4 ms·
It shouldn't because of utility monsters. If you weight everybody's happiness equally - the greedier you are the more resources should be assigned to you. That'
by ajuc 3y ago
It shouldn't because of utility monsters. If you weight everybody's happiness equally - the greedier you are the more resources should be assigned to you. That's obviously wrong.
- orwin 3y agoModern utilitarism is more about minimizing suffering rather than maximizing happiness.
- ajuc 3y agoIsn't that just minimizing -f(x) instead of maximalizing f(x)? So - the same thing?
- orwin 3y agoIt doesn't have the same effect. If torturing someone made 3 billion people sightly happy, and 3 miserable (the tortured, his wife and his child), but still the total happiness supercede the total suffering. Positive utilitarism says 'do it'. Negative utilitarism says 'do not'. I'm not a full utilitarist anymore as I don't think a good utility function exist, but it is a good way to evaluate quickly if an action I do is more likely to do good than bad: 'do I risk hurting someone?'.
- _0ffh 3y agoInteresting, I didn't know that utilitarians had figured out a way to oppose Omelas. (Doesn't make me change my mind about not being one, though.)
- orwin 3y agoI'm pretty sure this predate Omelas, it's an idea from Popper (that he didn't carry very far tbh). I think almost everyone is utilitarist, you probably are too. If one time you spent money to buy flowers or a gift for no reason but make someone happy, or you told a white lie/didn't tell the truth to avoid hurting someone, you're one too. But like I said, it's not a good moral philosophy. It's useful in short burst, to take quick judgment on concrete, temporary actions, but it fails on larger ideas. Which is fine tbh. I need philosophy to carry me through concrete decisions too, not just through political choices. Utilitarism is useful for the former, less for the later (in the best case you end up believing Pinker's statistics).
- _0ffh 3y agoAh, I think we're at least partially on the same page. To me, considering the consequences of my actions is just good sense, that doesn't make me an utilitarian. Utility is subjective and ordinal, not cardinal. That means you can't do math with utility, and you can't even meaningfully compare it between individuals. That's more than enough for me to disqualify Utilitarianism from being taken seriously.
- ajuc 3y agoWould you agree there's a way to quantify preferences for people so you have: Preference(person, one_thing, other_thing) and it returns -1, 0 or 1 depending on what that person prefers? You can do math on this and try to optimize it, it's just more complicated than if utility was cardinal and objective.
- austinjp 3y agoPossibly a tangent, but I'd suggest that happiness and suffering are not opposites, so aren't both "x" in your function. Someone might choose to maximise their personal happiness even knowing that their personal suffering would also increase (or even be maximised). Trite example: prisoner released from jail who sets out to kill the person who double-crossed him, knowing that he'll be re-incarcerated or even executed. Happiness and suffering might be related but they're (somewhat) independent.
- Attrecomet 3y agoThe correct function to minimize would be θ(-f(x))*(-f(x)), using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_step_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_step_function
- ajuc 3y agoOfftopic but I could never understand why math people prefer θ to pointwise conditionals or min/max. θ(-f(x))*(-f(x)) vs max(0, -f(x))
- Attrecomet 3y agoThe heavyside-function is integrable and differentiable?