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whether it's moral or abusive for people to perform jobs that don't respect their capacities as a human being. Utilitarianism only contains "pleasure" and "pai
by acchow 10y ago
whether it's moral or abusive for people to perform jobs that don't respect their capacities as a human being.
Utilitarianism only contains "pleasure" and "pain", and none of this orthogonal dimension of "human capacity" or "rationality" or "dignity". As long as the total utility is higher, the means are irrelevant. A libertarian would probably say it's fine (since the person voluntarily took the job). Immanuel Kant would say it's definitely amoral, since he prizes human capacity/rationality as ultimate. John Rawls would probably not care, tho it's less clear there...
- Filligree 10y agoThat's a vast misrepresentation of utilitarianism. All it says is "maximize a utility function", without defining either what the utility function is, or how it should be aggregated across multiple people. Very few utilitarians would define it as happiness.
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoHedonic utilitarianism is actually the standard notion of utilitarianism. You're thinking of consequentialism in general.
- aidenn0 10y agoIf it's a hedonic net negative for people to perform jobs that don't respect their capacities as a human being, then utilitarianism would have something to say.
- acchow 10y agoBut that would show up in the measure for total utility, and so we would decide not to put people in those jobs because it reduces total utility. It's already accounted for. It seemed grandparent was trying to allude at some outside measure - suppose if these people didn't get "pain" from doing these jobs - as if there's some value outside of utility for respecting someone's human capacity. And Kant does believe in this.