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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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Utilitarianism doesn't work when you're playing an intelligent opponent.

The better formulation is "utilitarianism doesn't work if you're an idiot, because then you can't properly calculate utility". Second-order effects like this are supposed to be included in utilitarian calculations; the fact that a lot of people are too stupid to do this doesn't make the theory wrong, just a bad fit for them.

True - Utilitarianism doesn't work even in theory, because it instantly succumbs to combinatorial explosion once you have to account for multiple orders of consequence. The way utilitarians get around this in practice is adding greebles and epicycles until they're effectively back to deontology/virtue ethics/common sense with a quantitative flavour.

I was never much concerned with this kind of argument. Make a reasonable attempt to determine outcomes. That does not involve perfect knowledge or unbounded computational problems. Using a small bit of thought and your best understanding of the situation, you can make a reasonable approximation.

OK, but once you abandon the philosophical consistency of the system and the arguments that justify it, you're left with common sense with some inspiration from utilitarianism. Nothing wrong with that, it just means you're not really that much of a utilitarian (and has the amusing corollary that you'll become a better utilitarian by reading Aristotle than you will by reading Bentham). Of course, this is what the most intelligent utilitarian in history (Mill) did pretty much immediately on thinking seriously about the theory, it just took him a nervous breakdown to get there.

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