satt comments on Impartial ethics and personal decisions - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Emile 08 March 2015 12:14PM

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Comment author: satt 10 March 2015 03:21:16AM *  0 points [-]

I don’t really know, and because of that, I don’t know whether or not I count as a consequentialist

Consequentialism just means the rightness of behaviour is determined by its result. (The World's Most Reliable Encyclopaedia™ confirms this.) So you can be a partial (as in not impartial) consequentialist, a consequentialist who thinks good results for kith & kin are better than good results for distant strangers.

As for utilitarianism, it depends on which definition of utilitarianism one chooses. Partiality is compatible with what I call utilityfunctionarianism (and with additively-separable-utility-function-arianism), but contradicts egalitarian utility maximization.