defend the indefensible: utilitarianism

Imagine for a second that the Genesis story is actually true. Under the actualist view, Adam and Eve could have morally refrained from having children, even if, had they decided differently, billions of billions of happy persons would have been around!

Can't actualism make an exception for cases where you're the anointed progenitor of all mankind?

billions of billions of happy persons

nb: this is not an actual number

yes it is, it's quintillions

The reason Singer is wrong is because consequentialism is wrong...

― go hang a salami I'm a canal, adam (silby), Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:47 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i never studied philosophy and would actually like to know what this means

here's the flopson defence of utilitarianism, plz tell me why its wrong

- quantities we care about in moral considerations are denoted in different units

- for example: having money makes me feel good, and having free time to do nothing also makes me feel good

- if you wanted to determine whether i was better off in two different states in the world, one in which i worked 12 hours a day and had lots of money, and one in which i worked 8 hours a day, had less money but more free time, you can't just do that by comparing money OR free time. if you do it comparing only money, the best world would be one where i work every waking hour. if you do it comparing only free time, the best world is one in which i sit on my ass all day. despite liking both things, i don't like either of those worlds

- the solution is to define some mapping (norm or ordering) from a 2-dimensional money-free time space to a 1-dimensional space... hey, why don't we call it utility? B-)

i don't see how you can make a moral statement in the context where you have quantities measured in different units without implicitly using utilitarianism.. but curious to find out

it's quintillions

it only falls in the range of quintillions for a determinate number of billions, between 1 billion billions and one thousand billion billions, but "billions of billions" leaves both terms indeterminate and so afaics it means only "some very big number".

why should there be some analysis of all existing moral practice into uniform terms in the first place, flopson? you need an existence proof first so that you're in a position to claim that there's any reason to think your mapping tracks the moral reality, otherwise it may just be a destructive, rationalizing overlay onto our actual lives

You guys have probably discussed this over and over and over, but I still don't believe there are any people out there who aren't consequentialists. Whenever I discuss things with a 'deontologist', she'll say something like 'Consequentialism is wrong, because it'll have this and this and this unintended consequence'....

On the other hand, I believe it could very well be, that it might bring about the best consequences, and therefore be the right thing to do for a consequentialist, to lie and claim to be a deontologist, because it's just that much simpler and easier for people to understand. But then if I say that to a 'consequentialist' he'll say 'oh, but lying is wrong'.

Of course, I do understand why so many philosophers fight against consequentialism, because there's no way in hell to morally defend wasting ones time speaking philosophically.

When asked about the trolley-problem, will you:

1) Answer that you allow the men to die
2) Answer that you'll kill the fat man
or
3) Answer that IT DOESN'T MATTER and do something more valuable than thinking about fucking trolleys.

Please don't think too much about it. The right answer is c.

consequentialism probably has enough malleability for it to be justified in all kinds of increasingly convoluted ways, but i think that reveals that the problem with being 'a consequentialist' is less about it being wrong as such than about it being a really not very useful lens to view practical ethics through

why should there be some analysis of all existing moral practice into uniform terms in the first place, flopson? you need an existence proof first so that you're in a position to claim that there's any reason to think your mapping tracks the moral reality, otherwise it may just be a destructive, rationalizing overlay onto our actual lives

― j., Thursday, August 27, 2015 8:12 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you can prove existence in many cases, just prove there's a contraction (in my example that's just concave in both arguments, which is realistic), zap it with a fixed point theorem, boom.

but i don't think my argument is utilitarianism is useful in every case, it's just inevitable in an important subclass of cases. i think that's a strong enough claim

my suspiscion has always been that all ethics is consequentialist; it is the precondition for anything having any moral weight & the difference between the hypothetical and real actions

flopson (et al) as I've alluded upthread I think consequentialist theories fail to correctly specify what actions are moral b/c I am basically a moral error theorist (based on my limited reading), i.e. moral propositions are all false. In my particular case my not-well-developed intuition is that moral propositions are all false because, for a moral proposition ("It is moral to do X") to be true, it would have to derive the authority to obligate me from somewhere, and I don't think that there are any such things from which authority can be derived.

Even leaving that aside, I think Singer and his adherents basically are sophists in their more popularized arguments about reducing suffering. Leading people by the nose by getting them to agree that they'd save a child drowning in a pond and then arguing that they therefore, to be consistent, must agree that effective altruism is a moral imperative is basically a political hoodwink, not a good argument.

My further and even less-well-developed intuition is that in point of fact people do not engage in moral reasoning all that often when making decisions; I suspect that they do whatever it is they do for some uncomputable collection of reasons and then pattern-match it after the fact to the collection of moral propositions they want to believe they adhere to. Which even if moral theories were ever true would make them of dubious use.

also Brian Leiter is a twit

yeah despite my explanation above that's what i don't get - where the fuck did the inbuilt philosophical hostility toward sophistry go?!? singerism is clearly an attempt to manipulate people into moral compliance, yet so many argumentatively hygienic people are total subscribers

(maybe in fact they maintain principled reservations for academic purposes but this is their little bit of cynicism, to profess what's good for the masses)

actually, once a very pro-singer philosopher i know contacted me while working on a piece for one of those 'just the arguments hard and fast' commercial books, and asked me how to formalize an argument correctly (something we had learned plenty about in school, this one no less than anyone else). i was aghast, the task was so rudimentary…

thx silby

for a moral proposition ("It is moral to do X") to be true, it would have to derive the authority to obligate me from somewhere, and I don't think that there are any such things from which authority can be derived

philosophers seem to always thirst for another deeper thing behind the thing in question... but it never ends... i had to ban myself from thinking that way after getting spending a whole acid trip in a recursive loop. good luck though.

people do not engage in moral reasoning all that often when making decisions; I suspect that they do whatever it is they do for some uncomputable collection of reasons and then pattern-match it after the fact to the collection of moral propositions they want to believe they adhere to

this is probably literally true, but idk... it's kind of like austrian economists being like "the market is too complex to understand, submit to it and let the price vector take a whizz all over you." like we still need some shitty model of ethics to help us understand what to do when stuff gets fucked up

when i was in high school i saw peter singer in an astra taylor documentary where she interviews celeb philosophers, and i remember being pretty into his part and telling my friend about it the next day, "hey, there's this philosopher who says we should give all our money to oxfam, crazy shit" and he was like "pfft... you needed a philosopher to tell you that bro?"

i think my problem with the jacobin piece upthread is you can apply the argument in that piece to anything that is not uh, single-handedly overthrowing capitalism, or whatever. the only exception is the author says at one point that philantrophy subsidizes capitalism which is what put the person in the ditch in the first place, but that's an unbacked empirical claim whereas vicious cycle of poverty is extremely well documented as well as fact that a random income shock can often snap you out of it. as i said upthread, this EA stuff only exists J-PAL has done the best empirical social science work ever and we have some strong results about poverty now

also, like, i don't even think EA is necessarily at odds with orthodox marxism... if having a revolution is the best thing poors can do with their money send them an unconditional cash transfer maybe they'll use it to have a revolution who knows

j. presumably you agree that the state should redistribute wealth from rich people to poor people... what other argument exists for that other than utility is concave in wealth?

they don't deserve it and we do

interesting.... so if an unequal distribution were deserved (hypothetical), no problem? even if you could make poors better off by taking away just desserts from rich?

why would the poors want to take away desserts that the rich ppl deserved, esp. considering they would also have whatever they deserved

right now someone is currently getting either more or less than their both desserts, yet seemingly everyone thinks they're getting less. plausible that even if everyone were getting their just desserts, they would still feel that way.

maybe in a society where everybody is dependent on many other people there's no such thing as individual dessert

is no one going to make a dessert joke here? OUTRAGEOUS

tbh i wasn't sure people already weren't

you're right in the middle of it!!!

http://img.tesco.com/Groceries/pi/586/5051399720586/IDShot_540x540.jpg

maybe in a society where everybody is dependent on many other people there's no such thing as individual dessert

― MC Whistler (Noodle Vague), Friday, August 28, 2015 10:17 AM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

j was the one who said "deserve" in the first place. i don't personally think it's a good way to think about distribution... i mean, greg mankiw thinks we shouldn't redistribute money to poors because they don't deserve it, ilx poster j thinks the opposite. if it's hard to figure out just desserts, so everyone just goes home with their priors. whereas in a utilitarian perspective, i show you a poor person suffering and a rich person spending his marginal dollars on trifles, and we're done. maybe consequences don't really exist maan *takes bong rip* or whatever but that seems like an unavoidably useful framework for anyone with strong egalitarian priors

i've said elsewhere, maybe upthread, that consequentialism might make more sense (or have more utility, lol) in the context of political action

but i'm not, instinctively, a consequentialist and i don't think political beliefs are analogous to ethical theory - i think there's a gap between programmatic or ideological types of thinking and ethics as it applies to individual action and interrelationships. if you could somehow demonstrate to me that e.g. capitalism was the form of economic organization that maximized "happiness" for the greatest number of people, i'd still believe it was a Bad Thing

sorry i shd've expanded on that first sentence - something along the lines of "the nature of managing expenditure on infrastructure for supporting large numbers of people might mean it's most effectively considered thru some kind of consequentialist lens"

flopson, I too think it is a useful framework, but what people don't like about utilitarianism is that utility is seen as more than a framework. E.G. to say "a dollar has more value to a poor person than a rich person and that argues it should be seen as a good when money flows from the rich to the poor" is a soft form of utilitarianism indeed, and not the form in which people find it indefensible.

I think a concave real-valued function is a great metaphor for this argument but that doesn't mean I think there literally IS a real-valued function lying around whose concavity is the issue. Let alone any talk about fixed point theorems.

^ my point

Just a thought, but if "the greatest good for the greatest number" is a correct formulation of the highest morality, then how would this highest morality not endorse selectively euthanizing the least healthy and most unproductive members of society, starting with the most disabled and extremely elderly, so as to redirect the resources they consume toward creating a better life for the much younger and healthier, but impoverished, members of society?

Because it's ludicrous?

I'm pretty sure there are still a few million eugenicists out there who would consider it ludicrous not to euthanize the weakest members of society and who'd justify it on purely utilitarian grounds. Is there anything inherent in utilitarianism that precludes that justification?

Anyone considering where to get resources for the poor should start with the wealthy, rather than the disabled and elderly. And throughout history, that does seem to be what people do. And even at times, violent uprisings has taken property, and at times even lifes, from the rich in order to give to the poor. The empirical evidence don't really support that this actually ends up in happiness and goodness. That's a different discussion, though.

Also, that is a prime example of dismissing consequentialism because the consequences of it are perceived to be bad ;)

You sidestepped my question very neatly, but your answer doesn't answer it. Is there anything inherent in utilitarianism that precludes its application to justify eugenics?

if you could somehow demonstrate to me that e.g. capitalism was the form of economic organization that maximized "happiness" for the greatest number of people

i think good (no doubt controversial) case can be made for this (with proviso that definitions of ‘capitalism’ & ‘happiness’ not unproblematic givens)

this is prob dumb-obv thing to say, but my problem with utilitarianism/ consequentialism is problem with any totalizing ethical system/ theory

irl (as opposed to academic philosophy), ethical considerations, criteria, calculations involve complex, heterogeneous, mixed set of language-games, engaging with abstraction/ generalization, analogies & disanalogies, yet also attuned to dense web (context) of particulars

in ‘pure’ form or as totalizing theory, consequentialism & deontology both are inhuman & absurd, alien to ways humans actually ‘reason’ morally— ways much more sophisticated than philosophy’s gedanken-parables capture or allow for (ways not easily schematized by philosophy)

imo everyone (sociopaths aside) is consequentialist and deontologist, i.e. these are primordial ethical perspectives/ arguments/ language-games, most useful & essential as correctives, checks & balances on each other

philosophers like singer seem to me like children, frustrated at illogicalities & apparent paradoxes of e.g. english language, adamantly insisting others shd adopt their own invented wd-be ‘rational’ language
i don’t begrudge anyone that choice of personal ethics (especially if it induces ethical action), but ultimately— in pure form— it’s no more ‘rational’ (its normative power no more secured by ‘logic’) than e.g. ethics based on religion
the complexity of ethical thought prob best elucidated through narrative, not abstract theory or some input-output algorithm for action

nb theories, algorithms, gedanken-experiments, schematizations of philosophy (e.g. of utilitarian philosophy) are useful— insofar as they contribute to diverse toolbox of ethical-political reasoning, argumentation, persuasion, evaluation (e.g. of policy)
but imo they don’t in themselves provide any answers

i agree it can be argued, it frequently is argued! by "demonstrate" i meant "proved to a reasonable degree of certainty".

not all consequentialism is utilitarianism, obv, but the problem they both have at the macro and micro level is fundamentally one of time - of consequences, even. an action that benefits me in the short term might do me greater harm as it's consequences unfold. a policy that benefits x number of people over a year might harm 100x people over 10.

this isn't to say consequentialism can't be a good way of taking decisions on how to behave, but it does mean that to call those decisions "moral" requires a lot of qualification of what "good", "right" and "consequence" mean

i think the language of ethics as commonly used is far closer to a deontological position. consequentialism feels closer to the language of government.

which is to say yeah i broadly agree with you drash, to insist on either position dogmatically is only sane in the realm of philosophy...the same might be true of a rigid belief in the field of ethics as a guide to how to live tho

x-post: No I can't. In the same way I can't find anything inherent in modern science to preclude it's application to proving that the world is flat. Nobody in their right mind, and in good faith, could argue that it would be utilitarian to kill a bunch of grandfathers and -mothers. But somebody might lie and manipulate to say such a thing, sure. However, the risk of something like that happening - due to utilitarianism - are so little that it simply doesn't matter, consequentialistically speaking. When speaking consequentially, what matters are not 'inherent' things, what matters is not 'being', but 'doing'.

As I said upthread, I fully accept if people think that the moral philosophy with the best consequences are anti-consequentialist. I cannot argue against lying and saying that you're not a consequentialist, even though consequentialist argumenation brought you to that conclusion. But what I would need to hear to consider deontology, for instance, would be a convincing argument based on deontological reasoning, instead of utilitarian.

Also, crash mostly otm.

Also, Noodle Vague also tom that 'the language of ethics' is closer to deontology, which is obviously why it's a worthless waste of time ;)

Also also also, late Wittgenstein rules! Language games forever.

Sorry, drash not crash. Stupid auto-correct.

children, frustrated at illogicalities & apparent paradoxes of e.g. english language, adamantly insisting others shd adopt their own invented wd-be ‘rational’ language

Have to admit that I am irrationally sympathetic with those people

xps yr points otm nv

Also also also, late Wittgenstein rules! Language games forever.

:) with you there (waving my lighter in the air)

Have to admit that I am irrationally sympathetic with those people

am sympathetic too. funny thing is, temperamentally wittgenstein was like epitome of this, keenly felt & suffered from this frustration/perplexity
that’s always one of the voices in his (dialogic) texts (a voice in himself)
all his late philosophy is like therapeutically trying to work through this, let go of that obsessiveness/ demand/ delusion, demystify ‘rule-following’

Singer distinguishes between involuntary and nonvoluntary euthanasia and argues the latter is defensible whereas the former is basically not http://utilitarianism.net/singer/by/1993----.htm

This is twenty years ago now though so maybe he's gotten weirder. Euthanasia is probably the topic of his that has sparked the most lay outrage iirc

imo everyone (sociopaths aside) is consequentialist and deontologist,

macintyre_shed_tear.gif

utilitarians of many non-horrific stripes routinely repudiate dumm consequences drawn from their main doctrine by e.g. claiming that the basic moral standards (inclusive of duties, rights, liberties, autonomy, what have you) are to be observed in some fashion or other when applying the principle of utility. mill did so. whether or not their theoretical refinements or their official stance toward existing moral practices hold up is another matter (esp. e.g. in view of their generally wide-open attitude toward the revision of any existent practice that could be improved utility-wise), but their official view excludes 'let's kill all the babies' etc.

xp aw & virtue ethicist too (i.e. everyone is)
(<3 aristotle)