There's a strip of an incredibly over-the-top vulgar comic called space moose that gets at the same idea. These acts of kindness aren't positive utility, even if the utility metric is based on desires, because they conflict with the desires of the stingrays or other victims. Preferences also need to be weighted somehow in preference utilitarianism, I suppose by importance to the person. But then hmm, anyone gets to be a utility monster by just really really really really wanting to kill the stringrays. So yeah there's a problem there.
I think I need to update, and abandon preference utilitarianism even as a useful correlate of whatever the right measure would be.
While it's gratifying to win an argument, I'd rather not do it under false pretenses:
But then hmm, anyone gets to be a utility monster by just really really really really wanting to kill the stringrays.
We need a solution to the utility monster problem if we're going to have a Friendly AI that cares about people's desires, so it's better to solve the utility monster problem than to give up on preference utilitarianism in part because you don't know how to solve the utility monster problem. I've sketched proposed solutions to two types of utility mon...
In You Provably Can't Trust Yourself, Eliezer tried to figured out why his audience didn't understand his meta-ethics sequence even after they had followed him through philosophy of language and quantum physics. Meta-ethics is my specialty, and I can't figure out what Eliezer's meta-ethical position is. And at least at this point, professionals like Robin Hanson and Toby Ord couldn't figure it out, either.
Part of the problem is that because Eliezer has gotten little value from professional philosophy, he writes about morality in a highly idiosyncratic way, using terms that would require reading hundreds of posts to understand. I might understand Eliezer's meta-ethics better if he would just cough up his positions on standard meta-ethical debates like cognitivism, motivation, the sources of normativity, moral epistemology, and so on. Nick Beckstead recently told me he thinks Eliezer's meta-ethical views are similar to those of Michael Smith, but I'm not seeing it.
If you think you can help me (and others) understand Eliezer's meta-ethical theory, please leave a comment!
Update: This comment by Richard Chappell made sense of Eliezer's meta-ethics for me.