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TheAncientGeek comments on Does utilitarianism "require" extreme self sacrifice? If not why do people commonly say it does? - Less Wrong Discussion
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If you want to completely optimize your life for creating more global utilons then, yes, utilitarianism requires extreme self-sacrifice. The time you spend playing that video-game or hanging out with friends netted you utility/happiness, but you could have spend that time working and donating the money to an effective charity. That tasty cheese you ate probably made you quite happy, but it didn't maximize utility. Better switch to the bare minimum you need to work the highest-paying job you can manage and give all the money you don't strictly need to an effective charity.
Of course, humans (generally) can't manage that. You won't be able to function at a high-paying job if you can't occasionally indulge in some tasty food or if your Fun-bar is in the red all the time. (Or, for that matter, most of your other bars. You'll probably spend a lot of time lying on the floor crying if you live like this.
While it might be morally optimal for you to ignore your own needs and work on the biggest gains you can manage, this isn't something that can be required of (most) people. You can use utilitarianism as a framework to base you decisions on without giving up everything. Giving up 100% of your income to a good charity might be morally optimal, but [giving 10% still makes a huge impact[(https://www.givingwhatwecan.org) and allows you a comfortable life yourself.
I don't think being perfectly utilitarian is something (most) humans should strive for. Use it as guidelines to influence the world around you, but don't let it drive you crazy.
Or to quote someone on skype::
People generally don't manage that. People learn what they can and can't do in Ranger School.
This is another case where it just seems there are multiple species of homo sapiens. Or maybe I'm just a Martian.
When other people say "X is moral", they mean "I will say that 'X is moral', and will occasionally do X"?
I can almost make sense of it, if they're all just egoists, like me. My moral preferences are some of my many preferences. Sometimes I indulge my moral preferences, and sometimes my gustatory preferences. Moral is much like "yummy". Just because something is "yummy", it doesn't I plan on eating it all day, or that I plan to eat all day.
But that is simply not my experience on how the term "moral" is generally used. Moral seems to mean "that's my criteria to judge what I should and shouldn't do". That's how everyone talks, although never quite how everyone does. Has there been an egoist revolution, and I just never realized it?
I think people have expressed before being "The Occasional Utilitarian" (my term), devoting some time slices to a particular moral theory. And other times, not. "I'm a utilitarian, when the mood strikes me".
It reminds me of a talk I had with some gal years ago about here upcoming marriage. "Oh, we'll never get divorced, no way, no how, but if we do..." What's going through a person's head when they say things like that? It's just bizarre to me.
Years later, I was on a date at a sex show and bumped into her. She was divorced.
Moral, or rather immoral, can also be used to mean "should be illegal". [*] Inasmuch as most people obey the law, there is quite a lot of morality going on. Your analysis basically states that there isn't much Individual, supererogatory moral action going on. That's true. People aren't good at putting morality into practice,, which is why morality needs to buttressed by things like legal systems. But there is a lot of unflashy morality going on...trading fairly, refraining from violence and so on. So the conclusion that people are rarely moral doesn't follow.
[*] This comment should not be taken to mean that in the opinion of the present author, everything which is illegal in every and any society is ipso facto immoral.
Can, but not necessarily should. Societies which move sufficiently far in that direction are called "totalitarian".
And there is another too far in the other direction, although no one wants to mention that.
Why not? The dimension that we are talking about is the sync -- or the disconnect -- between morality and legality. If this disconnect is huge, the terms used would be "unjust" and "arbitrary". Historically, such things happened when a society was conquered by someone with a significantly different culture.
What I was talking about was the larger but less noticeable part of the iceberg of morality.
If you, perhaps, could be more explicit..?
Moral, or rather immoral, can also be used to mean "should be illegal". [*] Inasmuch as most people obey the law, there is quite a lot of morality going on. Your analysis basically states that there isn't much Individual, supererogatory moral action going on. That's true. People aren't good at putting morality into practice,, which is why morality needs to buttressed by things like legal systems. But there is a lot of unflashy morality going on...trading fairly, refraining from violence and so on. So the conclusion that people are rarely moral doesn't follow.
[*] This comment should not be taken to mean that in the opinion of the present author, everything which is illegal in every and any society is ipso facto immoral.
Ah, I see.
What does this mean if we taboo "illegal"?
As far as I can tell, it means something like "If you do what you shouldn't do, someone should come around and do terrible things to you, against which you will have no recourse."
That's sort of true, but heavily spun. If you kill someone, what recourse do they have...except to live in a society that discourages murder by punishing murderers? Perhaps you were taking something like drug taking as a central example of "what you should not do".