But... but... the article claims false moral dilemmas... ¿Why framing a innocent is better than a riot? ¿Why kill a healthy man is better to let die 5 ill of them? ¿Why charity ---oh my god--- why charity is better than the usual inherintance rule? Stop reading here.
Why I am not a utilitarian
81–90 of 102 posts
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
The nuclear missile is a worse example because there is already this element of hostility and self-defense in the scenario. You might be able to justify killing five million people in another country in order to prevent them from launching a missile onto your country that would kill a million of your people. [1] I have no idea what utilitarians have to say here, will they be okay with getting a million of their people killed because that is a smaller lose of utility than the prevention of the attack which costs five million lifes in the hostile country?
[1] For simplicity ignoring all the complications of who wants to attack, probably the government or the military, and who would be victim of the prevention, probably military and civilians, and that you therefore might have to kill people that do not support or even oppose the attack.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#83The 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 happ…
This seems to assume that the 10 strangers are not someone else’s children.
My understanding of utilitarianism is that other factors than keeping someone alive should be considered. Is it utilitarian to save 10 elderly people over the life of a child? It might not be, depending on how long the elderly are expected to live, and if the remainder of their lives is as valuable as those of a child (eg, will their remaining years be unproductive and sickly due to age, while the child’s life may be full of productivity and health).
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#84I 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 natu…
Yes, even from a utilitarian viewpoint, the prospect of living in a society that will murder you if there happen to be a sufficient number of people that require your organs is a dismal prospect. A utilitarian should also account for that very significant negative externality.
Many of these examples fail to take overall utility into account. The sadistic pleasure is another prime example. You must consider not just those who would enjoy the torture but also those that would be repulsed by it.
Same with the cookie. Rewarding a serial killer would make much of society unhappy. From a utilitarian point of view, giving the cookie to Mother Teresa (generally rewarding those who act kindly to others), is a very straightforward choice. The individual perception of cookie sweetness contributes very little to the overall utility.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#85But... but... the article claims false moral dilemmas... ¿Why framing a innocent is better than a riot? ¿Why kill a healthy man is better to let die 5 ill of them? ¿Why charity ---oh my god--- why charity is better than the usual inherintance rule? Stop reading here.
How are these false? Framing an innocent person causes less overall harm than allowing a riot to happen. Killing a healthy man causes less overall harm than letting 5 men die, etc.
If you think killing the healthy man is wrong, you probably don't agree with utilitarianism.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#86Most ‘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 kind of missing the point. Even if it were to result in a "better world", the intuition is that it is still wrong to murder the innocent man to save 5, just prima facie. This is a problem for the utilitarian.
Their best response might be to just bite the bullet, but it significantly weakens their argument overall.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#87Earlier 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…
> Systems of morals can all be expressed as rules, outcomes, or goals
I have no problem with this, but utilitarians claim that utilitarianism is an alternative to deontology. If your statement here is true, then utilitarians are wrong in that claim.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#88The 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 happ…
This seems to assume that the 10 strangers are not someone else’s children. My understanding of utilitarianism is that other factors than keeping someone alive should be considered. Is it utilitarian to save 10 elderly people over the life of a child? It might not be, depending on how long the elderly are expected to live, and if the remainder of their lives is as valuable as those of a child (eg, will their remainin…
> This seems to assume that the 10 strangers are not someone else’s children.
It does not make that assumption.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#89The 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 happ…
Utility isn't the same as happiness. And in any event, another significant problem is in quantifying happiness, even if you were to base your decision making on it: how do you know that the decision-maker deciding to sacrifice their own kid would maximize overall happiness? How do you know those 10 strangers wouldn't be overcome with guilt, or that the pain of he decision maker wouldn't equal whatever suffering might ensue in others from the alternate decision?
Also, if that decision were made, it's not in the service of advancing some theory, it's in sacrifice. Wouldn't to do otherwise be a selfish decision? And if not, what does it say about maximizing happiness? Whose happiness is relevant? The 12 people involved, or whoever might be privy to the decision?
Some of these things might argue against utilitarianism, but I'm not sure any other ethical framework would be more immune to criticisms.
Sometimes I think these kinds of decision scenarios are fundamentally intractable, and don't really speak to reasons for adopting or not adopting any particular ethical paradigm.
Re: Why I am not a utilitarian
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I'm happy to see these kinds of discussions.
Here's the thing: one of the biggest problems to deontological approaches, as the parent pointed out, is that you end up with conflicts between values. But it's worse than that, because there's not a clear way to resolve these conflicts, and in my experience there's just a "hands throwing up" moment, along with a denial that the conflict existed, or an appeal to "maintaining values" without even recognizing that another value was abandoned.
So you could turn this on its head, and argue that if deontological and utilitarian approaches are equivalent at some level, why not advocate for the approach that at least offers a framework for resolving conflicts in theory? If two values confict, how do you decide? More importantly, how do you decide without appealing to utility at some level, including implicitly?
This gets into very high-level ethical reasoning issues and I'm not sure I would ascribe as purely utilitarian or deontological perspectives. But I think if you take the perspective of equivalence (and I think that's a reasonable perspective), there's not much grounds for saying you're not deontological or not utilitarian.