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Lars Sandaaker's avatar

I would not call myself a strict utilitarian, so I feel no need to defend the position, but this feels a bit too much like a straw man to be really useful.

There are short term utility and long term utility, and the two often collide. If I'm having surgery, it might be creating more utility for society in general if the doctor took all my usable organs and saved many lives, instead of doing the operation I was expecting to have. But the long term negative effect of this, fear of getting medical treatment lest one is turned into an unwilling organ donor, far outweighs the positive short term utility. I think it's rather easy to find similar counterarguments to the examples you're using.

"Utilitarianism places no value on duty to personal responsibilities." I think that's wrong, and I could see a utilitarian argument for such values similar to the one above: Showing personal responsibility and acting on duty can have positive consequences, social utility, thus can be defended on within a utilitarian philosophy.

In the end, I don't think all moral and practical questions can be solved on one universal principle, so I don't feel the need to defend utilitarian thinking at any cost. It's more, as you say, a good school of thought for shaking up one's own moral intuitions, for rethinking some of our mainstream approaches to problems.

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minetta's avatar

The main critique here falls flat to me, simply because you're allowed to fold into your definition of utility ideas like "people are better off in a society where we don't rape unconscious people or allow anyone to starve" and I think you'd be right to do so. Placing a large utility premium on these things lets us resolve all your counterexamples without much trouble, but importantly I *do* think there is some amount of human happiness we should trade one person starving for. Living in a world bound by physical reality requires making decisions with tradeoffs; you don't get to only win.

To me utilitarianism is the insistence that you consider the consequences of your actions when you're taking them, not just how they feel ex-ante. If your project is to alleviate climate change, then deontologically maybe recycling and spending tens of minutes thinking about how to reuse tote bags is the appropriate action, but a utilitarian will demand you acknowledge that these things are worse use of your resources and less effective at helping climate change than doing things like buying carbon credits, donating to climate lobbying groups, lobbying for nuclear power, etc.

A lot of EA's project is to get people to apply a minimally utilitarian lens to situations that aren't so thorny, and I think they are a very strong driving force in holding charity and philanthropy accountable for their actions and not just their words. I am extremely sympathetic to many of your criticisms of EA as a philosophical school, but I think I would much prefer to live in this world than a world where EA ideas are subscribed to by nobody. Any person living in abject poverty would prefer to gain basic resources and healthcare in exchange for adding to the world some billionaires and over-eager college students that the American philosopher class dislikes, and we, including you, have a duty to take that seriously

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