Why I am not a utilitarian • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#71

Post by drdeca » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:06 PM UTC

softwarebeware wrote: post #63

I 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 o…

utilitarianism is generally considered to only value outcomes and not any acts themselves.

So, one is comparing “a person dying” and “5 people not dying”, unless there’s something about the experience of the death-due-to-murder and the death-due-to-illness that differs and is taking into account as part of the outcome.

If you assign value to acts, then you don’t really have utilitarianism anymore, and you can probably describe nearly any ethical system in that language?

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#72

Post by Veedrac » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #39

lanternfish wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I don't see the contradiction. There is, after all, no one true utilitarianism.

What you're not allowed to do is say, as the article did, that X has the highest utility when strawmanning a utilitarian, only to turn around and say X sucks once the strawman is over.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#73

Post by staticman2 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:39 PM UTC

danbruc wrote: post #29

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…

Is murdering one to save billions justified? No.

That's an interesting response. I wonder if you getting caught up on the word "murder"?

A nucleur missle is about to fire off and kill everybody in your country. You can only shoot it before it launches, missle defense can't catch it after launch.

You can preemtively destroy the missle, but an innocent child playing near the missle silo is going to be killed.

Do you stop the missle? The child's death will be called collateral damage. Nobody was "murdered".

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#74

Post by Zickzack » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 7:16 PM UTC

The author tries to derive a dilemma for utilitarism:

> If you don’t accept ethical intuition as a source of justified belief, then you have no reason for thinking that enjoyment is better than suffering, that satisfying desires is better than frustrating them, that we should produce more good rather than less, or that we should care about anyone other than ourselves.

We have to take the author's word for this, because he does not offer any support for his claim. I wonder whether he believes that his personal ethical intuition can/may/should be generalised. The structural similarity to "whosoever does not believe in (my) god has no base for ethics" should serve as a warning.

> If you do accept ethical intuition, then at least prima facie, you should accept each of the above examples as counter-examples to utilitarianism. Since there are so many counter-examples, and the intuitions about these examples are strong and widespread, it’s hard to see how utilitarianism could be justified overall.

The auther is willfully ignorant about utilitarism and should make amends.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#75

Post by dr_dshiv » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

yboris wrote: post #67

dr_dshiv wrote: post #22

Bentham 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 being the guy to cultivate Adam Smith, you'd think he'd get more attention. But the issue is the f-s printing of the time. Hard to read!

His work on the inner sense of harmony and beauty is great psychology. Big influence on smith, whose first book was on Sympathy.

Oh, he also coined the term "inalienable rights" and wrote the text on moral philosophy that was used to educate over 60 percent of the signers of the declaration of independence.

Also had a big connection to secret societies and the whole western esoteric deal. Part of why Adam Smith burned all his papers (one may presume).

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#76

Post by apatil » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

softwarebeware wrote: post #63

I 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 o…

Exploring your second point a bit more: if it were five billion lives rather than five lives being saved, most people's intuition would be that regrettably it's necessary to murder the one patient. Our intuition about this thought experiment transitions from deontology to consequentialism as the magnitude of the utility impact increases. There's something unarticulated about the murder that seems worse than five natural deaths, but not worse than five billion natural deaths.

Maybe it's the fact that the act would have a major negative effect on the surgeon, or that admitting a justification for murder other than self-defense could open the door to abuse causing widespread harm. Ie, maybe our intuition is basically utilitarian but is constrained by rights and rules to protect against risks that are hard to quantify.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#77

Post by pdonis » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 8:02 PM UTC

IsTom wrote: post #33

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?

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 h…

I don't understand the difference between "idealized" and "real" organ harvesting. Unless "idealized" just means "ignoring all the actual hard questions involved".

In any case, your claim that I responded to was that "most, if not all, of these problems can be done away with" by adopting logarithmic instead of linear utility. You haven't said anything about how logarithmic utility "does away with" the problem of deciding whether organ harvesting is ethical. Or about any other of the scenarios in the article except the cookie one. So it looks to me like you are backing off from your original claim.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#78

Post by pdonis » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 8:04 PM UTC

kelseyfrog wrote: post #58

pdonis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

> If this framing doesn't escape moral conflicts then it's no better than utilitarianism!

It is if it recognizes that there is no magic framing that escapes moral conflicts. Utilitarianism claims to be such a framing, so showing that it doesn't actually deliver those goods seems to me to be a contribution worth making.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#79

Post by pdonis » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 8:05 PM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #56

pdonis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Utilitarians don't necessarily believe that pleasure is perfectly aligned with utility.

Then say "maximizing utility" in place of "maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain". It doesn't change the fact that utilitarianism says there is just one value worth pursuing, whereas other deontological systems say there are multiple values worth pursuing. The latter seems to me to be far more in line with reality.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#80

Post by pdonis » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 8:06 PM UTC

GolangProject wrote: post #9

pdonis wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is comparing actual pleasure and pain with expected pleasure and pain. It says nothing about why actual pleasure should be capped but actual pain should not.