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Why I am not a utilitarian

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Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#91

Post by dlkf »

derbOac wrote: post #89
dlkf wrote: post #70

The 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…

> Utility isn't the same as happiness.

In theory no, but in practice it is the concrete instantiation of utility most commonly proposed. Moreover, I think any definition of utility we invoke will be susceptible to a similar critique.

> another significant problem is in quantifying happiness

I agree with this, and I think the measurement problem is insurmountable. But I still think Williams' criticism is deeper. If we magically solved out the measurement problem (which, again, I think is impossible - the question is ill-posed) I would still be opposed to utilitarianism, because whatever notion of goodness we invoke becomes trivialised when we boil it down to a liquid currency.

> 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.

I think they can be useful, but analytic philosophers have a bad tendency to lean far too heavily on them. Often results in missing the forest for the trees.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#92

Post by GolangProject »

pdonis wrote: post #80
GolangProject wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The first sentence of the quote does as you say. The second and third sentences make more general claims.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#93

Post by randallsquared »

pdonis wrote: post #87
randallsquared wrote: post #56

Earlier 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…

> 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.

These are just different levels of abstraction. You can write bel in Blub, but that doesn't mean they aren't in some sense alternatives.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#94

Post by pdonis »

derbOac wrote: post #90
pdonis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "maintaini…

> If two values confict, how do you decide?

I'm not sure there is any general rule for this. That's why there are conflicts like this in the first place: because there isn't one consistent set of ethical rules that can be applied to every situation.

> More importantly, how do you decide without appealing to utility at some level, including implicitly?

"Utility" in this context is just another way of saying "what people value". But if there were one single scale on which we could measure everything that people value, there wouldn't be ethical conflicts. The whole point is that there isn't any such scale: people have multiple different, incommensurable values, and there is no general rule for how to resolve conflicts between them.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#95

Post by pdonis »

GolangProject wrote: post #92
pdonis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first sentence of the quote does as you say. The second and third sentences make more general claims.

Even those sentences don't argue for a general cap on pleasure but not on pain. In fact, it's hard to come up with any general claim that they do amount to an argument for. The specific example given, one animal eating the other, is obviously asymmetrical, so of course we would expect the respective valences of pleasure and pain to be asymmetrical too. But that's a particular property of that specific example.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#96

Post by edanm »

missingrib wrote: post #86
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…

>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 fa…

> Their best response might be to just bite the bullet, but it significantly weakens their argument overall.

I disagree. To me it seems fairly obvious that it is morally correct to murder one innocent person to save 5 innocent people. Not only that, but we often as a society make this exact decision (e.g. send young people to fight in armies, send firefighters to rescue people despite potential harm to themselves, etc).

I don't know why this supposedly weakens utilitarianism - the whole point of the philosophy is exactly to point out that this is the morally correct choice.

The problem with this and the other examples in the article is that there's a big difference between the hypothetical examples often given, which assume no other effects, and the real world. In the real world, we often only allow these kinds of decisions in society-wide settings - e.g. the examples I gave above (armies, firefighters). We don't allow people to just choose on a case-by-case basis who should live or die, because it would cause far more problems (and thus, negative utility) to do so.

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#97

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why I am not a utilitarian

#99

Post by GolangProject »

pdonis wrote: post #95
GolangProject wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first sentence of the quote does as you say. The second and third sentences make more general claims.

Even those sentences don't argue for a general cap on pleasure but not on pain. In fact, it's hard to come up with any general claim that they do amount to an argument for. The specific example given, one animal eating the other, is obviously asymmetrical, so of course we would expect the respective valences of pleasure and pain to be asymmetrical too. But that's a particular property of that specific example.

Well, I think you'd have to accept the Schopenhauerian worldview (or something similarly pessimistic) in toto, that sentient life involves a surfeit of suffering and conflicting desires that cannot possibly be reconciled, in order to accept the general asymmetry. A short quotation can, of course, only give a glimpse into that: it should be understood as rhetoric more than an analytical chain of reasoning. One animal eating another is absolutely central to the system of nature, since it's how the system sustains itself; the pain of one creature being hunted down and eaten is necessary for the other creature to survive, and yet the pain of dying is obviously greater than the satisfaction of eating.
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