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homunq comments on A critique of effective altruism - Less Wrong
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Note: Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is not actually a serious philosophical hurdle for a utilitarian (though related issues such as the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem may be). That is to say: it is absolutely trivial to create a social utility function which meets all of Arrow's "impossible" criteria, if you simply allow cardinal instead of just ordinal utility. (Arrow's theorem is based on a restriction to ordinal cases.)
Thank you for the clarification; despite this, cardinal utility is difficult because it assumes that we care about different preferences the same amount, or definably different amounts.
Unless there is a commodity that can adequately represent preferences (like money) and a fair redistribution mechanism, we still have problems maximizing overall welfare.
No argument here. It's hard to build a good social welfare function in theory (ie, even if you can assume away information limitations), and harder in practice (with people actively manipulating it). My point was that it is a mistake to think that Arrow showed it was impossible.
(Also: I appreciate the "thank you", but it would feel more sincere if it came with an upvote.)
I had upvoted you. Also, I used Arrow as a shorthand for that class of theorem, since they all show that a class of group decision problem is unsolvable - mostly because I can never remember how to spell Satterthewaite.