ciphergoth comments on On dollars, utility, and crack cocaine - Less Wrong

13 Post author: PhilGoetz 04 April 2009 12:00AM

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Comment author: ciphergoth 04 April 2009 09:26:34AM 1 point [-]

The real reason not to say "those fools don't deserve our help" is that it doesn't make sense for materialist consequentialists to weight utility based on who deserves what.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 April 2009 11:41:59AM 2 points [-]

IAWYC but "consequentialism" of itself, or "materialism" of itself, doesn't stop us from having such a utility function.

Comment author: ciphergoth 04 April 2009 12:36:09PM 1 point [-]

Do you know if this is a well-known position in consequentialist philosophy? It seems like it must be, but I only got as far as the Wikipedia page on deserts and it seems to cover a discussion among deontologists,,,

Comment author: conchis 04 April 2009 12:59:01PM *  4 points [-]

There's a fair amount of debate about what exactly the formalism of consequentialism excludes or doesn't, and whether it's possible to view deontological views (or indeed any other moral theory) as a subset of consequentialism. The idea that any moral view can be seen as a version of consequentlialism is often referred to as "Dreier's conjecture" (see e.g. the discussion here.)

Usually, consequentialist aggregration functions impose an anonymity requirement, which seems to discourage desert as a consideration (it requires that the identity of individuals can't matter to what they get). But even that doesn't really exclude it.