Bentham's Mugging (2022)

I love this for three reasons:

1: the dig at Effective Altruism;

2: I went to UCL back in the days when you could hang out with the Bentham In A Box;

3: One of my (distant) colleagues is a descendant of Bentham.

But aren’t the counterexamples largely detached from reality because in reality people adopt other ethical systems/principles to avoid extreme outcomes?

I’m by no means opposing a general morality of optimising for the greater good, and I think on the whole utilitarianism, like other ideological/ethical systems, gets critiqued in comparison to an impossible standard of perfection. My sense is there are some more basic principles that underpin the success and pragmatism of any ethical/ideological system, and that these principles, to your implied point I think, would safeguard utilitarianism as well as other systems.

I think this is implied in the critique some have against utilitarianism, namely that it needs to introduce weighting in order to adjust the morality towards palatable/sensible means and outcomes. But I don’t think any system could avoid those same coping mechanisms.

Well the ten pounds still exists either way. You'd have to argue that there's more utility in Bentham owning the £10 than the mugger owning the £10, and that the difference in utility between them is greater than the utility of a finger.

I imagine you could define utility that way, but presumably the mugger could increase the cost (two fingers? an arm?) until the argument works. Also, if you do definite a utility function like that (say, "there is more utility in this £10 being mine rather than yours than the utility of your arm") then that's a pretty questionable morality.

Yup. According to which utility function? Certainly not mine.

Yeah I think we agree that utilitarianism is held to an unreasonable standard. I think contributing to that is some advocates suggesting it’s a solid utopian model to guide all decisions without further refinement and nuance (and I don’t think this is what you’re arguing).

And because it hasn’t been in practice widely adopted in history (unlike e.g. liberalism or Catholicism) the rubber hasn’t hit the road to allow us to understand how it would work practically. I think some other good ideas suffer the same problem/preemptive attack. Indeed any social progress seems to be attacked by a sort of whataboutism or false slippery slope attack.

To your question on basic principles, I think they’re caught in exercises like the trolley problem or the psychological experiments of the 60s: people on the whole don’t want to be responsible for causing harm, they don’t want to see people in their influence of control harmed, they don’t want to feel bad about themselves, they don’t want to be judged/punished by others - even if convinced it’s for the greater good. I’m not saying some people won’t take a fiercely rational or ideological lens, but on the whole people are influenced by some common psychology. And I think actually this is probably good: as much as it hinders “utopian” ideas being realised I think it ensures humanity moderates ideology.

I think without this a strict utilitarianism, eg a robotic approach, would lead to kinds of harm that I wouldn’t support, even if justified to some sort of ends that itself is subjective. But I think with it, an elevation of the greater good would probably be better than many approaches today. For a practical example I think we should permit more people to consensually enrol in promising but risky cancer research and treatments.

To reiterate that same point I think that in practice those factors would probably allow most systems to be successful, and some/many might be better than what we have now.