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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38752 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Premise #2: Within the unit of people we care about, we care about everyone equally.

Your utilitarians may select different 'units of people we care about.' Someone that might be called a 'globalist' might care about the whole world, while a stereotypical NIMBY might care mostly about their own neighborhood.

Response: This may be a coherent objection, but it's not a utilitarian objection, it's a rights-based objection.

A utilitarian might say 'I alone am rational enough to allocate my resources to maximize utility, the government will fail and I will succeed therefore taking my resources away is unethical'

I only care about those who are deserving to not be in poverty; I don't care about everyone, I'm fine with people being in poverty if they do nothing to better themselves

If your goal is to maximize utility in the shortest possible span of time, sure, spend all the money buying the world a single meal. But there's something to be said for making sure resources are spent in a way that sets people up for continued success. That said, often the resources spent deciding if Joe X Poor is 'down on his luck' or a drug addict make the whole program significantly less effective...

Overall you've made a great argument against utilitarianism.

Your utilitarians may select different 'units of people we care about.' Someone that might be called a 'globalist' might care about the whole world, while a stereotypical NIMBY might care mostly about their own neighborhood.

This isn't really utilitarianism. This is just whatever-I-want-ism.

If I'm free to select which subset of the human race I "care" about, then how do I not have an unlimited license to arbitrarily decide whatever other values I want to follow? In the same way I can decide to only "care" about my own neighborhood, what if I decide to just only "care" about committing bank robberies, to the detriment of all else? It seems like under your definition of utilitarianism, I should just go ahead and do that. But that can hardly be called a systematic moral philosophy.

As I think Nietzsche convincingly argues, every system of morality is whatever-I-want-ism.

Why is your utility function better just because it's larger than a egoist's?

Correct, utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics are intercompatible: "My utility is maximized if I behave in accordance with the rules/in a virtuous fashion" vs. "The rule I follow is utilitarianism; utilitarianism is the most virtuous form of behavior." But generally, utilitarianism just means you rate worldstates in a one-dimensional numeric fashion; it doesn't say anything about the nature of your preference. The utility function is not up for grabs. Similarly, I could say, idk, Randian ethics are not virtue ethics because I don't recognize their target as virtuous, but that's just not how those terms work: they're about the way in which you pursue the good / the rules / your preferences, not what those preferences are.

Now, lots of utilitarians, especially in these spaces, are also liberal humanists, and so rate all human life equally, and there are certainly arguments to be had for or against that, but neither side has a monopoly on "utilitarianism".

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