I'm completely unmoved by all of these, except for (f), sadistic pleasure. In my opinion this one is poorly presented, because it doesn't highlight the real problem well enough, since it is so shocking. The issue is not so much that some concepts of pleasure are better or worse (this may be true, but it doesn't make me really worry for utilitarianism). The issue is that interpersonal hedonic comparisons are not possible. There just is no way to do this. If one person says they enjoy something more than another person does, how do you confirm or falsify that? My best answer is to do what you would if you knew that tomorrow you would wake up as a random person, but one can immediately find problems with this.
Why I am not a utilitarian
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#62Should 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…
Is murdering one to save billions justified? No.
Why not?
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#63I think the examples are mere forms of sophistry. At best they’re straw men. Take the example of one healthy patient and five sick ones. First, this is not actually the “greatest good” at all, because you’re only considering six people from the viewpoint of one doctor. Second, why calculate one murder as being of less negative value than the positive value of “saving five lives?” Third, we don’t know anything about other alternatives that are considered instead.
I really don’t think these are examples of utilitarianism.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#64Earlier 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,…
What exactly is the point of utilitarianism then? What can you say about utilitarianism itself? Under this scheme, it seems to possess no qualities.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#65Most ‘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…
> It is in fact the case that we do often do bad things for more important goals. We kill people in wars.
I may not be a utilitarian, but I do think war is a bad thing, so I’m not sure how this is a great example.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#66No post body was provided.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#67Bentham is always credited with utilitarianism, but Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), the PhD advisor of Adam Smith, formulated "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" nearly 100 years before Bentham. Smith referred to him lovingly as "the never-to-be-forgotten Hutcheson." Oops. Hutcheson also devised a system of "moral computation" (complete with a series of equations—and applicable to AI systems) and specific…
Reminds me of how the "veil of ignorance" attributed to John Rawls while the original was developed by John Harsanyi.
In the end, it doesn't much matter who did what, as long as good ideas got popularized. Bentham made an enormous contribution to developing and spreading utilitarian thought, and should be praised as such.
Thank you for sharing about Hutcheson - I've not heard of him before.
One of the best resources for philosophy reading is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Here it seems Hutcheson is credited with "proto-utilitarian" views / "anticipation of some strains of utilitarian thought".
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#68Ahh, the author is a philosopher. That explains idiocy.
The only thing that this text points to is that it's better not to be strict utilitarian if you have iq below 50 or a mentality of evil djinni.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#69A horrific piece. How can this person possibly be a professor of philosophy?
The examples are simply absurd. As many other commenters have pointed out, he simply doesn’t evaluate them reasonably.
You can certainly make the case that this is a real problem with utilitarianism - i.e. that there is no good function for evaluating scenarios.
But that’s not what the author s arguing. He is arguing that utilitarianism leads to repugnant trade-offs.
He’s not even wrong. He just doesn’t seem to have thought deeply about it at all.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#70The article omits what I always considered the best argument against utilitarianism. It's basically a cutting-off-the-branch-you're-sitting-on argument, and it's due to Bernard Williams.
1. Utilitarianism asks me to choose to save 10 strangers over my own kid, as this would maximize human happiness.
2. The bond a parent shares with their kid is among the most foundational examples of human happiness.
3. If human happiness is so flimsy that I should be willing to destroy the root of my own in the advancement some abstract ethical theory, why is human happiness worth maximizing in first the place?