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Utility monster
- chaorace 6y agoYeah, it's not surprising that you can blow out a weighting system if you... blow it out. If we're modelling utility in situations where human life could be endangered, you should probably tie some amount of utility value to risk of death (or inevitability of death, given the cookie example), preferably on a ramping scale that approaches infinity as death becomes more imminent. Maybe I'm missing the forest for the trees here, maybe the point is that it's impossible to create a moral system for allocating resources in a world where they are finite. I see little utility in such an argument, however.
- IanCal 6y agoUnfortunately for the risk of death idea due to the way that scales it means we should bring everyone to the point of almost certain death tomorrow to avoid one certain death right now.
- aabhay 6y agoI mean yes, the need to reduce values, emotions, and human life down to numbers is a known and justified challenge to a utilitarian ethic. But in many instances, it is generally allowable to do so, such as in the instance of taxation.
- chaorace 6y agoIn that scenario, the utility value for the utility monster would have to be enormous. We're talking something that would probably also result in human deaths if it were to go unhandled, like triggering a war or nuclear meltdown. I feel the greater ethical flaw in utilitarianism is the case where a utility value scales positively with suffering. What can you do if the utility monster derives positive utility value from others dying, as opposed to remaining linear? Utilitarian measures simply don't fare well when the actors are inherently antagonistic to one another.
- IanCal 6y agoThere's no involvement of the utility monster in what I'm talking about. If you put the cost of imminent certain death of one person as infinite, then given the choice between: One person dies right now, everyone else survives and lives a full life. And In one hour, everyone in the world dies with a 99.9999% chance. You would pick the latter. That's the issue I see with placing an infinite cost on imminent death.
- stared 6y agoThis is a problem only for unbounded utility, and can occur for both a super happy monster, and a monster in extreme anguish. Once you make utility which is in a fixed range, Utility Monster disappears.
- IanCal 6y agoI don't think it does. You have still the issue of the unhappy monster once everyone else has hit the "max" utility. You would spend all your resources on them rather than improve things for the rest of the group because they are now deemed unimprovable.
- stared 6y agoYou don't get anyone hit 0 or 1. (Compare with probabilities predicted by a sigmoid - it never reaches 0 or 1.)
- ben_w 6y agoLoose eyelashes vs factory farmed human flesh. Both are finite pain/finite negative utility. How many of the former must be avoided to equally balance the creation of one of the latter?
- chaorace 6y agoQuestion: how is that mathematically different from bounding by negative & positive infinity?
- stared 6y agosigmoid(x_1 + ... + x_n) != sigmoid(x_1) + ... + sigmoid(x_n)
- lidHanteyk 6y agoNo, as long as one entity can derive exponentially more utility than another, utility monsters are possible; such monsters cannot be satisfied only with polynomially many sacrifices.
- aasasd 6y agoSounds rather like plutocracy and corporatocracy.
- croon 6y agoI may have misinterpreted utilitarianism, but I thought it was egalitarian because everyone's utility values were the same. Am I wrong? Meaning the utility value of a cookie is the same for everyone, and the utility value of your first $100 is the same for everyone, and the utility value of anyone's second $100 is lesser than the first, etc, etc. Obviously someone thought this Utility Monster idea warranted a wikipedia entry, so I assume there's some point in it, but it does nothing to break my head canon of what utilitarianism is.
- Normal_gaussian 6y agoYes you are wrong. Simply consider a diabetic and me; the utility of an external insulin supply to me is vanishingly small, yet its life or death to them. Similarly, the graph of utility value vs amount of sugar will look very different for us. I've used a diabetic because its an obvious and massive difference, but the cookie example applies too. I like cookies, but my girlfriend likes them more. I dislike white chocolate cookies, and loves them. This is a common difference in utility.
- aabhay 6y agoBut your flaw here is extrapolating this utility difference to its limit, that something like a cookie can become exponentially more valuable to someone versus their peers. The value of insulin is just that — life and death. But it certainly doesn’t equate to a million lives or deaths.
- NateEag 6y agoYou are suffering a failure of creativity. Suppose a psychedelic drug that is incredibly difficult to synthesize makes someone inhumanly good at problem solving, but only for a few minutes. Further suppose one of the easiest ways to create this drug is to harvest human brains. They have to be extracted while the donor is still alive, though, as the delicate compounds coming from the brain become unusable rapidly after death. According to utilitarianism, if that person uses their insane problem solving abilities to increase utility for others, and they're good enough at it with this drug, then we should throw the people who generate the least utility for others (e.g. the poor and disadvantaged, who usually have few resources to offer and little training or skill) into the brain ripper so that the remaining people can get the gains. This example may seem absurd, but many others like it can be constructed. Spend a few minutes trying and you'll come up with some. This one took me thirty seconds, if that. See "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin for the canonical illustration of this problem.
- convFixb 6y agoUtilitarianism is incompatible with Morals. I'm no bible-thumper but I think the man from Galilee had a GOOD point or two.
- ben_w 6y agoSome naughty boy walking over a pond distributing his blood without a medical assay is no basis for a system of ethics. Supreme moral authority derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical reverse-vampire ceremony. More seriously, the OT Ten Commandments come with a whole bunch of asterisks — Thou Shalt Not Kill (except for war and executing criminals) — and even in the NT, when Christianity first popped into existence a number of the new converts immediately committed suicide right after baptism so that they would get into heaven with all their sins absolved and no chance of, e.g., dying immediately after an unwanted adultery boner [Matt 5:28].
- MereInterest 6y ago> Thou Shalt Not Kill Standard disclaimer that English words have shifted meaning, and that today it would be more accurately translated as "thou shall not murder".
- MereInterest 6y agoI'd be interested to hear the conflict that you describe between utilitarianism and morals. From my perspective, the two are entirely orthogonal. Morals define what one should optimize (e.g. minimize the number of unnecessary deaths, improve human comfort), and utilitarianism defines how to achieve those goals (for each action, determine how much it achieves those goals).
- lidHanteyk 6y agoWhat were those points, exactly? Also, which year was that man born, and by what evidence do you know that?
- lucideer 6y agoMaybe I'm missing something obvious but it seems surprising this argument would gain any traction. It's pretty thin... Even before you get into debates between average and total utilitarianism, even for total/maximum utility, utilitarianism is predicated on the idea that all beings are equally considered, from which the supposed egalitarianism stems. The whole premise is that utility monsters don't exist.
- gowld 6y ago> from which the supposed egalitarianism stems. The whole premise is that utility monsters don't exist. Yes, but you took the wrong lesson. Utility Monsters prove that utilitarianism is a bad model for reality.
- gmac 6y agoUtility Monsters prove that utilitarianism is a bad model for reality. I think it's a pretty big stretch to say that something that doesn't exist proves anything at all. I've always felt utility monsters were just bad philosophy trying to throw a spanner in the works of a fairer society.
- lucideer 6y agoI don't think I did. Assignment of units to beings isn't a model, it's an approach. Don't get me wrong, utilitarianism is a bad approach in reality, but this isn't why.
- enjeyw 6y agoIt seems to me that the utility Monster argument has a critical flaw in that it actually does a great job of describing the way we distribute utility in reality. We can't properly rationalise with a being that derives 100 times more utility than humans any better than we can imagine a fourth spatial dimension, so instead, let's go in the other direction. What if humans were the beings that derived 100 times the utility? Would we be then be able to justify consuming 100 times the resources? Well, we can and we do. Case and point, literally any other animal. That leaves a choice: either one accepts that being a utility monster is actually ok, or refrains from causing harm to any conscious being, human or otherwise.
- jpmoral 6y agoPerhaps the fact that we act like utility monsters to other animals is part of the point. Also, no snark intended but 'case in point'.
- hkt 6y ago..are billionaires real life utility monsters?
- ben_w 6y agoNot in and of themselves, no. They can be, but it isn’t a necessary state. Even if you assume their wealth is stolen and they do nothing for job creation etc., there is no reason to assume that their gains are correlated with anyone else’s losses. To be a utility monster, you have to say that the suffering they cause is still a net win specifically because of their pleasure. I suppose you could say it about budget airlines who nickel-and-dime you for everything and take you to an airport that is “near” your destination in the way that Dublin is “near” Belfast — lots of small irritations causing a small number of people to be very happy.
- MereInterest 6y agoBillionaires actually present the opposite problem. People's happiness tends to revert to a mean as they adapt to whatever situation they are in [1]. If somebody wins the lottery, or their startup makes a big win, then they will quickly adjust to their new normal. It takes more and more resources to add a single unit of happiness. If you pick a random person on the street and gave them a million dollars, it would be life changing. Paying off all debt, move to a new location, buy a house, set up investments to ensure that food and the mortgage are paid in perpetuity. If you give a million dollars to a billionaire, it is a rounding error on their total assets, and does not substantively change their lifestyle. Conversely, taking a million dollars, or even nine hundred million dollars, from a billionaire, will not significantly affect their lifestyle, and that amount could improve the lives of many others. This is one reason why taxation is ethical from a utilitarian perspective. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
- hkt 6y agoThat's a great answer, thanks. Double thanks for the link to the hedonic treadmill, too.
- mac01021 6y ago
- floathub 6y agoThis is why the strict core of microeconomics never allows one to make interpersonal utility comparisons. As soon as you start to try and figure out "best" outcomes across groups (beyond ability to pay), it gets really complicated, really quickly. This is the domain of areas like Social Choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_choice_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_choice_theory
- gmac 6y agoThis is why the strict core of microeconomics never allows one to make interpersonal utility comparisons. Yes ... though maybe the other reason why it's not "allowed" is that it suits corporate and moneyed interests that way. There's pretty good evidence for logarithmic marginal utility of money, which is itself a pretty strong argument for redistributing most of every billionaire's wealth.
- _dps 6y ago> There's pretty good evidence for logarithmic marginal utility of money 1) This is, at best, controversial. Measuring cardinal utility is an unsolved, perhaps unsolvable problem. The kinds of experiments that lead to these claims are things like "what more would you buy if you had $X" or "how much, out of 10, would your happiness increase if you had $X more". Needless to say these are full of problems with self reporting, perception, lack of skin in the game, etc. The only utility-adjacent concept that can be tested rigorously is preference ordering in situations where the subject actually bears the costs and benefits of the choice. This makes most experiments you'd want to do very costly, and potentially unethical. 2) Even if we accept that everyone has a logarithmic curve describing their own utility for money, this doesn't mean you can make intersubjective comparisons. To give an analogy, it's a "units" problem. Bob's utility is measured in Bobutils, and Alice's utility is measured in Aliceutils. Even if Bobutils(dollars) and Aliceutils(dollars) are both logarithmic, this doesn't get you any closer to aggregating their utility or evaluating tradeoffs (can't add/subtract things with different units). Edit: playing minor devil's advocate to myself on point 1, it's certainly true that there's good evidence of diminishing marginal utility of money (or of anything). I was specifically responding to the kinds of experiments that lead to the claim of a logarithmic form, which I consider to have many problems.
- jl2718 6y agoThis is how most welfare, insurance, medical, and education systems work today. The opposite is basic income. Somehow I see most people supporting both.
- dredmorbius 6y agoExistential Comics' proposal of a "freedom monster", an original contribution to philosophy, is a particularly illuminating variant of this concept, and suggests a fundamental conflict with the notion: ...Nozick's conception of freedom is based largely on contracts revolving around property rights. That is to say, freedom for Nozick is freedom to own and control not just your own personhood, but any property that you own. Property, like resources devoted to increasing "utility", is a finite resource that could theoretically be entirely owned by a single "Freedom Monster", or maybe "Justice Monster", but perhaps best named "Property Monster". Like the comic imagines, a monster that lived forever and bent its entire will to owning more and more land could, theoretically, through entirely voluntary transactions, own all of the land. If this situation arose, the monster would have infinite leverage in any negotiation that it entered into, because everyone on earth would starve unless they made a deal with the monster. From Nozick's point of view, because neither party was physically coerced, and the monster's property came from a history of free transactions, the monster's ownership of all its property is just and free. However, the situation that it leads to seems to be one that severely lacks freedom. The monster could make any rules it wanted, and everyone on earth would be more or less "freely" forced to obliged it. Most people would not describe this situation as one where humanity is more free.... http://existentialcomics.com/comic/259 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/259
- danharaj 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
- dredmorbius 6y agoThanks. I'm of course familiar but hadn't considered this light.
- maliker 6y agoThere's a fun SMBC comic illustrating this concept: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-04-03 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-04-03
- jjk166 6y agoWhy should we not feed the utility monster? Consider a population of mostly healthy people but one person has a rare cancer. There is a small supply of drugs that treat that cancer. The vast majority of the population would derive little utility from being allocated this drug (there is some small chance that they may get the same cancer in the future, so having it available does have value, just not much) whereas the person who has that cancer derives a much larger amount of utility from the resource. The cancer patient is in this case a utility monster and giving it cancer medicine is feeding the utility monster. Consider even further the case where most of the population is middle class but some fraction is living in absolute poverty. A single dollar provides little utility to the middle class people but a tremendous amount of utility to the extremely poor. Taxing the population some small amount and allocating it to the poor individuals would not only be feeding a utility monster but it would be directly decreasing the utility of everyone else to do so. Let's consider a third scenario: a researcher is trying to cure some terminal disease but requires test subjects who may die as various possible drugs are tried. The utility gain from curing a disease once and for all would be immense compared to the life of one or even a few individuals. Carrying out this research is again feeding a utility monster, and in this case literally sending people to their deaths to do so. While people might disagree on how we'd go about feeding these monsters in practice, society has widely accepted at least in principle giving medicine to the sick, providing welfare to poor, and taking calculated risks in the name of progress. The utility monster only sounds appealing as an ad absurdum argument because the existence of such a utility monster presupposes such an absurd situation. One can easily imagine that a utility monster which derives more utility from every resource than the whole of humanity combined could exist, but actually imagining such a monster is much harder. It feels wrong to support sacrificing the whole of humanity to one being because I can not truly comprehend a situation where one being could derive enough utility to justify such a sacrifice. But in this hypothetical scenario where the sacrifice actually was justified, I would by definition be able to imagine it, and thus I would apply the same logic I do to the utility monsters which I can imagine, and there is no reason to believe I would reach a different conclusion. Thus I would support feeding the utility monster if I were ever in such a scenario.