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mattnewport comments on My main problem with utilitarianism - Less Wrong
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I'd be interested to know if that's true. I don't accept utilitarianism as a basis for ethics. Alicorn's recent post suggests she doesn't either. I think quite a few rationalists are also libertarian leaning and several critiques of utilitarianism come from libertarian philosophies.
Suggests? I state it outright (well, in a footnote). Not a consequentialist over here. My ethical views are deontic in structure, although they bear virtually no resemblance to the views of the quintessential deontologist (Kant).
I did think twice over using 'suggests' but I just threw in the link to let you speak for yourself. Thanks for clarifying :)
Additional data point: not a utilitarian either.
FWIW: fairly committed consequentialist. Most likely some form of prioritarian, possibly a capability prioritarian (if that even means anything); currently harboring significant uncertainty with regard to issues of population ethics.
Person-affecting consequentialisms are pretty nice about population ethics.
Yeah, that's the way I tend, but John Broome has me doubting whether I can get everything I want here.
Conchis, take a look at Krister Bykvist's paper, "The Good, the Bad and the Ethically Neutral" for a convincing argument that Broome should embrace a form of consequentialism.
(As an aside, the paper contains this delightful line: "My advice to Broome is to be less sadistic.")
Thanks for the link.
As far as I can tell, Bykvist seems to be making an argument about where the critical level should be set within a critical-level utilitarian framework rather than providing an explicit argument for that framework. (Indeed, the framework is one that Broome appears to accept already.)
The thing is, if you accept critical-level utilitarianism you've already given up the intuition of neutrality, and I'm still wondering whether that's actually necessary. In particular, I remain somewhat attracted to a modified version of Dasgupta's "relative betterness" idea, which Broome discusses in Chapter 11 of Weighing Lives. He seems to accept that it performs well against our intuitions (indeed, arguably better his own theory), but ultimately rejects it as being undermotivated. I still wonder whether such motivation can be provided.
(Of course, if it can't, then Bykvist's argument is interesting.)