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AndrewKemendo comments on Friedman on Utility - Less Wrong
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Comments (31)
According to who? Are we just redefining terms now?
As far as I can tell your definition is the same as Benthams only implying rules bound more weakly for the practitioner.
I think someone started (incorrectly) using the term and it has taken hold. Now a bunch of cognitive dissonance is fancied up to make it seem unique because people don't know where the term originated.
See my reply and the following comments for the distinction. The economist's utility function is ordinal; the ethicist's is cardinal.
The economist wants to predict human behavior. This being the case, the economist is only interested in values that someone actually acts on. The 'best' utility function for an economist is the one that completely predicts all actions of the agent in interest. Capturing the agent's true values is subservient to predicting actions.
The ethicist wants to come up with the proper course of action, and thus doesn't care about prediction.
The difference between the two is the two is normativity. Human psychology is complicated. Buried deep inside is some set of values that we truly want to maximize. When it comes to every day actions, this set of values need not be relevant for predicting our actual behavior.