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nshepperd comments on A Sketch of an Anti-Realist Metaethics - Less Wrong
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This statement seems meaningless to me. As in "Utilitarianism is true" computes in my mind the exact same way as "Politics is true" or "Eggs are true".
The term "utilitarianism" encompasses a broad range of philosophies, but seems more commonly used on lesswrong as meaning roughly some sort of mathematical model for computing the relative values of different situations based on certain value assumptions about the elements of those situations and a thinghy called "utility function".
If this latter meaning is used, "utilitarianism is true" is a complete type error, just like "Blue is true" or "Eggs are loud". You can't say that the mathematical formulas and formalisms of utilitarianism are "true" or "false", they're just formulas. You can't say that "x = 5" is "true" or "false". It's just a formula that doesn't connect to anything, and that "x" isn't related to anything physical - I just pinpointed "x" as a variable, "5" as a number, and then declared them equivalent for the purposes of the rest of this comment.
This is also why I requested an example for deontology. To me, "deontology is true" sounds just like those examples. Neither "utilitarianism is true" or "deontology is true" correspond to well-formed statements or sentences or propositions or whatever the "correct" philosophical term is for this.
Wait, seriously? That sounds like a gross misuse of terminology, since "utilitarianism" is an established term in philosophy that specifically talks about maximising some external aggregative value such as "total happiness", or "total pleasure minus suffering". Utility functions are a lot more general than that (ie. need not be utilitarian, and can be selfish, for example).
To an untrained reader, this would seem as if you'd just repeated in different words what I said ;)
I don't see "utilitarianism" itself used all that often, to be honest. I've seen the phrase "in utilitarian fashion", usually referring more to my description than the traditional meaning you've described.
"Utility function", on the other hand, gets thrown around a lot with a very general meaning that seems to be "If there's something you'd prefer than maximizing your utility function, then that wasn't your real utility function".
I think one important source of confusion is that LWers routinely use concepts that were popularized or even invented by primary utilitarians (or so I'm guessing, since these concepts come up on the wikipedia page for utilitarianism), and then some reader assumes they're using utilitarianism as a whole in their thinking, and the discussion drifts from "utility" and "utility function" to "in utilitarian fashion" and "utility is generally applicable" to "utilitarianism is true" and "(global, single-variable-per-population) utility is the only thing of moral value in the universe!".