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Bentham's Mugging (2022)

133 points by mattmerr 3y ago

paulhart 3y ago
I love this for three reasons: 1: the dig at Effective Altruism; 2: I went to UCL back in the days when you could hang out with the Bentham In A Box; 3: One of my (distant) colleagues is a descendant of Bentham.
kubb 3y ago
It’s amazing how contrived and detached from reality the counterexamples for utilitarianism have to be able to attack even the most basic forms of it. It really makes you think that utilitarianism is a solid principle.
- nopassrecover 3y ago
  But aren’t the counterexamples largely detached from reality because in reality people adopt other ethical systems/principles to avoid extreme outcomes? I’m by no means opposing a general morality of optimising for the greater good, and I think on the whole utilitarianism, like other ideological/ethical systems, gets critiqued in comparison to an impossible standard of perfection. My sense is there are some more basic principles that underpin the success and pragmatism of any ethical/ideological system, and that these principles, to your implied point I think, would safeguard utilitarianism as well as other systems. I think this is implied in the critique some have against utilitarianism, namely that it needs to introduce weighting in order to adjust the morality towards palatable/sensible means and outcomes. But I don’t think any system could avoid those same coping mechanisms.
  - kubb 3y ago
    People do adopt other systems, feel that utilitarianism must be “wrong” for whatever reason, get research grants from people who agree, and produce incredibly unimpressive work. What basic principles are you thinking of? Even more basic than hedonism, consequentialism, etc.? Weighing is just one of critiques against utilitarianism, and it’s a valid one. Maybe the extreme happiness of one person isn’t worth mild suffering of 5 people. But pretending that this upends the entirety of this moral framework, and not one of its building blocks (basically the aggregation function) is kinda silly.
    - nopassrecover 3y ago
      Yeah I think we agree that utilitarianism is held to an unreasonable standard. I think contributing to that is some advocates suggesting it’s a solid utopian model to guide all decisions without further refinement and nuance (and I don’t think this is what you’re arguing). And because it hasn’t been in practice widely adopted in history (unlike e.g. liberalism or Catholicism) the rubber hasn’t hit the road to allow us to understand how it would work practically. I think some other good ideas suffer the same problem/preemptive attack. Indeed any social progress seems to be attacked by a sort of whataboutism or false slippery slope attack. To your question on basic principles, I think they’re caught in exercises like the trolley problem or the psychological experiments of the 60s: people on the whole don’t want to be responsible for causing harm, they don’t want to see people in their influence of control harmed, they don’t want to feel bad about themselves, they don’t want to be judged/punished by others - even if convinced it’s for the greater good. I’m not saying some people won’t take a fiercely rational or ideological lens, but on the whole people are influenced by some common psychology. And I think actually this is probably good: as much as it hinders “utopian” ideas being realised I think it ensures humanity moderates ideology. I think without this a strict utilitarianism, eg a robotic approach, would lead to kinds of harm that I wouldn’t support, even if justified to some sort of ends that itself is subjective. But I think with it, an elevation of the greater good would probably be better than many approaches today. For a practical example I think we should permit more people to consensually enrol in promising but risky cancer research and treatments. To reiterate that same point I think that in practice those factors would probably allow most systems to be successful, and some/many might be better than what we have now.
- MereInterest 3y ago
  This is known as a "reductio ad absurdum" argument, and isn't contrived at all. It's easy to make a general rule that applies in the majority of cases. To test whether a general rule has flaws, and to improve upon a general rule, it must be tested by applying it to edge cases. The same way that you test a datetime library by picking potential edge cases (e.g. Leap Day, dates before 1970, dates between Feb. 1-13 in 1918 in Russia, etc), you test a philosophical theory by seeing what it predicts in potential edge cases. This also deliberately avoids introducing irrelevant arguments. By framing it as a mugger who wants to gain money for purely selfish reasons, we deliberately exclude complicating factors from the statement. * The argument could be framed around donating to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, rather than a mugger. With the controversies it has had [0], it could be argued that these donations may or may not increase total utility, but donations to charities are part of the best possible path. However, using the Susan G. Komen Foundation as an example relies on accepting a premise that it isn't using donations appropriately, and makes the argument dependent on whether that is or isn't the case. * The argument could be framed around allowing tax exemptions for all self-described charitable foundations, with Stichting INGKA Foundation [1], part of the corporate structure that owns IKEA, playing the narrative role of the mugger. The argument would be that the tax exemptions provided to charitable foundations are necessary for bringing about the best outcomes, but that they can be taken advantage of. Here, the argument would depend on whether you view the corporate structure of INGKA as a legitimate charity. * Even staying with purely hypothetical answers, we could ask if the mugger going to starve should be mugging be unsuccessful. These could veer into questions of the local economy, food production, and so on, none of which help to test the validity of utilitarianism. I've heard this described as crafting the least convenient world. That is, whenever there's a question about the hypothetical scenario that would let you avoid an edge case in a theory, update the hypothetical scenario to be the least convenient option. What if the mugger just needs a hug? Nope, too convenient. What if the mugger isn't going to go through with the finger-chopping? Nope, too convenient. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure#Controversy_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure#Co... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation
  - roenxi 3y ago
- b450 3y ago
  It's not really a reflection on utilitarianism. That's just philosophical ethics, at least in the form that predominates in Anglo-American philosophy departments. The game of coming up with "counterexamples" to moral theories is fun, but basically stupid. By definition it involves "contriving" cases, however realistic really, which can make whatever preposterous "stipulations" they please. The underlying assumption is that moral theories are somehow like scientific theories in that they are validated by "predicting" the available observational "data", i.e. our moral intuitions, i.e. the social values of the cultural/economic groups we're a part of. Mysteriously, christian conservative scolds engage with philosophy and end up developing something a lot like christian social conservatism, and cosmopolitan liberal scolds come up with something a lot like cosmopolitan social liberalism, despite the fact that both are engaged in this highly scientific form of inquiry. Very odd. The whole game is also probably largely irrelevant to the kind of stuff Bentham actually cared about, since he mainly wanted to use utilitarianism to guide state policy, and (famously) hard cases make bad law.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  This is mostly an amusing logic puzzle of the sort Lewis Carroll liked to write, but there is an unstated moral here: utilitarianism requires a metric of utility, and it can be gamed by people who are merely paying lip service (at best) to utilitarianism, opening the door, in the worst cases, to Mill's tyranny of the majority. The global news, on any given day, contains several such cases.
- hgomersall 3y ago
  It's not at all detached. People are manipulative all the time, including using themselves to reduce overall utility. Emotional blackmail is a name given to one variety of this.
nisegami 3y ago
I feel like this statement hides something critical, "Here's the thing: there is, clearly, more utility in me keeping my finger than in you keeping your measly ten pounds." My point is that, is that so clear? Or is the utility function being presumed here lacking?
- Diggsey 3y ago
  Well the ten pounds still exists either way. You'd have to argue that there's more utility in Bentham owning the £10 than the mugger owning the £10, and that the difference in utility between them is greater than the utility of a finger. I imagine you could define utility that way, but presumably the mugger could increase the cost (two fingers? an arm?) until the argument works. Also, if you do definite a utility function like that (say, "there is more utility in this £10 being mine rather than yours than the utility of your arm") then that's a pretty questionable morality.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    The mugger, through no coercion of Bentham, chooses to go down a finger. It is obvious that the mugger has an insane utility function, but it isn't obvious that Bentham letting him act it out is causing a drop in overall utility. If the mugger doesn't want his own finger, it is Bentham can choose to trust him that 9 fingers are better than 10. Maybe the mugger is even behaving rationally, maybe the 10th finger has cancer, who knows. As the story illustrates, giving him $10 didn't stop him from losing his finger. There are many factors here that make the situation unclear.
  - snapcaster 3y ago
    Not really, my utility function weighs some mugger being hurt at 0
- optimalsolver 3y ago
  Yup. According to which utility function? Certainly not mine.
- Tao3300 3y ago
  > Or is the utility function being presumed here lacking They're all lacking in someway, so sure.
jl6 3y ago
Is there perhaps more than a finger's worth of utility in deterring such muggings by refusing the initial deal?
AndrewDucker 3y ago
The point here is largely that reality (at our level) is not something which can be simply solved by the application of a couple of rules, from which Right Action will thenceforth necessarily flow. Reality is a big, complex, ball of Stuff, and any attempts to impress morality upon it will be met with many corner cases which produce unwanted results unless we spend our time engaged with dealing with what initially look like tiny details.
- bwanab 3y ago
  So we end up coming full circle from "here are the rules" to "play each situation by ear". Ethics is just too dang hard!
  - AndrewDucker 3y ago
    I'm sure you can find a compromise in the middle of "Mostly follow some vague rules, but when they lead you to what seem to be negative outcomes think about whether it's because you don't enjoy doing the moral thing, or if it's because actually it's led somewhere unpleasant and you need a new rule for this situation."
    - piaste 3y ago
      It's even worse. People are exceptionally good at rationalising whatever it is they want to do and turn them into convenient rules that sound noble and high-minded. It would be a much less frustrating world if the robber who takes your money would just tell you "hi, I'm taking your money because I can and because I like it" instead of earnestly believing that he deserves it for some complicated reason (pick your example).
      - AndrewDucker 3y ago
        Oh yes, retroactive justification is mostly what people do. And aren't aware that they're doing it most of the time. Most muggers don't try to justify themselves philosophically, thankfully. That would just make the experience even more painful.
JR1427 3y ago
But the mugger could have avoided making the deal with the thug, so I don't see how that deal changes much.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
Bentham brought up a good point: > Fair enough. But, even so, I worry that giving you the money would set a bad precedent, encouraging copycats to run similar schemes. I don’t understand how it was logically defeated with escalation as in the story. Would it be wrong for a Utilitarian to continue arguing against this precedent, saying that the decision to be mugged removes overall Utility because now anyone who can be sufficiently convincing can also effectively steal money from Utilitarians. (I guess money changing hands is presumed net neutral in the story?)
- ameliaquining 3y ago
  No, the mugger getting the money counts as negative. "Now, as an Act Utilitarian, I would happily part with ten pounds if I were convinced that you would bring more utility to the world with that money than I would. The trouble is I know I would put the money to good use myself – whereas you, I surmise, would not."
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - uoaei 3y ago
    No, it doesn't. People having money is Good under utilitarianism because they can utilize it no matter which person it is. Utilitarianism does not benefit from covert insertions of specific moral carve-outs. Surmisal does not impact outcomes only predictions of outcomes. It is not appropriate to make judgments based on surmisal because utilitarianism can only ever look backward at effects to justify actions post-hoc. This is the primary flaw with utilitarianism as a moral philosophy.
- jefftk 3y ago
  I'm also confused why they drop this point. I don't give in to this kind of threat because I expect overall a policy of giving in leads to worse outcomes.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
ameliaquining 3y ago
The problem here isn't with the main character's moral philosophy, but with his decision theory. He'd be dealing with exactly the same predicament if the mugger were threatening to harm him. The solution is indeed "don't give in to muggers", but it's possible to define this in a workable way. Suppose the mugger can choose between A (don't try to mug Bentham) or forcing Bentham to choose between B (give in) or C (don't give in). A is the best outcome for Bentham, B the best outcome for the mugger, and C the worst for both. The mugger, therefore, is only incentivized to force the choice if he expects Bentham to go for B; if he expects Bentham to go for C, then it's in his interest to choose A. Bentham, therefore, should have a policy of always choosing C, if it's worse for the mugger than A; if the mugger knows this and responds to incentives (as we see him doing in the story), then he'll choose A, and Bentham wins. And none of this has anything to do with utilitarianism, except in the respect that utilitarianism requires you to make decisions about which outcomes you want to try to get, just like any other human endeavor.
- tylerhou 3y ago
  It does have to do with utilitarianism — if you change the mugger to harming Bentham, the situation is different. In that situation, many other reasonable moral theories would agree with utilitarianism. In the original situation, where the mugger is harming themselves, the critique is that utilitarianists are required to treat their own interests as exactly the same as other people’s interests. It doesn’t matter if someone is harming themselves in order to provoke some action from you; if your action prevents that harm, you are obligated to do that action (even if you suffer because of it).
  - Micaiah_Chang 3y ago
    Yes, the point of the GP comment is exactly this, if Bentham becomes an agent that goes for C, he also explicitly discourages the mugger from being an agent that would cut off their fingers for a couple of bucks. Notice that what Bentham is altering is their strategy and not their utility. If they could spend 10 dollars to treat gangrene and save the fingers, they would do it. It's not clear many other morality systems would be as insistent on this as utilitarianism, because practitioners of other moralities curiously form epicycles defending why the status quo is fine anyway, how dare you imply I'm worse at morality. Edit: Slight wording change for clarity
ertgbnm 3y ago
The underlying assumption is that Bentham is a true act utilitarian yet simultaneously has 10 pounds in his pocket that he can stand to lose without much harm. If he truly were an act utilitarian, the utility of the 10 pounds remaining in Bentham's possession must be so high that it outweighs the mugger losing their finger, otherwise Bentham would have already spent it on something similarly utility maximizing. Clearly that 10 pounds was already destined to maximize utility such as staving off Bentham's hunger and avoiding his own death or the death of others. Meanwhile the utility of the mugger's finger is questionable. The pain of losing the finger is the only real cost. If they are just a petty criminal, the loss of their finger will probably reduce their ability to commit crimes and prevent him from inflicting as much suffering on others as he otherwise would have. Maybe losing his finger actually increases utility. Bentham: "I'm sorry Mr. Mugger but I am on my way to spend this 10 pounds on a supply of fever medication for the orphanage and I am afraid that if I don't procure the medicine, several children will die or suffer fever madness. So when faced with calculating the utility of this situation I must weigh your finger against the lives of these children. Good day. And if the experience of cutting your finger off makes you question your own deontological beliefs, feel free to call upon me for some tutoring on the philosophy of Act Utilitarianism." Any other scenario and Bentham clearly isn't a true Act Utilitarian and would just tell the Mugger to shove his finger up his ass for all Bentham cares. Either strictly apply the rules or don't apply them at all.
- jfengel 3y ago
  It's for this reason that I find all forms of Utilitarian less edifying than I would hope. They can put intuitively moral choices on a clear, explicit footing, but they produce counterintuitive results in less clear cases. Those less clear cases are precisely what you'd want a Utilitarian system to solve, since you don't really need to make much effort to justify clear cases. They tend to look best on the moral equivalent of PowerPoint slides. But if you look beyond toy examples, nearly everything is too complex to believe that you've really formed a decent model of the situation. Without that model you're stuck where you were without the Utilitarian principles. It's fun to argue about but I don't think it makes for a pragmatic moral system. And it's easily subverted by people claiming to present a moral case that is in fact incomplete, leading to abhorrent conclusions that they feel rigorously bound by.
throwaway101223 3y ago
> Here's the thing: there is, clearly, more utility in me keeping my finger than in you keeping your measly ten pounds. How is this clear? This is one of the things I find strange about academic philosophy. For all the claims about trying to get at a more rigorous understanding of knowledge, the foundation at the end of the day seems to just be human intuition. You read about something like the Chinese Room or Mary’s Room thought experiments, that seem to appeal to immediate human reactions. “We clearly wouldn’t say…” or “No one would think…” It feels like an act of obfuscation. People realize the fragility of relying on human intuition, and react by trying to dress human intuition up with extreme complexities in order to trick themselves into thinking they’re not relying on human intuition just as much as everyone else.
- smif 3y ago
  I think the point here is that it's subverting and redirecting Bentham's own utilitarianism against itself. How does the utilitarian decide which one of those has more utility? That's a rhetorical question and it's sort of immaterial how that question gets answered, because regardless of how they decide, the dialogue is structurally describing how utilitarianism is vulnerable to exploitation of this type.
- tylerhou 3y ago
  Professional philosophers understand that many arguments rely on intuition. But they need intuition to create basic premises. Otherwise, if you have no "axioms" in your system of logic, you cannot derive any sentences. Also, moral philosophy deals with what is right and what is wrong. These are inherently fuzzy notions and they likely require some level of intuitive reasoning. ("It is clearly wrong to kill an innocent person.") I would be extremely surprised if someone could formally define what is right and wrong in a way that captures human intuition. It's also not worth debating philosophy with people who will argue that $10 is not clearly worth less than a finger. (And if you don't believe that, then we can consider the case with two fingers, or three, or a whole hand, etc.).
  - throwaway101223 3y ago
    > It's also not worth debating philosophy with people who will argue that $10 is not clearly worth less than a finger. Some of these arguments feel like the equivalent of spending billions to create a state of the art fighter plane and not realizing they forgot to put an engine inside of it. It’s not $10 vs. “a finger,” it’s $10 vs. the finger of someone who goes about using their fingers to threaten people to give them money. If the difference isn’t immediately obvious, I think it’s time to step back from complex frameworks and take a look at failures with common intuition.
alphazard 3y ago
The most pressing problem facing utilitarians has never been choosing between principled vs. consequentialist utilitarianism. It's how to take a vector of utilities, and turn it into a single utility. What function do I use? Do I sum them, is it the mean, how about root-mean-squared? Why does your chosen function make more sense than the other options? Can I perform arithmetic on utilities from two different agents, isn't that like adding grams and meters?
- jefftk 3y ago
  > What function do I use? Traditionally you use sum, which gets you total utilitarianism. Some have advocated avg which gets you average utilitarianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_and_total_utilitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_and_total_utilitariani... > root-mean-squared Why? > Can I perform arithmetic on utilities from two different agents? This is called "interpersonal utility comparison", and there's a ton of literature on it. Traditionally utilitarians have accepted it, and without it ideas like "sum the utility across everyone" don't make sense.
  - schoen 3y ago
    I think the people you're responding to are taking the modus ponens for your modus tollens, saying that interpersonal utility comparisons are not obviously possible or meaningful, and so aggregating utilities across persons is also not obviously possible or meaningful.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > It's how to take a vector of utilities, and turn it into a single utility. Not just "how", but whether doing such a thing is even possible at all. And even that doesn't push the problem back far enough: first the utilitarian has to assume that utilities, treated as real numbers, are even measurable or well-defined at all.
  - tome 3y ago
    I don't think a utilitarian requires that utilities are real numbers, just that they satisfy a total ordering.
1970-01-01 3y ago
Reads like a ChatGPT argument with an idiot savant, with emphasis on the idiot.
earthboundkid 3y ago
Utilitarianism is supposed to be a strawman theory that you teach in the first week of class in order to show the flaws and build a real theory of ethics the remaining 14 weeks of the semester. SMDH at all these people who didn't get that basic point.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  I can't tell if you're joking or not. Utilitarianism has always been more about government policy, so yes it's largely inappropriate as the foundation for a system of personal ethics, at least in its basic forms. But I'm unaware of any university class that has ever attempted to "build a real system of ethics". That's not what moral philosophy classes do. The whole point is every moral system encounters major showstopper flaws, and how to reconcile those is one of the great unsolved problems of humanity.
jjk166 3y ago
The problem here stems from trying to have some universal utility values for acts. You can't say cutting off a finger is fundamentally worse than losing 10 pounds, even if it frequently would be. I wouldn't give up one of my fingers for 10 pounds, and I think most sane people wouldn't either, but here the mugger is willing to do that. So in this particular instance, the mugger is valuing the utility of keeping his finger at 10 pounds, and thus the decision on whether or not to give it to him is a wash. The moment you start dictating what the utility values are of consequences for other people you get absurd outcomes (e.g. some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make).
- hgomersall 3y ago
  He's not, he's explicitly saying the value to him of his finger is more than £10. The finger is clearly a case where the utility disparity is obvious.
  - jjk166 3y ago
    He can say it's worth whatever he wants, but the fact is he is willing to cut off his finger in an effort to get £10, thus £10 must provide equal or greater utility. > The finger is clearly a case where the utility disparity is obvious. This is the erroneous assumption that leads to the false conclusion. There's no such thing as an obvious utility disparity. It's a decent heuristic that works fine in the real world, but in this imaginary scenario where a person would actually be willing to cut off their own fingers simply because they have not gained £10, it no longer holds true.
    - hgomersall 3y ago
      He's not willing to do it. He explicitly does not want to do it and is only going to do it to lower overall utility by more than the £10 can provide to either party. That is, it only makes sense if he values his finger by more than £10.
      - jjk166 3y ago
superb-owl 3y ago
Maybe morality can't be quantified. https://blog.superb-owl.link/p/contra-ozy-brennan-on-ameliatarianism/ https://blog.superb-owl.link/p/contra-ozy-brennan-on-ameliat...
Veedrac 3y ago
> If I find an unmuggable version of utilitarianism with more explanatory power, I'll let you know. Functional Decision Theory
erostrate 3y ago
I used to be a utilitarian, but it made me morally repulsive, which pushed my friends away from utilitarianism. I had to stop since this had negative utility. More seriously, any moral theory that strives too much for abstract purity will be vulnerable to adversarial inputs. A blunt and basic theory (common sense) is sufficient to cover all practical situations and will prevent you from looking very dumb by endorsing a fancy theory that fails catastrophically in the real world [1] [1] https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism-alameda-ftx/ https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruis...
- tim333 3y ago
  I'm not sure that SBF being a crook shows that effective altruism failed.
  - erostrate 3y ago
    One main idea of EA is that you should make a lot of money in order to give it away. The obvious problem is that this can serve as a convenient moral justification for greed. SBF explicitly endorsed EA, Will MacAskill vouched for him, and I understand he was widely admired in EA circles. And he turned out to be the perfect incarnation of this problem, admitting himself he just used EA as a thin veil. What would you count as evidence that effective altruism fails?
    - tim333 3y ago
      If effective altruism was not much good for the average adherent I'd say that was a fail. SBF was an outlier.
- Smaug123 3y ago
  SBF did have a very unusual discounting policy, namely "no discounting", in fairness. I'm not aware of anyone other than SBF who bites the "keep double-or-nothing a 51% probability gamble forever, for infinite expected utility and probability 1 of going bust" bullet in favour of keeping going forever. (SBF espoused this policy in March 2022, if I recall correctly, on Conversations with Tyler.)
brindlejim 3y ago
Now imagine that instead of a mugger you have an AI researcher who both believes that AGI will destroy the world and is intent on being in the room when it is created. The self-mugging of an AI safety-ist.
firecall 3y ago
I feel mugged having attempted to read that nonsense ;-)
uKVZe85V 3y ago
Fun fact: I asked ChatGPT to help me translate that to French for private use, pasting there the first part of the conversation. It started answering, then within seconds my question was replaced with "This content may violate our content policy. If you believe this to be in error, please submit your feedback — your input will aid our research in this area." Then, seconds after, the still-appearing answer was replaced with the same message. Doh! The content filter got tripped because "obviously" it's not a philosophical thought experiment about utilitarianism but an evil text about mugging someone, which is an illegal activity. What a time to be alive!

133 points by mattmerr 3y ago

I love this for three reasons: 1: the dig at Effective Altruism; 2: I went to UCL back in the days when you could hang out with the Bentham In A Box; 3: One of my (distant) colleagues is a descendant of Bentham.

kubb 3y ago

It’s amazing how contrived and detached from reality the counterexamples for utilitarianism have to be able to attack even the most basic forms of it. It really makes you think that utilitarianism is a solid principle.

nopassrecover 3y ago
But aren’t the counterexamples largely detached from reality because in reality people adopt other ethical systems/principles to avoid extreme outcomes? I’m by no means opposing a general morality of optimising for the greater good, and I think on the whole utilitarianism, like other ideological/ethical systems, gets critiqued in comparison to an impossible standard of perfection. My sense is there are some more basic principles that underpin the success and pragmatism of any ethical/ideological system, and that these principles, to your implied point I think, would safeguard utilitarianism as well as other systems. I think this is implied in the critique some have against utilitarianism, namely that it needs to introduce weighting in order to adjust the morality towards palatable/sensible means and outcomes. But I don’t think any system could avoid those same coping mechanisms.
- kubb 3y ago
  People do adopt other systems, feel that utilitarianism must be “wrong” for whatever reason, get research grants from people who agree, and produce incredibly unimpressive work. What basic principles are you thinking of? Even more basic than hedonism, consequentialism, etc.? Weighing is just one of critiques against utilitarianism, and it’s a valid one. Maybe the extreme happiness of one person isn’t worth mild suffering of 5 people. But pretending that this upends the entirety of this moral framework, and not one of its building blocks (basically the aggregation function) is kinda silly.
  - nopassrecover 3y ago
    Yeah I think we agree that utilitarianism is held to an unreasonable standard. I think contributing to that is some advocates suggesting it’s a solid utopian model to guide all decisions without further refinement and nuance (and I don’t think this is what you’re arguing). And because it hasn’t been in practice widely adopted in history (unlike e.g. liberalism or Catholicism) the rubber hasn’t hit the road to allow us to understand how it would work practically. I think some other good ideas suffer the same problem/preemptive attack. Indeed any social progress seems to be attacked by a sort of whataboutism or false slippery slope attack. To your question on basic principles, I think they’re caught in exercises like the trolley problem or the psychological experiments of the 60s: people on the whole don’t want to be responsible for causing harm, they don’t want to see people in their influence of control harmed, they don’t want to feel bad about themselves, they don’t want to be judged/punished by others - even if convinced it’s for the greater good. I’m not saying some people won’t take a fiercely rational or ideological lens, but on the whole people are influenced by some common psychology. And I think actually this is probably good: as much as it hinders “utopian” ideas being realised I think it ensures humanity moderates ideology. I think without this a strict utilitarianism, eg a robotic approach, would lead to kinds of harm that I wouldn’t support, even if justified to some sort of ends that itself is subjective. But I think with it, an elevation of the greater good would probably be better than many approaches today. For a practical example I think we should permit more people to consensually enrol in promising but risky cancer research and treatments. To reiterate that same point I think that in practice those factors would probably allow most systems to be successful, and some/many might be better than what we have now.
MereInterest 3y ago
This is known as a "reductio ad absurdum" argument, and isn't contrived at all. It's easy to make a general rule that applies in the majority of cases. To test whether a general rule has flaws, and to improve upon a general rule, it must be tested by applying it to edge cases. The same way that you test a datetime library by picking potential edge cases (e.g. Leap Day, dates before 1970, dates between Feb. 1-13 in 1918 in Russia, etc), you test a philosophical theory by seeing what it predicts in potential edge cases. This also deliberately avoids introducing irrelevant arguments. By framing it as a mugger who wants to gain money for purely selfish reasons, we deliberately exclude complicating factors from the statement. * The argument could be framed around donating to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, rather than a mugger. With the controversies it has had [0], it could be argued that these donations may or may not increase total utility, but donations to charities are part of the best possible path. However, using the Susan G. Komen Foundation as an example relies on accepting a premise that it isn't using donations appropriately, and makes the argument dependent on whether that is or isn't the case. * The argument could be framed around allowing tax exemptions for all self-described charitable foundations, with Stichting INGKA Foundation [1], part of the corporate structure that owns IKEA, playing the narrative role of the mugger. The argument would be that the tax exemptions provided to charitable foundations are necessary for bringing about the best outcomes, but that they can be taken advantage of. Here, the argument would depend on whether you view the corporate structure of INGKA as a legitimate charity. * Even staying with purely hypothetical answers, we could ask if the mugger going to starve should be mugging be unsuccessful. These could veer into questions of the local economy, food production, and so on, none of which help to test the validity of utilitarianism. I've heard this described as crafting the least convenient world. That is, whenever there's a question about the hypothetical scenario that would let you avoid an edge case in a theory, update the hypothetical scenario to be the least convenient option. What if the mugger just needs a hug? Nope, too convenient. What if the mugger isn't going to go through with the finger-chopping? Nope, too convenient. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure#Controversy_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure#Co... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation
- roenxi 3y ago
b450 3y ago
It's not really a reflection on utilitarianism. That's just philosophical ethics, at least in the form that predominates in Anglo-American philosophy departments. The game of coming up with "counterexamples" to moral theories is fun, but basically stupid. By definition it involves "contriving" cases, however realistic really, which can make whatever preposterous "stipulations" they please. The underlying assumption is that moral theories are somehow like scientific theories in that they are validated by "predicting" the available observational "data", i.e. our moral intuitions, i.e. the social values of the cultural/economic groups we're a part of. Mysteriously, christian conservative scolds engage with philosophy and end up developing something a lot like christian social conservatism, and cosmopolitan liberal scolds come up with something a lot like cosmopolitan social liberalism, despite the fact that both are engaged in this highly scientific form of inquiry. Very odd. The whole game is also probably largely irrelevant to the kind of stuff Bentham actually cared about, since he mainly wanted to use utilitarianism to guide state policy, and (famously) hard cases make bad law.
mannykannot 3y ago
This is mostly an amusing logic puzzle of the sort Lewis Carroll liked to write, but there is an unstated moral here: utilitarianism requires a metric of utility, and it can be gamed by people who are merely paying lip service (at best) to utilitarianism, opening the door, in the worst cases, to Mill's tyranny of the majority. The global news, on any given day, contains several such cases.
hgomersall 3y ago
It's not at all detached. People are manipulative all the time, including using themselves to reduce overall utility. Emotional blackmail is a name given to one variety of this.

nisegami 3y ago

I feel like this statement hides something critical, "Here's the thing: there is, clearly, more utility in me keeping my finger than in you keeping your measly ten pounds." My point is that, is that so clear? Or is the utility function being presumed here lacking?

Diggsey 3y ago
Well the ten pounds still exists either way. You'd have to argue that there's more utility in Bentham owning the £10 than the mugger owning the £10, and that the difference in utility between them is greater than the utility of a finger. I imagine you could define utility that way, but presumably the mugger could increase the cost (two fingers? an arm?) until the argument works. Also, if you do definite a utility function like that (say, "there is more utility in this £10 being mine rather than yours than the utility of your arm") then that's a pretty questionable morality.
- roenxi 3y ago
  The mugger, through no coercion of Bentham, chooses to go down a finger. It is obvious that the mugger has an insane utility function, but it isn't obvious that Bentham letting him act it out is causing a drop in overall utility. If the mugger doesn't want his own finger, it is Bentham can choose to trust him that 9 fingers are better than 10. Maybe the mugger is even behaving rationally, maybe the 10th finger has cancer, who knows. As the story illustrates, giving him $10 didn't stop him from losing his finger. There are many factors here that make the situation unclear.
- snapcaster 3y ago
  Not really, my utility function weighs some mugger being hurt at 0
optimalsolver 3y ago
Yup. According to which utility function? Certainly not mine.
Tao3300 3y ago
> Or is the utility function being presumed here lacking They're all lacking in someway, so sure.

jl6 3y ago

Is there perhaps more than a finger's worth of utility in deterring such muggings by refusing the initial deal?

AndrewDucker 3y ago

The point here is largely that reality (at our level) is not something which can be simply solved by the application of a couple of rules, from which Right Action will thenceforth necessarily flow. Reality is a big, complex, ball of Stuff, and any attempts to impress morality upon it will be met with many corner cases which produce unwanted results unless we spend our time engaged with dealing with what initially look like tiny details.

bwanab 3y ago
So we end up coming full circle from "here are the rules" to "play each situation by ear". Ethics is just too dang hard!
- AndrewDucker 3y ago
  I'm sure you can find a compromise in the middle of "Mostly follow some vague rules, but when they lead you to what seem to be negative outcomes think about whether it's because you don't enjoy doing the moral thing, or if it's because actually it's led somewhere unpleasant and you need a new rule for this situation."
  - piaste 3y ago
    It's even worse. People are exceptionally good at rationalising whatever it is they want to do and turn them into convenient rules that sound noble and high-minded. It would be a much less frustrating world if the robber who takes your money would just tell you "hi, I'm taking your money because I can and because I like it" instead of earnestly believing that he deserves it for some complicated reason (pick your example).
    - AndrewDucker 3y ago
      Oh yes, retroactive justification is mostly what people do. And aren't aware that they're doing it most of the time. Most muggers don't try to justify themselves philosophically, thankfully. That would just make the experience even more painful.

JR1427 3y ago

But the mugger could have avoided making the deal with the thug, so I don't see how that deal changes much.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago

Bentham brought up a good point: > Fair enough. But, even so, I worry that giving you the money would set a bad precedent, encouraging copycats to run similar schemes. I don’t understand how it was logically defeated with escalation as in the story. Would it be wrong for a Utilitarian to continue arguing against this precedent, saying that the decision to be mugged removes overall Utility because now anyone who can be sufficiently convincing can also effectively steal money from Utilitarians. (I guess money changing hands is presumed net neutral in the story?)

ameliaquining 3y ago
No, the mugger getting the money counts as negative. "Now, as an Act Utilitarian, I would happily part with ten pounds if I were convinced that you would bring more utility to the world with that money than I would. The trouble is I know I would put the money to good use myself – whereas you, I surmise, would not."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- uoaei 3y ago
  No, it doesn't. People having money is Good under utilitarianism because they can utilize it no matter which person it is. Utilitarianism does not benefit from covert insertions of specific moral carve-outs. Surmisal does not impact outcomes only predictions of outcomes. It is not appropriate to make judgments based on surmisal because utilitarianism can only ever look backward at effects to justify actions post-hoc. This is the primary flaw with utilitarianism as a moral philosophy.
jefftk 3y ago
I'm also confused why they drop this point. I don't give in to this kind of threat because I expect overall a policy of giving in leads to worse outcomes.
- HWR_14 3y ago

ameliaquining 3y ago

The problem here isn't with the main character's moral philosophy, but with his decision theory. He'd be dealing with exactly the same predicament if the mugger were threatening to harm him. The solution is indeed "don't give in to muggers", but it's possible to define this in a workable way. Suppose the mugger can choose between A (don't try to mug Bentham) or forcing Bentham to choose between B (give in) or C (don't give in). A is the best outcome for Bentham, B the best outcome for the mugger, and C the worst for both. The mugger, therefore, is only incentivized to force the choice if he expects Bentham to go for B; if he expects Bentham to go for C, then it's in his interest to choose A. Bentham, therefore, should have a policy of always choosing C, if it's worse for the mugger than A; if the mugger knows this and responds to incentives (as we see him doing in the story), then he'll choose A, and Bentham wins. And none of this has anything to do with utilitarianism, except in the respect that utilitarianism requires you to make decisions about which outcomes you want to try to get, just like any other human endeavor.

tylerhou 3y ago
It does have to do with utilitarianism — if you change the mugger to harming Bentham, the situation is different. In that situation, many other reasonable moral theories would agree with utilitarianism. In the original situation, where the mugger is harming themselves, the critique is that utilitarianists are required to treat their own interests as exactly the same as other people’s interests. It doesn’t matter if someone is harming themselves in order to provoke some action from you; if your action prevents that harm, you are obligated to do that action (even if you suffer because of it).
- Micaiah_Chang 3y ago
  Yes, the point of the GP comment is exactly this, if Bentham becomes an agent that goes for C, he also explicitly discourages the mugger from being an agent that would cut off their fingers for a couple of bucks. Notice that what Bentham is altering is their strategy and not their utility. If they could spend 10 dollars to treat gangrene and save the fingers, they would do it. It's not clear many other morality systems would be as insistent on this as utilitarianism, because practitioners of other moralities curiously form epicycles defending why the status quo is fine anyway, how dare you imply I'm worse at morality. Edit: Slight wording change for clarity

ertgbnm 3y ago

The underlying assumption is that Bentham is a true act utilitarian yet simultaneously has 10 pounds in his pocket that he can stand to lose without much harm. If he truly were an act utilitarian, the utility of the 10 pounds remaining in Bentham's possession must be so high that it outweighs the mugger losing their finger, otherwise Bentham would have already spent it on something similarly utility maximizing. Clearly that 10 pounds was already destined to maximize utility such as staving off Bentham's hunger and avoiding his own death or the death of others. Meanwhile the utility of the mugger's finger is questionable. The pain of losing the finger is the only real cost. If they are just a petty criminal, the loss of their finger will probably reduce their ability to commit crimes and prevent him from inflicting as much suffering on others as he otherwise would have. Maybe losing his finger actually increases utility. Bentham: "I'm sorry Mr. Mugger but I am on my way to spend this 10 pounds on a supply of fever medication for the orphanage and I am afraid that if I don't procure the medicine, several children will die or suffer fever madness. So when faced with calculating the utility of this situation I must weigh your finger against the lives of these children. Good day. And if the experience of cutting your finger off makes you question your own deontological beliefs, feel free to call upon me for some tutoring on the philosophy of Act Utilitarianism." Any other scenario and Bentham clearly isn't a true Act Utilitarian and would just tell the Mugger to shove his finger up his ass for all Bentham cares. Either strictly apply the rules or don't apply them at all.

jfengel 3y ago
It's for this reason that I find all forms of Utilitarian less edifying than I would hope. They can put intuitively moral choices on a clear, explicit footing, but they produce counterintuitive results in less clear cases. Those less clear cases are precisely what you'd want a Utilitarian system to solve, since you don't really need to make much effort to justify clear cases. They tend to look best on the moral equivalent of PowerPoint slides. But if you look beyond toy examples, nearly everything is too complex to believe that you've really formed a decent model of the situation. Without that model you're stuck where you were without the Utilitarian principles. It's fun to argue about but I don't think it makes for a pragmatic moral system. And it's easily subverted by people claiming to present a moral case that is in fact incomplete, leading to abhorrent conclusions that they feel rigorously bound by.

throwaway101223 3y ago

> Here's the thing: there is, clearly, more utility in me keeping my finger than in you keeping your measly ten pounds. How is this clear? This is one of the things I find strange about academic philosophy. For all the claims about trying to get at a more rigorous understanding of knowledge, the foundation at the end of the day seems to just be human intuition. You read about something like the Chinese Room or Mary’s Room thought experiments, that seem to appeal to immediate human reactions. “We clearly wouldn’t say…” or “No one would think…” It feels like an act of obfuscation. People realize the fragility of relying on human intuition, and react by trying to dress human intuition up with extreme complexities in order to trick themselves into thinking they’re not relying on human intuition just as much as everyone else.

smif 3y ago
I think the point here is that it's subverting and redirecting Bentham's own utilitarianism against itself. How does the utilitarian decide which one of those has more utility? That's a rhetorical question and it's sort of immaterial how that question gets answered, because regardless of how they decide, the dialogue is structurally describing how utilitarianism is vulnerable to exploitation of this type.
tylerhou 3y ago
Professional philosophers understand that many arguments rely on intuition. But they need intuition to create basic premises. Otherwise, if you have no "axioms" in your system of logic, you cannot derive any sentences. Also, moral philosophy deals with what is right and what is wrong. These are inherently fuzzy notions and they likely require some level of intuitive reasoning. ("It is clearly wrong to kill an innocent person.") I would be extremely surprised if someone could formally define what is right and wrong in a way that captures human intuition. It's also not worth debating philosophy with people who will argue that $10 is not clearly worth less than a finger. (And if you don't believe that, then we can consider the case with two fingers, or three, or a whole hand, etc.).
- throwaway101223 3y ago
  > It's also not worth debating philosophy with people who will argue that $10 is not clearly worth less than a finger. Some of these arguments feel like the equivalent of spending billions to create a state of the art fighter plane and not realizing they forgot to put an engine inside of it. It’s not $10 vs. “a finger,” it’s $10 vs. the finger of someone who goes about using their fingers to threaten people to give them money. If the difference isn’t immediately obvious, I think it’s time to step back from complex frameworks and take a look at failures with common intuition.

alphazard 3y ago

The most pressing problem facing utilitarians has never been choosing between principled vs. consequentialist utilitarianism. It's how to take a vector of utilities, and turn it into a single utility. What function do I use? Do I sum them, is it the mean, how about root-mean-squared? Why does your chosen function make more sense than the other options? Can I perform arithmetic on utilities from two different agents, isn't that like adding grams and meters?

jefftk 3y ago
> What function do I use? Traditionally you use sum, which gets you total utilitarianism. Some have advocated avg which gets you average utilitarianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_and_total_utilitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_and_total_utilitariani... > root-mean-squared Why? > Can I perform arithmetic on utilities from two different agents? This is called "interpersonal utility comparison", and there's a ton of literature on it. Traditionally utilitarians have accepted it, and without it ideas like "sum the utility across everyone" don't make sense.
- schoen 3y ago
  I think the people you're responding to are taking the modus ponens for your modus tollens, saying that interpersonal utility comparisons are not obviously possible or meaningful, and so aggregating utilities across persons is also not obviously possible or meaningful.
pdonis 3y ago
> It's how to take a vector of utilities, and turn it into a single utility. Not just "how", but whether doing such a thing is even possible at all. And even that doesn't push the problem back far enough: first the utilitarian has to assume that utilities, treated as real numbers, are even measurable or well-defined at all.
- tome 3y ago
  I don't think a utilitarian requires that utilities are real numbers, just that they satisfy a total ordering.

1970-01-01 3y ago

Reads like a ChatGPT argument with an idiot savant, with emphasis on the idiot.

earthboundkid 3y ago

Utilitarianism is supposed to be a strawman theory that you teach in the first week of class in order to show the flaws and build a real theory of ethics the remaining 14 weeks of the semester. SMDH at all these people who didn't get that basic point.

crazygringo 3y ago
I can't tell if you're joking or not. Utilitarianism has always been more about government policy, so yes it's largely inappropriate as the foundation for a system of personal ethics, at least in its basic forms. But I'm unaware of any university class that has ever attempted to "build a real system of ethics". That's not what moral philosophy classes do. The whole point is every moral system encounters major showstopper flaws, and how to reconcile those is one of the great unsolved problems of humanity.

jjk166 3y ago

The problem here stems from trying to have some universal utility values for acts. You can't say cutting off a finger is fundamentally worse than losing 10 pounds, even if it frequently would be. I wouldn't give up one of my fingers for 10 pounds, and I think most sane people wouldn't either, but here the mugger is willing to do that. So in this particular instance, the mugger is valuing the utility of keeping his finger at 10 pounds, and thus the decision on whether or not to give it to him is a wash. The moment you start dictating what the utility values are of consequences for other people you get absurd outcomes (e.g. some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make).

hgomersall 3y ago
He's not, he's explicitly saying the value to him of his finger is more than £10. The finger is clearly a case where the utility disparity is obvious.
- jjk166 3y ago
  He can say it's worth whatever he wants, but the fact is he is willing to cut off his finger in an effort to get £10, thus £10 must provide equal or greater utility. > The finger is clearly a case where the utility disparity is obvious. This is the erroneous assumption that leads to the false conclusion. There's no such thing as an obvious utility disparity. It's a decent heuristic that works fine in the real world, but in this imaginary scenario where a person would actually be willing to cut off their own fingers simply because they have not gained £10, it no longer holds true.
  - hgomersall 3y ago
    He's not willing to do it. He explicitly does not want to do it and is only going to do it to lower overall utility by more than the £10 can provide to either party. That is, it only makes sense if he values his finger by more than £10.
    - jjk166 3y ago

superb-owl 3y ago

Maybe morality can't be quantified. https://blog.superb-owl.link/p/contra-ozy-brennan-on-ameliatarianism/ https://blog.superb-owl.link/p/contra-ozy-brennan-on-ameliat...

Veedrac 3y ago

> If I find an unmuggable version of utilitarianism with more explanatory power, I'll let you know. Functional Decision Theory

erostrate 3y ago

I used to be a utilitarian, but it made me morally repulsive, which pushed my friends away from utilitarianism. I had to stop since this had negative utility. More seriously, any moral theory that strives too much for abstract purity will be vulnerable to adversarial inputs. A blunt and basic theory (common sense) is sufficient to cover all practical situations and will prevent you from looking very dumb by endorsing a fancy theory that fails catastrophically in the real world [1] [1] https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism-alameda-ftx/ https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruis...

tim333 3y ago
I'm not sure that SBF being a crook shows that effective altruism failed.
- erostrate 3y ago
  One main idea of EA is that you should make a lot of money in order to give it away. The obvious problem is that this can serve as a convenient moral justification for greed. SBF explicitly endorsed EA, Will MacAskill vouched for him, and I understand he was widely admired in EA circles. And he turned out to be the perfect incarnation of this problem, admitting himself he just used EA as a thin veil. What would you count as evidence that effective altruism fails?
  - tim333 3y ago
    If effective altruism was not much good for the average adherent I'd say that was a fail. SBF was an outlier.
Smaug123 3y ago
SBF did have a very unusual discounting policy, namely "no discounting", in fairness. I'm not aware of anyone other than SBF who bites the "keep double-or-nothing a 51% probability gamble forever, for infinite expected utility and probability 1 of going bust" bullet in favour of keeping going forever. (SBF espoused this policy in March 2022, if I recall correctly, on Conversations with Tyler.)

brindlejim 3y ago

Now imagine that instead of a mugger you have an AI researcher who both believes that AGI will destroy the world and is intent on being in the room when it is created. The self-mugging of an AI safety-ist.

firecall 3y ago

I feel mugged having attempted to read that nonsense ;-)

uKVZe85V 3y ago

Fun fact: I asked ChatGPT to help me translate that to French for private use, pasting there the first part of the conversation. It started answering, then within seconds my question was replaced with "This content may violate our content policy. If you believe this to be in error, please submit your feedback — your input will aid our research in this area." Then, seconds after, the still-appearing answer was replaced with the same message. Doh! The content filter got tripped because "obviously" it's not a philosophical thought experiment about utilitarianism but an evil text about mugging someone, which is an illegal activity. What a time to be alive!