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SilentCal comments on Does utilitarianism "require" extreme self sacrifice? If not why do people commonly say it does? - Less Wrong Discussion
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My view, and a lot of other people here seem to also be getting at this, is that the demandingness objection comes from a misuse of utilitarianism. People want their morality to label things 'permissible' and 'impermissible', and utilitarianism doesn't natively do that. That is, we want boolean-valued morality. The trouble is, Bentham went and gave us a real-valued one. The most common way to get a bool out of that is to label the maximum 'true' and everything else false, but that doesn't give a realistically human-followable result. Some philosophers have worked on 'satisficing consequentialism', which is a project to design a better real-to-bool conversion, but I think the correct answer is to learn to use real-valued morality.
There's some oversimplification above (I suspect people have always understood non-boolean morality in some cases), but I think it captures the essential problem.
I'm not sure you can really say it's a 'misuse' if it's how Bentham used it. He is essentially the founder of modern utilitarianism. If any use is a misuse, it is scalar utilitarianism. (I do not think that is a misuse either).
Fair point... I think the way I see it is that Bentham discovered the core concept of utilitarianism and didn't build quite the right structure around it. My intention is to make ethical/metaethical claims, not historical/semantic ones... does that make sense?
(It's true I haven't offered a detailed counterargument to anyone who actually supports the maximizing version; I'm assuming in this discussion that its demandingness disqualifies it)