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gjm comments on The Trouble With "Good" - Less Wrong
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I fear you may be thinking "serial killer: karma -937; my sister: karma +2764".
A utilitarian would say: consider what that person is likely to do in the future. The serial killer might murder dozens more people, or might get caught and rot in jail. Your sister will most likely do neither. And consider how other people will feel about the deaths. The serial killer is likely to have more enemies, fewer friends, fewer close friends. So the next utility change from shooting the serial killer is much less negative (or even more positive) than from shooting your sister, and you need not (should not) be indifferent between those.
In general, utilitarianism gets results that resemble those of intuitive morality, but it tends to get them indirectly. Or perhaps it would be better to say: Intuitive morality gets results that resemble those of utilitarianism, but it gets them via short-cuts and heuristics, so that things that tend to do badly in utilitarian terms feel like they're labelled "bad".
In a least convenient possible world, where the serial killer really enjoys killing people and only kills people who have no friends and family and won't be missed and are quite depressed, would it ever be conceivable that utilitarianism would imply indifference to the choice?
It's certainly possible in principle that it might end up that way. A utilitarian would say: Our moral intuitions are formed by our experience of "normal" situations; in situations as weirdly abnormal as you'd need to make utilitarianism favour saving the serial killer at the expense of an ordinary upright citizen, or to make slavery a good thing overall, or whatever, we shouldn't trust our intuition.
And this is the crux of my problem with utilitarianism I guess. I just don't see any good reason to prefer it over my intuition when the two are in conflict.
Even though your intuition might be wrong in outlying cases, it's still a better use of your resources not to think through every case, so I'd agree that using your intuition is better than using reasoned utilitarianism for most decisions for most people.
It's better to strictly adhere to an almost-right moral system than to spend significant resources on working out arbitrarily-close-to-right moral solutions, for sufficiently high values of "almost-right", in other words. In addition to the inherent efficiency benefit, this will make you more predictable to others, lowering your transaction costs in interactions with them.
My problem is a bit more fundamental than that. If the premise of utilitarianism is that it is morally/ethically right for me to provide equal weighting to all people's utility in my own utility function then I dispute the premise, not the procedure for working out the correct thing to do given the premise. The fact that utilitarianism can lead to moral/ethical decisions that conflict with my intuitions seems to me a reason to question the premises of utilitarianism rather than to question my intuitions.
Your intuitions will be biased to favoring a sibling over a stranger. Evolution has seen to that, i.e. kin selection.
Utilitarianism tries to maximize utility for all, regardless of relatedness. Even if you adjust the weightings for individuals based on likelihood of particular individuals having a greater impact on overall utility, you don't (in general) get weightings that will match your intuitions.
I think it is unreasonable to expect your moral intuitions to ever approximate utilitarianism (or vice versa) unless you are making moral decisions about people you don't know at all.
In reality, the money I spend on my two cats could be spent improving the happiness of many humans - humans that I don't know at all who are living a long way away from me. Clearly I don't apply utilitarianism to my moral decision to keep pets. I am still confused about how much I should let utilitarianism shift my emotionally-based lifestyle decisions.
I think you are construing the term "utilitarianism" too narrowly. The only reason you should be a utilitarian is if you intrinsically value the utility functions of other people. However, you don't have to value the entire thing for the label to be appropriate. You still care about a large part of that murderer's utility function, I assume, as well as that of non-murderers. Not classical utilitarianism, but the term still seems appropriate.
Utilitarianism seems a fairly unuseful ethical system if the utility function is subjective, either because individuals get to pick and choose which parts of others' utility functions to respect or because individuals are allowed to choose subjective weights for others' utilities. It would seem to degenerate into an impractical-to-implement system for everybody just justifying what they feel like doing anyway.
Well, assuming you get to make up your own utility function, yes. However, I don't think this is the case. It seems more likely that we or born with utility functions or, rather, something we can construct a coherent utility function out of. Given the psychological unity of mankind, there is likely to be a lot of similarities in these utility functions across the species.
Didn't you just suggest that we don't have to value the entirety of a murderer's utility function? There are certainly similarities between individual's utility functions but they are not identical. That still doesn't address the differential weighting issue either. It's fairly clear that most people do in fact put greater weight on the utility of their family and friends than on that of strangers. I believe that is perfectly ethical and moral but it conflicts with a conception of utilitarianism that requires equal weights for all humans. If weights are not equal then utility is not universal and so utilitarianism does not provide a unique 'right' answer in the face of any ethical dilemma and so seems to me to be of limited value.
Yes. But if the "serial killer" is actually somone who enjoys helping others, who want to (and won't harm anyone when they), commit suicide; are they really a bad person at all?
Is shooting them really better than shooting a random person?
Also, would the verdict on this question change if the people he killed had attempted but failed at suicide, or wanted to suicide but lacked the willpower to?