People have been proposing that some people should be harmed to benefit others long before anyone proposed the idea of utilitarianism; usually it was justified because the people being harmed are outgroup members, or simply Less Important compared to the people being helped, or to subordinate individual identity to the group identity.

Sometimes, this doesn't go well. In some cases, such as, by your own example, in the case of taxes or a justic system, it goes much better than a refusal to harm some people to help others. Utilitarianism is a construction for formalizing under what conditions it is or is not a good idea to attempt such tradeoffs. Calling the purges of Hitler or Stalin failings of Utilitarianism is about as fair as calling every successful government intervention or institution ever, which after all all involve sacrificing resources of the public for a common good, successes of Utilitarianism.

That seems like a pretty low bar for "not civilized", which is a seriously bad characterization, and some of those are downright bizarre. It reads as though you took a laundry list of things you don't like about the US and decided that that's your definition of "not civilized". Would it make any sense if I pointed out that Europe tends to have weaker freedom of speech than the US, and a higher tendency towards anti-Semitism, and higher taxes, therefore Europe is "not civilized"?

It was a bad choice of word. But it seems like you agree that there are distinct empirical clusters for Europe-like and America-like (and Japan resides somewhere between the two - like most empirical classifications it's imperfect, but still useful).

I think the case can be made that Europe is a better place to live (and that US states that practice executions are worse than those that don't). But in any case this is all beside the point; the fact that there is this kind of resistance to the death penalty, even if only in Europe, demonstrates that humans are not naturally utilitarian.

It seems like either (1) Rivers was deceived, or (2) she was in some other way unaware that there was already an effective cure for syphilis which was not going to be given to the experimental subjects, or (3) the other options available to these people were so wretched that they were worse than having syphilis left untreated.

In cases 1 and 2, it doesn't really matter what we think of her calculations; if you're fed sufficiently wrong information then correct algorithms can lead you to terrible decisions. In case 3, maybe Rivers really didn't have anything better to do -- but only because other circumstances left the victims of this thing in an extraordinarily terrible position to begin with. (In much the same way as sawing off your own healthy left arm can be the best thing to do -- if someone is pointing a gun at your head and will definitely kill you if you don't. That doesn't say much about the merits of self-amputation in less ridiculous situations.)

I find #3 very implausible, for what it's worth.

(Now, if the statement were that Rivers believed that the benefits to the community outweighed the risks, and indeed the overt harm, to the subjects of the experiment, that would be more directly to the point. But that's not what the article says.)

What do you think of that utilitarian calculation?

Which one? The presumed altruistic one or the real-life one (which I think included the utilitly of having a job, the readiness to disobey authority, etc.)

I don't get the impression that those experiments destroyed a lot of trust-- nothing compared to the rape of Nanking or Japanese treatment of American prisoners of war.

It's hard for experiments to destroy trust when those doing the experiments aren't trusted anyway because they do other things that are as bad (and often on a larger scale).

Logically, people could volunteer for such experiments and get the same respect that soldiers do, but I don't know of any real-world examples.

I was going to say that I didn't think that medical researchers had ever solicited volunteers for experiments which are near certain to produce such traumatic effects, but on second thought, I do recall that some of the early research on the effects of decompression (as experienced by divers) was done by a scientist who solicited volunteers to be subjected to decompression sickness. I believe that some research on the effects of dramatic deceleration was also done similarly.

Probably.

In a culture of ideal rationalists, you might be better off having a government run lottery where people were randomly selected for participation in medical experiments, with participation on selection being mandatory for any experiment, whatever its effects on the participants, and all experiments being vetted only if their expected returns were more valuable than any negative effect (including loss of time) imposed on the participants. But we're a species which is instinctively more afraid of sharks than stairs, so for human beings this probably isn't a good recipe for social harmony.

Not directly, because I don't think it would be likely to work. I do think that people should be educated in practical applications of utilitarianism (for instance, the importance of efficiency in charity,) but I don't think that this would be likely to result in widespread approval of such practices.

In the specific case of the Tuskegee experiment, the methodology was not good, and given that treatments were already available, the expected return was not that great, so it's not a very good example from which to generalize the potential value of studies which would be considered exploitative of the test subjects.

Of wait we're talking about an entire society thats utilitarian and rational. In that case I'm (coordinating with everyone else via auman agreement) just dedicating the entire global population to a monstrous machine for maximally efficient FAI research where 99% of people are suffering beyond comprehension with no regard for their own well being in order to support a few elite researchers as the dedicate literally every second of their lives to thinking at maximal efficiency while pumped full of nootropics that'll kill them in a few years.

Given the millions killed by malaria and at most thousands of experimental subjects, it takes a heavy thumb on the scales of this argument to make the utilitarian calculation come out against.

If it would result in a timely cure for malaria which would result in the disease's global eradication or near-eradication, I would say that it would be worth kidnapping a few thousand children. But not only would a world where you could get away with doing so differ from our own in some very significant ways, I honestly doubt that a few thousand captive test subjects constitute a decisive and currently limiting factor in the progress of the research.

Would experimenting on little girls actually help that much?

...

No, seriously. I've read the original comment, James A. Donald does not support his claim.

But not any more expensive than caring for chimpanzees. Where, of course, "care for" does not mean "care for", but means "keep sufficiently alive for experimental purposes".

This is granted. References to small mice were silly and are now being replaced by "small chimpanzees." However...

Given the millions killed by malaria and at most thousands of experimental subjects, it takes a heavy thumb on the scales of this argument to make the utilitarian calculation come out against.

This is not the calculation being made. Using your numbers, experimenting on little girls needs to be at least 1.001 times as effective as experimenting on chimpanzees or mice to be worthwhile (because then you save an extra thousand lives for your thousand girls sacrificed.) It's not a flat "little girls versus millions of malaria deaths."

This is, quite frankly, not clear to me, and I'd want to call in an actual medical researcher to clarify. Doubly so, with artificial human organs becoming more and more possible (such organs are obviously significantly cheaper than humans.)

This is a get-out-of-utilitarianism-free card. A real utilitarian simply chooses the action of maximum utility. He would only pay a psychological cost for not doing that. When all are utilitarians the laws will also be utilitarian, and an evaluation of utility will be the sole criterion applied by the courts.

Actually, I was interpreting the hypothetical as "utilitarian government in our world." But fine, least convenient possible world and all that. That's why I set the non-society costs aside from the rest.

You feel obliged to pretend to be a utilitarian, so you justify your non-utilitarian repugnance by putting it into the utilitarian scales.

This looks like motivated reasoning. The motivation, to not torture little children, is admirable. But it is misapplied.

Honestly, this is probably true - case in point, I would rather not write a similar post from the opposite side. That being said, looking through my arguments, most of them hinge on the implausibility of human experimentation really being all that more effective compared to chimpanzee and artificial organ experimentation.

Morality isn't like physics

Can you expand on what you see as the differences?

The physics calculations around us have already been done perfectly. If, when we try to emulate them with our theories, we get something abnormal, it means our calculations are wrong and we need to either fix the calculation or the model. When we've done it all right, it should all add up to normality.

Our current morality, on the other hand, is a thing created over a few thousand years by society as a whole, that occasionally generates things like slavery. It is not guaranteed to already be perfectly calculated, and if our calculations turn out something abnormal, it could mean that either our calculations or the world is wrong.

It's more a matter of what evil means.

Yes, agreed. I'm not sure I know what "evil" means, but I'm fairly sympathetic to the view that, as the saying goes, good folk can allow evil to thrive by doing nothing.