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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32787 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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The "this is why utilitarianism sucks" conclusion.

If utilitarianism has any value at all, and it does, it's important to decide what flavor of utilitarianism is most correct. The best way to do that is by taking it to extremes, deciding which extreme sounds most correct, and then extrapolating from there back to normal actually relevant morality. This is because deciding whether to create 1 happy person or increase someone's standard of living by 1% may not be intuitively clear, but imo the answer to the impossibility theorem is pretty clear, and that can inform our decisions on more proximate questions, though it shouldn't determine them.

I'm not a pure utilitarian--I'd probably be closest to being an ethical intuitionist--but I think we can hone our ethical intuitions by being knowledgeable and consistent about other theories of morality. So I don't think you should just dismiss the thought experiment entirely.

Counterarguments and reductio ad absurdum don't work that way.

If I say "your reasoning implies that all left-handers should be executed", it's not a valid reply to say "well, I'll never be in a position where I have a chance to execute any left-handers". A valid principle applies even to situations that are logically consistent but can't actually happen.

Let me be more clear:

  1. The universe is not designed such that the Repugnant Conclusion will ever matter

  2. If it were, then my moral beliefs would be different than they are.

If my reasoning implies that both left-handers should be executed, and also that left-handers don't exist, "I'll never be in a position to execute left-handers" absolutely is a valid response to any complaints against the "left-handers should be executed" conclusion. Any scenario where I'm convinced that left-handers do exist is also one where I rethink whether they should be executed. Our moral beliefs are shaped by reality, so my beliefs about reality are relevant to my moral beliefs.

If you look at what I actually said though, I never said the repugnant conclusion etc. was totally irrelevant, just that it was mostly irrelevant. I did answer your question pretty quickly. The repugnant conclusion just seems particularly nefarious to me because people take it way beyond where any thought experiment should be taken, directly porting conclusions back to reality despite the numerous differences between the hypothetical and reality.

If my reasoning implies that both left-handers should be executed, and also that left-handers don't exist,

If your reasoning implies that left-handers don't exist because the concept is logically impossible, you don't have to care whether it tells you to execute them. But there's a difference between "it's logically impossible" and "it doesn't exist in practice".

Sure. My original response did include:

If miserable people were miserable by definition then I'm not sure I'd want to tile the universe with them, but if we ever get to that point then surely we will have solutions to their problems.

So I feel I was pretty clear about my position.

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