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Dolores1984 comments on A (small) critique of total utilitarianism - Less Wrong
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I've always felt that post was very suspect. Because, if you do the utilitarian math, robbing banks and giving them to charity is still a good deal, even if there's a very low chance of it working. Your own welfare simply doesn't play a factor, given the size of the variables you're playing with. It seems to be that there is a deeper moral reason not to murder organ donors or steal food for the hungry than 'it might end poorly for you.'
Bank robbery is actually unprofitable. Even setting aside reputation (personal and for one's ethos), "what if others reasoned similarly," the negative consequences of the robbery, and so forth you'd generate more expected income working an honest job. This isn't a coincidence. Bank robbery hurts banks, insurers, and ultimately bank customers, and so they are willing to pay to make it unprofitable.
That was a somewhat lazy example, I admit, but consider the most inconvenient possible world. Let's say you could expect to take a great deal more from a bank robbery. Would it then be valid utilitarian ethics to rob (indirectly) from the rich (us) to give to the poor?
My whole point in the comments on this post has been that it's a pernicious practice to use such false examples. They leave erroneous impressions and associations. A world where bank-robbery is super-profitable, so profitable as to outweigh the effects of reputation and the like, is not very coherent.
A better example would be something like: "would utilitarians support raising taxes to fund malaria eradication," or "would a utilitarian who somehow inherited swoopo.com (a dollar auction site) shut down the site or use the revenue to save kids from malaria" or "if a utilitarian inherited the throne in a monarchy like Oman (without the consent of the people) would he spend tax revenues on international good causes or return them to the taxpayers?"
Only if you're bad at math. Banks aren't just piggybanks to smash, they perform a useful function in the economy, and to disrupt it has consequences.
Of course I prefer to defeat bad utilitarian math with better utilitarian math rather than with ethical injunctions. But hey, that's the woe of bounded reason, even without going into the whole corrupted hardware problem: your model is only so good, and heuristics that serve as warning signals have their place.