defend the indefensible: utilitarianism

Until she was 11, she was fervently religious. She believed that, since God had given her life, she owed him a debt so enormous that she could never repay it, but that it was her duty to try as hard as she could. Then, one weekend, it occurred to her that other people in the world believed in their holy books just as strongly as she believed in the Bible, so what reason did she have to believe that hers was true? She had never seen or felt any evidence of God’s presence. Quite suddenly, she lost her faith.

no she didn't

Okay, this is the best part:

He calculated that if the child gave away around 10% of its income, then they would likely break even – that is, the money their child would donate would be equal to the money they did not donate because they spent it instead on raising the child. Of course, this did not take into account that it was better to give money now rather than later, especially to urgent causes such as global warming and Aids, so some discounting would have to be factored into the calculation. All this made Julia feel better for a while, and even though she realised that it would be pretty weird to tell a child that they expected it to pay for its existence in the world with a certain percentage of its income, she figured she was going to be a weird mother anyway, and her child would probably be weird, too, and so perhaps to a child of hers all this would seem perfectly sensible.

they're going to have an incentive to put nietzsche on their home's list of prohibited books!!

xp aye, but i found a blog where she says Some have asked if we consider her a sort of recruit, hoping that her future donations will outweigh the cost of raising her. The answer is “definitely not.”.

I just like the idea that because, from their perspective, raising a child was an optional cost, they think their child should view it the same way. From one's own perspective, having been raised isn't an optional cost.

"Is it bad to discriminate against fertile women in employment?"

http://robertwiblin.com/2010/04/11/is-it-bad-to-discriminate-against-fertile-women-in-employment/

is some classic utilitarian "makes u think bro"

that is one of the major EA dudes btw, not just some bro w/ thoughtz

is there a difference

power

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03c2zw6

TBF I think Steve Landsburg remains the all time "makes u think bro" utilitarianism champ with

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/04/03/steven_landsburg_rochester_professor_is_it_really_rape_if_the_victim_doesn.html

"Raping unconscious people: maybe not so bad"

http://thepointmag.com/2015/examined-life/effected

An idea is a kind of cartoon. Inhabiting one, we get that thrill of clarity: everything simple and certain, with sharp black borders. But at some point this cleaner world turns oppressive, like the grandparents’ condo after a few days’ visit, and we look to escape. That too is another sort of thrill. We get out, and the fuller world rushes back to meet us, in all its grubby confusion. Woosh.

The break was unexpected and decisive. We both got home one day, three or four weeks in, and instead of sitting down to practice building little virtual boxes, we picked up some book or other, Homer or Harry Potter or our own journals; and that was that. We canceled the remaining interviews and tests; David said goodbye to an already-guaranteed $90,000 job. Just a few days later it all seemed a bizarre and sort-of boring dream, a micro-group fantasy we’d witched ourselves into. One of us bumped the running chess game, which I was losing, and we never put the pieces back, leaving the crooked board on the table as a sort of monument to our stumble out of grace.

. I set up an interview with Google, and David began a series of trainings and tests for web-development boot camp.

How do you "set up an interview with google" when you don't know anything about web development?

connections my brother connections

That was a good piece. Not exactly another critique of EA, more about the experience of getting caught up in a brief spell of idealism before reverting to fecklessness.

http://bostonreview.net/forum/foundations-philanthropy-democracy

I'm not going to read the whole death penalty thread but I assume utilitarians are at it again

no it's a bunch of deontologists and catholics ruining everything, creating problems and suffering

nothing kantian, I promise

fairly huge absence of utilitarian arguments i'd say actually - maybe a little bit deems

i did espouse the utilitarian argument that executions should be carried out more efficiently and economically (i.e. shooting vs. the more expensive method of lethal injection)

http://www.publicbooks.org/the-problem-with-philanthropy/

In The Self Help Myth, Erica Kohl-Arenas shows how hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and decades of advocacy have failed to address the poverty and disenfranchisement of workers in the area.

In her richly told historical analysis, Kohl-Arenas interrogates the longstanding tension between philanthropic funders and their grantees: “Can the surplus of capitalist exploitation be used to aid those on whose backs this surplus is generated?” Considering the Central Valley as a test case, one would have to assume the answer is no. Farmworkers continue to face substandard housing, food insecurity, dangerous working conditions, underemployment and overwork, lack of health care, endemic racism, and the threat of deportation. While the lack of “outcomes” from philanthropic investments suggest a simple systems failure, Kohl-Arenas’s close examination of the negotiation of power over decades offers a deeper lesson, providing key insights into the nonprofit sector’s role in American society and beyond.

https://www.academia.edu/30350308/The_Lessons_of_Effective_Altruism

still noxious trash

one day you will be piloting a speeding train and you will have to decide whether to run over a bum on the tracks or derail the entire train, and that day you will love utilitarianism

― the late great, Thursday, August 1, 2013 8:07 PM (five years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what kind of a cretin needs a moral theory to tell them not to derail the entire train

― j., Thursday, August 1, 2013 8:15 PM (five years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Still the best

so i had a colleague who taught civics and he always started with the trolley problem because he thought understanding utilitarianism was key to being a good citizen in a democracy

he was a vegan straightedge punk with tattoos everywhere and plugs, big thick glasses and a beard

this guy did everything from first principles. it is sometimes proposed that math and science teachers should teach from first principles. personally i think teaching math and science from first principles is a terrible way to teach math and science,

but beyond that i was opposed to his approach because i consider myself a practitioner, not a philosopher. i don't like thinking about the trolley problem because my job (like anyone's) is dilemmas all day long and even the smallest are hardly as clear cut as the stupid trolley, so it's a terrible principle to organize from

that's how i (was trying to) break it down to an extent

he won a bunch of awards in his first three years of high school teaching, then left the classroom in the middle of his fourth to become an academic

the substitute they got for his kids was terrible

i think he felt he could reach more people or something

Sounds like a prick honestly

“Reaching more people” is exactly the sort of dumb thing a utilitarian believes is important

anyway i'm surprised to see this was recently bumped (i missed it in SNA, being tied up elsewhere)

i searched it up tonight because i saw on facebook a video of a man with down's syndrome presenting an argument against abortion at a congressional hearing. he was testifying about his personal quality of life (good, apparently) and also talking about how upset it made him feel when he imagined being aborted. it was really something.

anyway a lot of the argument on both sides of the discussion in the comment section was utilitarian in nature ... and yes it got around to the trolley problem ... and then i remembered this teacher dude and his bit about democracy ... so i came here etc etc

what do you guys think of that teacher guy's proposition that utilitarianism is essential to a properly functioning democracy?

he was a difficult colleague

quite a showboat

Utilitarianism relies on arguing from what is supposed to be an indisputably simple and uncontroversial premise, and walking us down the garden path to various conclusions about moral rules, and alleges that even if we find some of the conclusions violate our moral sensibilities we are stuck with them because we agreed to the premise, but like, if the conclusions violate an agent’s moral sensibilities, they have no particular reason not to reject the utilitarian premise as a result.

You can xref the Roko’s basilisk people for what happens when you decide an argument from first principles can’t possibly give you a reason to reject or modify your principles.

maybe i should just read the thread but i found it really difficult going last time (over my head)

personally as a practitioner, i think it should be okay for both types of trolley operators to exist, but that they should reflect on their core values and clearly state to their stakeholders (passengers) their professional orientation on the matter, while also gathering information on the stakeholder's position and providing working channels for feedback. then i guess you let the riders decide which trolley they prefer.

i have not heard of this basilisk, will investigate

thx

If “utilitarianism is essential to a properly functioning democracy” then that would sort of imply that a “properly functioning democracy” is a good in itself and utilitarianism good in a merely instrumental way to achieve the properly functioning democracy, which is not what a moral theory is supposed to be, so I find that kind of hilarious.

Representative democracy is just, like, a means of investing sovereign authority. The sovereign might make utilitarian decisions or it might not; surely a state that maximized global utility would be a totalitarian one.

totally over my head i'm afraid

back up a bit ... what's a moral theory supposed to be, anyway?

Well so I shall crib liberally and perhaps without direct citation from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. By morality in this discussion I don’t mean “a given set of rules for conduct put forward by an actual community in the actual world” but “a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons”. (SEP, “Morality.) So a moral theory should give us an argument that a given code of conduct is a moral code in this second sense, by demonstrating that all rational persons would agree to it.

So the various utilitarianisms are normative theories that argue acts are deemed good only by their consequences. The one I mostly keep yelling about is “preference utilitarianism”, where good acts are those which (more or less) are those most preferred by all persons due moral consideration.

Leaving aside the questions of whether a normative morality can exist, or whether any moral theory could discover it if it could, I think my particular straw man of utilitarianism aggravates me in part because some of its proponents aren’t just doing philosophy, they actually want to get people to act in the ways their theory suggests is the right way to act. And this is going to sound absurd but I think moralizing is not really the proper domain of moral philosophy! Peter Singer or your ex-colleague or whomstever addressing the lay populace with a morality that they argue is straightforwardly logically necessary to accept is kind of sophistic boondoggle, trying to take the basically abstract and academic question of what a normative morality would be if we could derive one from first principles and try to use their answer to answer the question most people have about their behavior which is “how should I live and what should I do” which I think is largely orthogonal.

i felt he bullied his students but that's a whole other story

NB I’m a dilettante who hasn’t read nearly enough books to really justify yelling about all this but that’s my take right now.

can i just

our school was an alternative progressive school but unfortunately it was situated in a part of the county where suburbs blend into semi-rural land. a lot of kids of wingnut conservative people (owners of large semi-rural estates) in this area ended up sending their kids to our school because their parents were trying to segregate them from the general population in the district (the area has a lot of hispanic agricultural workers and many of them don't know how to access the charter school system)

long story short he got into a debate w/ a young 15 year old republican about veganism. the 15 year old argued that he should respect her cultural beliefs, so he proposed a thought experiment in which he cooked and ate her horse (she owned a pony or something). in front of the class. which made her cry.

so tbf there was a high chance he wouldn't have been asked back for a 5th year anyway

jesus christ

afterward he was all "what if i told you i loved the cows you eat at in n out as much as you love your pony"

he did get reprimanded for that one

sorry for derail

i didn't witness this personally, but i heard all about it from the administrator (a friend of mine friend, totally righteous guy) who reprimanded him ... who, believe it or not, is also a tattooed vegan straightedge punk and part time bouncer at hardcore shows ... they had known each other from the scene which is how the first guy got hired

Utilitarianism relies on arguing from what is supposed to be an indisputably simple and uncontroversial premise, and walking us down the garden path to various conclusions about moral rules, and alleges that even if we find some of the conclusions violate our moral sensibilities we are stuck with them because we agreed to the premise, but like, if the conclusions violate an agent’s moral sensibilities, they have no particular reason not to reject the utilitarian premise as a result.

I'd put it a little differently. Utilitarians tend to say that the counter-intuitive results of applying utilitarianism in certain cases can be explained in ways that are consistent with the theory, and that these explanations are preferable, because they're plausible and they make for a simpler overall picture of how things work. This is suppose to give you a reason not to reject the utilitarian premise.

I think moralizing is not really the proper domain of moral philosophy! Peter Singer or your ex-colleague or whomstever addressing the lay populace with a morality that they argue is straightforwardly logically necessary to accept is kind of sophistic boondoggle, trying to take the basically abstract and academic question of what a normative morality would be if we could derive one from first principles and try to use their answer to answer the question most people have about their behavior which is “how should I live and what should I do” which I think is largely orthogonal.

That's funny--I usually hear the opposite sort of criticism, that moral philosophers are too obsessed with technical minutiae and should get back to practical theories of how to live. You really can't please everyone. (Utilitarians find this especially disappointing.)