the flaws in a short and concise way. An achievement, really. It is more difficult to be short and concise than to write long articles.

It can of course be wrong. But it is hubris to think that these ideas are new and haven't themselves been discussed and challenged in the moral philosophy community.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#58

Post by kelseyfrog »

pdonis wrote: post #8
kelseyfrog wrote: post #3

The 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 in…

Why default to deontology then? If this framing doesn't escape moral conflicts then it's no better than utilitarianism!

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#59

Post by kelseyfrog »

boloust wrote: post #44
kelseyfrog wrote: post #3

The 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 author is Michael Huemer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, so would be very familiar with "the nuts and bolts of deontology".

Surely he should be familiar with logical reasoning then as well. Yet the argument present here is 'A bad, therefore B' without any evidence that B doesn't also have its own problems. If he is an authority on deontology, he would do well to provide evidence by way of his writing.
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