A common response (although, one I cannot find an example of via the search feature, blah) I have observed from Less Wrongers to the challenge of interpersonal utility comparison is the claim that "we do it all the time". I take this to mean that when we make decisions we often consider the preferences of our friends and family (and sometimes strangers or enemies) and that whatever is going on in our minds when we do this approximates interpersonal utility calculations (in some objective sense). This, to me, seems like legerdemain for basically this reason:
...One stand restoring to utilitarianism its role of judging policy, is that interpersonal comparisons are obviously possible since we are making them all the time. Only if we denied "other minds" could we rule out comparisons between them. Everyday linguistic usage proves the logical legitimacy of such statements as "A is happier than B" (level-comparison) and, at a pinch, presumably also "A is happier than B but by less than B is happier than C" (difference-comparison). A degree of freedom is, however, left to interpretation, which vitiates this approach. For these everyday statements can,
The other day, I forgot my eyeglasses at home and while walking I got a good sized piece of dust or dirt lodged in my eye. My eye was incapacitated for the better part of a minute until tears washed it out. I had a bit of an epiphany: 3^^^3 dust specks suddenly seems a lot scarier, something you obviously need to agregate and assign a monstrous pile of disutility to. So Basically I have updated my position on torture vs specks.
I have a pill that will make you a psychopath. You will retain all your intellectual abilities and all understanding of moral theory, but your emotional reactions to others suffering will cease. You will still have the empathy to understand that others are suffering, but you won't feel automatic sympathy for it.
Do you want to take it?
I am having a discussion on reddit (I am TheMeiguoren), and I have a a moral quandry that I want to run by the community.
I'll highlight the main point (the context is a discussion about immortality):
...imbecile: For someone to have several lifetimes to be considered a good thing, it must be conclusively shown that this person improves the life of others more and faster than several other people could achieve in their lifetime together with the resources he has at his disposal.
me: If my existence really was harming the human race by not being as efficient a
I have a question: what is akrasia exactly?
Say I have to finish a paper, but I also enjoy wasting time on the internet. All things considered, I decide it would be better for me to finish the paper than for me to waste time on the internet. And yet I waste time on the internet. What's going on there? It can't just be a reflex or a tick: my reflexes aren't that sophisticated. Given how complicated wasting time on the internet is, and that I decidedly enjoy it, it looks like an intentional action, something which is the result of my reasoning. Yet I reasoned...
Summary: I'm wondering whether anyone (especially moral anti-realists) would disagree with the statement, "The utility of an agent can only depend on the mental state of that agent".
I have had little success In my attempts to devise a coherent moral realist theory of meta-ethics, and am no longer very sure that moral realism is true, but there is one statement about morality that seems clearly true to me. "The utility of an agent can only depend on the mental state of that agent". Call this statement S. By utility I roughly mean how goo...
Love - in increase in her utility causes an increase in your utility.
Hate - in increase in her utility causes a decrease in your utility.
Indifference - a change in her utility has no influence on your utility.
Love = good.
Hate = evil.
Indifference = how almost everyone feels towards almost everyone.
[...]and related-to-rationality enough to deserve its own thread.
I've gotten to thinking that morality and rationality are very, very isomorphic. The former seems to require the latter, and in my experience the latter gives rise to the former. So they may not even be completely distinguishable. We've got lots of commonalities between the two, noting that both are very difficult for humans due to our haphazard makeup, and both have imaginary Ideal versions (respectively: God, and the agent who only has true beliefs and optimal decisions and infinite comp...
Question: What is the definition of morality? What is morality? For what humans use this concept and what motivitates humans to better understand morality, whatever it is?
- maybe if we really focus in on what people mean by "nice", and do lots of studies into what makes them think that people are nice, and think really hard, then we can come up with a precise concept of niceness that we can stick a unit on.
Jasay addresses this very counterargument a few paragraphs later:
On the other hand, if they are to be understood as verifiable, refutable matters of fact, interpersonal comparability must mean that any difficulties we may have with adding up are technical and not conceptual; they are due to the inaccessibility, paucity or vagueness of the required information. The problem is how to get at and measure what goes on inside people's heads and not that the heads belong to different persons. Minimal, widely accessible information about Nero, Rome and fiddling, for example, is sufficient for concluding that, for a fact, there was no net gain of utility from the burning of Rome while Nero played the fiddle. Progressively richer, more precise information allows progressively more refined interpersonal findings. Thus we move forward from the non-addibility resulting from sheer lack of specific data to an at least quasi-cardinal utility and its at least partial interpersonal comparison. At least ostensibly, the contrast with proposals to ignore specificity and strip individuals of their differences, could not be more complete. The proposal here seems to be to start from admitted heterogeneity and approach homogeneity of individuals by capturing as many of their differences as possible in pairwise comparisons, as if we were comparing an apple and a pear first in terms of size, sugar content, acidity, colour, specific weight and so on through n separate comparisons of homogeneous attributes, leaving uncompared only residual ones which defy all common measure. Once we have found the n common attributes and performed the comparisons, we have n separate results. These must then be consolidated into a single result, the Comparison, by deciding their relative weights.
Would, however, the admission that this procedure for adding up utilities is intellectually coherent, suffice to make it acceptable for choosing policies? If the procedure were to be operated, a host of debatable issues would first have to be somehow (unanimously?) agreed by everybody whose utility gain or loss was liable to be compared in the operation. What distinguishing traits of each individual (income, education, health, job satisfaction, character, spouse's good or bad disposition, etc.) shall be pairwise compared to infer utility levels or utility differences? If some traits can only be subjectively assessed, rather than read off from Census Bureau statistics, who shall assess them? What weight shall be given to each characteristic in inferring utility, and will the same weight do for people of possibly quite different sensibilities? Whose values shall condition these judgements? If some "equitable" way were unanimously agreed for delegating powers for taking comparative readings and setting the weights, the delegate would either go insane, or would just produce whatever result looked right to his intuition.
The long and short of it is that objective and procedurally defined interpersonal comparisons of utility, even if they are modestly partial, are merely a roundabout route all the way back to irreducible arbitrariness, to be exercised by authority. At the end of the day, it is the intuition of the person making the comparison which decides, or there is no comparison.
I apologize for the excessive quotation length, but I couldn't think of a good chunk to cut.
The exact same arguments could be leveled against intrapersonal utility comparisons. After all, a person's desires and tastes change over time, or even oscillate.
The answer to both "dilemmas" is the same: one can only get there from here. That is, each must use one's present weightings of the various dimensions of utility. In a democracy or an anarchy, these can then be discussed and bargained over to reach some reasonable trade-off between (e.g.) those who especially want to see their fellow citizens experience more pleasure and those who e...
I figure morality as a topic is popular enough and important enough and related-to-rationality enough to deserve its own thread.
Questions, comments, rants, links, whatever are all welcome. If you're like me you've probably been aching to share your ten paragraph take on meta-ethics or whatever for about three uncountable eons now. Here's your chance.
I recommend reading Wikipedia's article on meta-ethics before jumping into the fray, if only to get familiar with the standard terminology. The standard terminology is often abused. This makes some people sad. Please don't make those people sad.