Alright, ratpill me. What’s wrong with utilitarianism aside the fact
that people bend it to come to galaxy-brained conclusions, which happens
to all other ethics theories?
All forms of utilitarianism require other philosophical frameworks to fill in the gaps. The whole higher-lower pleasures thing is significant: how many ice-cream sandwiches equal one human life? How many PlayStation plus memberships would justify torturing a dude? If your answer is “these units aren’t transferable,” then the entire math of utilitarianism ceases to be a uniform whole, and now you have separate systems for your lower, higher, and in some cases mega-higher pleasures. Because of this, people who call themselves “utilitarian” without a lot of qualification tend to be (But aren’t always) people who *do* think these quantities are transferable, and usually have shortsighted/neoliberal politics.
That's kind of true of all attempts at creating coherent moral systems though, isn't it? (and I have certainly seen hardcore communists arguing from a utilitarian perspective)
For sure. The targeting of utilitarianism in particular, from what I can tell, is just from the confidence that utilitarians have that they’ve figured it all out. It’s not as much an intellectual rivalry as one based on personal interactions between utilitarians and virtue ethicists/philosophy-agnostics
Also hardcore communists tend to be negative utilitarians, which is a more defensible and somewhat disparate form of utilitarianism that avoids like 90% of the higher-lower pleasure transference.
I’m not at all sure what you mean by that
Negative utilitarianism is just a (popular) form of utilitarianism which attempts to resolve a few of the conflicts thrown up by naive Benthamite utilitarianism without running into the weird contradictions thrown up by later attempts (such as those of Mill) to resolve apparent problems with that original Benthamite view
When you get into it all philosophical (not to mention scientific) endeavours throw up “internal differences” between advocates of this or that view even within circles of thinkers who otherwise broadly agree
Totally agree with the last paragraph. My though was on the grand battles between weak and strong negative utilitarianism. Different modes of calculation.
That wasn't my question; I said the following:
>Which hardcore communist has argued from a negative utilitarian position
I'm asking for names. Which communist has argued this?
If your argument is that:
>hardcore communists tend to be negative utilitarians
Then you need to be able to give more than one name to make a case here. Not much of a tendency if it's just you, is it?
Exactly 42,059,225 ice cream sandwiches equal one human life. Checkmate.
But joking aside, we rarely see direct transactions between higher/lower order pleasures, but they’re often exchanged through chance. Underwater welders get paid ~$75,000-100,000 more a year than normal welders even though their skill sets are 95% overlapping; the difference comes from the hazard of underwater welding. Utilitarians (an often more conservative economists) could say this confirms that people unconsciously make choices based on utility, and that higher and lower order pleasures are exchangeable—people are willing to trade a small but quantifiable chance of dying for a large quantity of cash, which lets utilitarians put a (flawed) price on life.
Looking deeper, this is clearly stupid. Humans don’t act perfectly rationally, and their decisions don’t reflect the basic concept of utility well. Read about welfare economics and it gets into detail where utilitarian economics as a framework fails.
Society at large seems to think that a gallon of milk is more valuable than the disutility of four hours of (cow) suffering, so 42,059,225 ice cream sandwiches are worth more than about nineteen thousand years of suffering.
Honestly I like the anti-rat (heh) vocabulary we're developing over time. It contrasts well with the annoying "wheel rediscovery" vocabulary the rats have.
'ratpill' is just the rightwing red-pill thing. It is the same as when a while back suddenly the words cuck and simp showed up, that isn't developing a vocabulary, that is just being an edgelord, and copying other edgelords.
We have strayed so far from the guiding light of our dying wizards. ;)
NB: I do not agree with utilitarianism as an ethical theory
In the broadest sense, there’s nothing wrong with utilitarianism, and indeed many eminent philosophers - including such late great luminaries as the late great Derek Parfit - worked on versions of it even while acknowledging fundamental issues with its most naive versions, such as are pointed out in /u/Jemdat_Nasr’s reference to Ursula Le Guin
On one level, it’s become something of an in-joke to bag on utilitarianism in a bunch of philosophically-oriented online places, just because in its most naive versions it’s easy to take the piss out of for being - well - naive
On another, utilitarians *in* online philosophy stuff seem to tend to be the most insufferable lanyard types who nobody wants to hang around with anyway. This is most apparent for sneering purposes in the wasteful bullshit you get from the likes of Yudkowsky and his friend Nick Bostrom (who is fond of making ridiculous probability estimates of long term outcomes and drawing irritatingly obtuse clever arguments out of them. He works out of Oxford University now, go figure)
That’s not really an answer to your question but the real answer is too long to do a reddit comment about: go check out /r/askphilosophy or the SEP page on the subject to find out more at greater length
This is a common misconception about Kant though
The axe murderer example is an extreme example he uses not in order to tell you that - as a maxim - you should give away your friends to axe murderers, but to explain how you formulate an ethical principle (according to his system anyway)
Korsgaard discusses this in a few places
[The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas](http://sites.asiasociety.org/asia21summit/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/3.-Le-Guin-Ursula-The-Ones-Who-Walk-Away-From-Omelas.pdf) is a short-story by Ursula K. Le Guin that presents a critique of Utilitarianism.
There's also the practical consideration of how to actually calculate the net utility of our actions. How well could you predict the after effects of any particular action 50 years down the line?
Hot take: Omelas is preferable to the status quo. Your concerns on practical considerations are valid obviously, but these pure examples still check out imo.
Also has Omelas been confirmed as a critique of utilitarianism? I was always taught that it was just a thought experiment concerning utilitarianism. Le Guin seems to have a utilitarian mindset in Earthsea and shit.
You can read the short story and decide for yourself. I think it is pretty obvious. Or you can look at one of her inspirations for the story, and it will become blindingly obvious:
Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?
William James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life
I definitely see the highlighting of the repulsive reaction to the negative sides, but in my Phil classes this has always been portrayed not as an argument to itself as much as it highlights a natural human reaction. How we feel does not always indicate how we should act, but analyzing the feeling and trying to find a framework to fit it into has been the exercise, at least in my experience.
Not doubting your position at all, just explaining where I’m coming from.
Ah. I think your phil class wasn't saying, UKLG dislikes utilitarianism, so much as it was saying, UKLg's hatred of naive utilitarianism is a common example of how people hate it
Alright, ratpill me. What’s wrong with utilitarianism aside the fact that people bend it to come to galaxy-brained conclusions, which happens to all other ethics theories?
If people could maybe not do their barely informed hot takes about moral philosophy in this sub that would please me immensely
Sorry, I know this is a shitpost.
Utilitarianism itself is fine, however..