A question about utilitarianism and selfishness.

abcd_z

Utilitarianism seems to indicate that the greatest good for the most people generally revolves around their feelings. A person feeling happy and confident is a desired state, a person in pain and misery is undesirable.

But what about taking selfish actions that hurt another person's feelings? If I'm in a relationship and breaking up with her would hurt her feelings, does that mean I have a moral obligation to stay with her? If I have an employee who is well-meaning but isn't working out, am I morally allowed to fire him? Or what about at a club? A guy is talking to a woman, and she's ready to go home with him. I could socially tool him and take her home myself, but doing so would cause him greater unhappiness than I would have felt if I'd left them alone.

In a nutshell, does utilitarianism state that I am morally obliged to curb my selfish desires so that other people can be happy?

Each case is solved by what society seems to have mutually concluded:

Breaking up hurts, but being "strung along" is worse. I myself have advised coming clean due to the ever-more extreme pain resulting from the inevitable breakup. In the end, your ex-partner will be better off when they get over you.
Management is an unsolved problem in society, but the co-workers of that employee will almost certainly conclude that he did not deserve to be fired. Managers themselves will often agree with this assessment, but somehow reach the conclusion that it needed to happen regardless. Perhaps his happiness is outweighed by the distributed quality of the company's income and the remaining employees? Management often does not make its reasoning entirely clear.
Stealing someone else's partner is considered to be a very bad practice. It is also existentially risky.

Utilitarianism is certainly correct. You can observe this by watching people make decisions under uncertainty. Preferences aren't merely ordinal.

But yes, doing the math has its own utility cost, so many decisions are better off handled with approximations. This is how you get things like the Allais paradox.

I'm not sure what "moral" means here. The goal of a gene is to copy itself. Ethics isn't about altruism.

3Vaniver13y

Is this obviously true? Note the underlying assumption that you would break up eventually. Suppose you're dating someone, and the relationship gives you 1 hedon and them 3 hedons. You discover you have another option that gives you 2 hedons, but their next best opportunity gives them 1 hedon. (Suppose, to make things easy, those two other options are involved in a relationship themselves, which gives each of them 1 hedon.) If you just sum hedons, you should stay with your current partner. But that doesn't maximize your hedons, and the locally optimal move is to break up and date the other option. Another consideration: suppose you're dating someone with suicidal tendencies, and you know that a major immediate cause of suicide attempts is the end of a relationship, but you were unaware of their suicidal tendencies when you started dating. You're pretty sure that you will be less happy in this relationship than other options you have, but think that they will pose a serious risk to themselves if you break up with them. To what degree can they manufacture an obligation for you to provide emotional support to them? [...] Both of these strike me as contentious. Few people are satisfied when their coworkers are incompetent or slack off, and we know quite a bit about effective management. [...] Certainly there must be cases where the option that maximizes profit does not maximize happiness, unless happiness is defined as profit. [...] But this ignores actually doing the math! Suppose it is known that she would prefer abcd_z's company to the other fellow's, and abcd_z would prefer her company to no one's, and the other fellow would prefer her company to no one's, but his preference is smaller than theirs. The "stealing other people's partners is bad" is putting precedence above greatest good.* The claim that it's existentially risky is one that doesn't require utilitarianism; a selfish person is more concerned about those sorts of incentives than a utilitarian. *"B

0abcd_z13y

That last one was meant as in "he's a player that just met her and so am I."

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A question about utilitarianism and selfishness.

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A question about utilitarianism and selfishness.

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