= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
mattnewport comments on Cultivating our own gardens - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (47)
If you're optimizing, you're a form of utilitarian. Even if all you're optimizing is "minimize the number of times Kant's principles X, Y, and Z are violated".
This makes the utilitarian/non-utilitarian distinction useless, which I think it is. Everybody is either a utilitarian of some sort, a nihilist, or a conservative, mystic, or gambler saying "Do it the way we've always done it / Leave it up to God / Roll the dice". It's important to recognize this, so that we can get on with talking about "utility functions" without someone protesting that utilitarianism is fundamentally flawed.
The distinction I was drawing could be phrased as between explicit utilitarianism (trying to compute the utility function) and implicit utilitarianism (constructing mechanisms that you expect will maximize a utility function that is implicit in the action of a system but not easily extracted from it and formalized).
There is a meaningful distinction between believing that utility should be agent neutral and believing that it should be agent relative. I tend to assume people are advocating an agent neutral utility function when they call themselves utilitarian since as you point out it is rather a useless distinction otherwise. What terminology do you use to reflect this distinction if not utilitarian/non-utilitarian?
It's the agent neutral utilitarians that I think are dangerous and wrong. The other kind (if you want to still call them utilitarians) are just saying the best way to maximize utility is to maximize utility which I have a hard time arguing with.
Yes; but I've never thought of utilitarianism as being on one side or the other of that choice. Very often, when we talk about a utility function, we're talking about an agent's personal, agent-centric utility function.
As an ethical system it seems to me that utilitarianism strongly implies agent neutral utility. See the wikipedia entry for example. I get the impression that this is what most people who call themselves utilitarians mean.