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.

Jiro comments on What EAO has been doing, what it is planning to do, and why donating to EAO is a good idea - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: TodesBrot 29 December 2015 01:46AM

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

Comments (17)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Jiro 29 December 2015 09:28:04PM 0 points [-]

If utility stands for what you care about, everyone is a utilitarian by definition. Even if you only care about yourself, that just means that your utility function gives great weight to your preferences and no weight to anyone else's.

Comment author: gjm 29 December 2015 11:05:00PM 2 points [-]

"Utilitarian" doesn't mean "acting according to a utility function". Further, many people's actions are really difficult to express in terms of a utility function, and in order even to try you need to do things like making it change a lot over time and depend heavily on the actions and/or character of the person who's utility function it's supposed to be.

I'm not (I think) saying that to disagree with you; if I'm understanding correctly your first sentence is intended as a sort of reductio ad absurdum of entirelyuseless's comment. But, if so, I am saying the following to disagree with you: I think it is perfectly possible to be basically utilitarian and think animal suffering matters, without finding it likely that happy rat farms and humane insecticides are an effective way to maximize utility. And so far as I know, values of the sort you need to hold that position are quite common among basically-utilitarian people and quite common among people who identify as EAs.