You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

satt comments on Impartial ethics and personal decisions - Less Wrong Discussion

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (18)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

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.