thomblake comments on Open Thread: December 2011 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Tripitaka 01 December 2011 06:59PM

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Comment author: thomblake 16 December 2011 12:32:35AM 1 point [-]

When Utilitarianism was proposed, Mill/Bentham identified it as basically "pleasure good / pain bad". Since then, Utilitarianism has pretty much become a family of theories, largely differentiated by their conceptions of the good.

One common factor of ethical theories called "Utilitarianism" is that they tend to be agent-neutral; thus, one would not talk about "an agent's utility function", but "overall net utility" (a dubious concept).

"Consequentialism" only slightly more generally refers to a family of ethical theories that consider the consequences of actions to be the only consideration for morality.

Comment author: Bugmaster 16 December 2011 01:12:08AM 0 points [-]

Thanks, that clears things up. But, as you said, "overall net utility" is kind of a dubious concept. I suspect that no one had figured out a way yet to compute this utility function in a semi-objective way... is that right ?