= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Lukas_Gloor comments on 'Effective Altruism' as utilitarian equivocation. - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (79)
Not if people have a strong preference to go on living. Killing them would frustrate this preference. This view would only imply that you shouldn't go on procreating indefinitely into the future if this would produce lots of unsatisfied preferences overall. So this conclusion depends on empirical circumstances, and it would be odd to reject a normative view because of this.
Perhaps, that too is an empirical question. If people's preferences for tradition were strong enough, it likely wouldn't get outweighed. And if the preferences are weak, it being outweighed wouldn't pose much of a problem, given the framework in consideration.
The preference to go on living results in large part from the good things (i.e. opportunities for preference satisfaction) available in life. If we didn't care about those any more, the strength of the preference to go on living would presumably diminish considerably.
But yes, the policy recommendations of utilitarianism always depend on how the numbers actually come out. The point is that they're too dependent on a single parameter, or a small subset of parameters, contrary to complexity of value.
(I would go so far as to argue that this is by design: utilitarianism historically comes from an intellectual context in which people thought moral theories ought to be simple.)