komponisto comments on 'Effective Altruism' as utilitarian equivocation. - Less Wrong
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It sounds like you might be confusing utilitarianism with utility functions (a common mistake on LW). While utilitarianism always involves a utility function, not all utility functions are utilitarian.
Yes, that's always theoretically possible. In real life, however, humans are subject to value drift, and have to "practice" their values, lest they lose them.
That doesn't sound like the latter guy's true rejection. It sounds like he really means to accuse the mayor of undervaluing movies specifically. (After all, if the mayor had made the opposite choice, why couldn't the food program guy equally well accuse the mayor of not understanding the complexity of value?)