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Utilitarianism doesn't just lead to insane antisocial results in bizzare edge cases, it leads to insane antisocial results in real life. You see it with SBF and FTX, you see it with the shrimp welfare people, and you see it here.
There is no metaphysical or metaethical reason why one should inherently care about the suffering of those who are not even constitutionally capable of agreeing to or following the social contract. There may be contengent reasons to care about their suffering (i.e. family members of impulsive low IQ prisoners who themselves are capable of agreeing to and following the social contract), but this is distinct from the utilitarian framing.
This is rich. You complain about utilitarianism leading to antisocial outcomes, and then you continue:
Did you just say that it is ok to torture two-year-olds to death? At least if they are without guardians who would care about them, they are terminally ill (so they won't grow up to be an ethics-capable person) and you keep it secret (so you won't upset the general population).
Utilitarianism certainly has its share of problems, but at least it gets "pain is universally bad, even if it is felt by some entity who could never reciprocate with you" right without having to add any epicycles.
I think that hypothetical is correct. It shares a lot of similarities with post-birth abortion, which, while aesthetically repugnant, is probably okay in the strict metaethical sense I am talking about.
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Indeed.
And yet there is a valid question about whether you should care about creating such a person as compared to them not existing or as compared to being someone that can follow the social contract.
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You can't blame this on utilitarianism, almost every ethical system yields insane results if you try to take it seriously as direct truth instead of just treating it as a grab bag of heuristics. Like, most people would find your second paragraph permitting causing extreme suffering to mentally disabled people without living relatives insane (I don't find it insane personally). You're objecting to 'similarly-weighted universalism among humans', and replacing it with 'universalism among people who can agree to the social contract'. You can easily have a utilitarianism among people who can agree to a social contract, or utilitarianism focused on the health of society. You can also have a deontology that cares deeply the suffering of people who don't agree to the social contract.
The way scott's comment calls out our society's choice to "create" these people also hints at another solution, one he's named more explicitly in the past - choose, instead, to not create them. (Or, if you prefer, use genetic enhancement to "create the same person, but with better genes", but I don't think there's a moral difference between gene-editing a sperm and an egg before fusing them and discarding that sperm/egg and instead using different sperm/eggs)
Well. I think utilitarianism has its weaknesses. One thing to mention here is that you have to actually put a value to every good in view. Shooting everyone who shoplifts baby formula from Walmart will stop that crime, but you’d have to balance it with other goods — justice, humaneness, aesthetic values (pretty sure nobody wants to step over corpses to go shopping), and so on. I’m not even entirely clear how you’d determine whether a given individual was permanently unable to live by the social contract. Perhaps some can actually be rehabilitated,
I’m much more impressed by deontology which simply declares that certain things are simply off limits, and certain things are absolutely required to be a moral society. I don’t think things like collective responsibility or arbitrary detention or punishment make much sense. At the same time I don’t think a moral society would refuse to punish based on a misplaced compassion. That would quite clearly create unsafe and produce more people willing to commit a crime.
I'm not impressed by deontology because those declarations have to come from somewhere, and in practice they either come from explicit utilitarian-ish cost-benefit math done by some philosopher or elite in the past, or from cultural selection on random views where the selection is, also, doing a sort of cost-benefit analysis on what gets selected for. (Well, generally a mix of both)
No, traditional they come from divine revelation and religious precepts.
I'm claiming that historically, materially, the reason the divine revelations / religious precepts are what they are are the above - the religious elites actually did think a lot about what the right precepts are, and precepts and revelations were selected across cultures and generations for working and propagating
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