The death penalty has various serious problems and lifetime imprisonment is really really expensive.
I guess we should be happy every time someone so thoroughly bad we want them out of society forever (like a serial murderer) does us the favour of killing themselves. Nothing of value is lost, and the justice system saves money. Right?
It seems to me it logically follows that we should incentivize such suicides. Like: 5000 dollars to a person of your choice if you're dead within the first year of your lifetime sentence, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
It feels very wrong and is clearly outside the overton window. But is there any reason to expect this wouldn't be a net benefit?
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Given a robust background in game theory, I'd say that utility functions can be whatever it is that you think ought to be optimized for. If maximizing pleasure leads to "bad" outcomes, then obviously your utility function contains room for other things. If you value human flourishing, then define your utility function to be "human flourishing", and whatever maximizes that is utilitarian with respect to that utility function. And if that's composed of a complicated combination of fifty interlocking parts, then you have a complicated utility function, that's fine.
Now, taking this too broadly, you could classify literally everything as utilitarianism and render the term meaningless. So to narrow things down a bit, here's what I think are the broad distinguishers of utilitarianism.
1: Consequentialism. The following of specific rules or motivations of actions matter less than their actual outcomes. Whatever rules exist should exist in service of the greater good as measured by results (in expectation), and the results are the outcome we actually care about and should be measuring. A moral system that says you should always X no matter whether it helps people or hurts people because X is itself a good action is not-consequentialist and thus not utilitarian (technically you can define a utility function that increases the more action X is taken, but we're excluding weird stuff like that to avoid literally everything counting as stated above)
2: Moral value of all people. All people (defined as humans, or conscious beings, or literally all living creatures, or some vague definition of intelligence) have moral value, and the actual moral utility function is whatever increases that for everyone (you can define this as an average, or a sum, or some complicated version that tries to avoid repugnant conclusions). The point being that all the people matter and you don't define your utility function to be "maximize the flourishing of Fnargl the Dictator". And you don't get to define a subclass of slaves who have 0 value and then maximize the utility of all of the nonslaves. All the people matter.
3: Shut up and multiply. You should be using math in your moral philosophy, and expected values. If you're not using math you're doing it wrong. If something has a 1% chance of causing 5300 instances of X then that's approximately 53 times as good/bad as causing 1 instance of X (depending on what X is and whether multiple instances synergize with each other). If you find a conclusion where the math leads to some horrible result, then you're using the math wrong, either because you misunderstand what utilitarianism means, you're using a bad utility function, or your moral intuitions themselves are wrong. If you think that torturing someone for an hour is worse than 3↑↑↑3 people getting splinters it's because your tiny brain can't grasp the Lovecraftian horror of what 3↑↑↑3 means.
Together this means that utilitarianism is a broad but not all encompassing collection of possible moral philosophies. If you think that utilitarianism means everyone sitting around being wireheaded constantly then you've imagined a bad utility function, and if you switch to a better utility function you get better outcomes. If you have any good moral philosophy, then my guess is that there is a version of utilitarianism which closely resembles it but does a better job because it patches bugs made by people being bad at math.
Sometimes, I like to throw out my own robust background in game theory. This is one of those times. Behold!
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It's the same bullshit though.
Any multi-agent game is going to be by nature anti-inductive, because "the one weird trick" is stops working the moment other players start factoring it into their decisions. As such it is the optimizing impulse itself. IE the idea that morality can somehow be "solved" like a mathematical equation that ultimately presents the problem. All the jargon about Qualia, QALYs, and multiplication is just that, Jargon. Epicycles tacked on to a geocentric model of the solar system to try and explain away the inconstancies between your theory and the observed reality.
Better than a geocentric model of the solar system with no epicycles, which is what I'd compare most other moral philosophies to.
The over-optimization is largely solved by epistemic humility. Assume that whatever is actually good is some utility function, but you don't know what it actually is in proper detail, and so any properly defined utility function you write down might be wrong in some way, so don't over-optimize it to the exclusion of all else. I don't think this is somehow distinct from any other moral philosophy, which also lead to horrible results if taken to extremes.
Is that what you think you have? To repeat myself from another thread what predictions does you model make? In what way are they better than the alternatives? If as Yud Singer and Caplan allege "properly understood, utilitarianism approaches virtue ethics" why are you even wasting your time with utilitarianism instead of trying to teach your children virtue?
I'm a moral absolutist, not a relativist. I believe that there is one actual objective morality that describes the thing we are talking about when we mean "right" and "wrong", and each action is either right or wrong in some universal sense. Moral philosophies that people come up with should be viewed as attempts at approximating this thing, not as actual competing definitions of the words "right" and "wrong", which is why when someone comes up with an edge case where a moral philosophy extrapolates to lead to some horrific result, the most common response is either denial "no it doesn't lead to that", or an attempt to patch the theory, or "that result is actually good because X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z are good in some other sense (usually utilitarian). Whereas if you had relativist morality or just definitions the response "yep, I believe that that horrific result is right, because that's how I've defined 'right'".
As a result, it's perfectly logical that properly understood and robust versions of any moral philosophy should approach each other. So I could make an equal claim that properly understood, virtue ethics approaches utilitarianism (is it virtuous to cause misery and and death to people which decreases their utility?). And if someone constructed a sufficiently robust version of virtue ethics that defined virtues in a way that massively increased utilities and covered all the weird edge cases then I would be happy to endorse it. I'm not familiar with the specific works of Yud Singer or Caplan you're referring to, but if they're arguing that utilitarianism eventually just turns into standard virtue ethics then I would disagree. If they're making a claim more similar to mine then I probably agree.
But again, I think utilitarianism isn't meaningless as a way of viewing right and wrong, because people are bad at math and need to use more of it. And I think fewer epicycles need to be added to most utilitarian constructions to fix them than would need to be added to virtue ethics or other systems, so it's more useful as a starting point.
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