I would not. This is a fair point.

Follow-up question: are all things that we consider misfortunes similar to the "burn yourself" situation, in that there is some sort of "damage" that is part of what makes the misfortune bad, separately from and additionally to the distress/discomfort/pain involved?

apply the sympathy-without-personal-distress trick to yourself

If you do this, would not the result be that you do not feel distress from your own misfortunes? And if you don't feel distress, what, exactly, is there to sympathize with?

Wouldn't you just shrug and dismiss the misfortune as irrelevant?

you have to sort of act as if your brain was screaming that loudly even when your brain doesn't have a voice that loud.

Why should I act this way?

Where and what are these "pleasure centers", exactly?

http://lesswrong.com/lw/k60/2014_survey_of_effective_altruists/avgo

You have to ask questions people will be able to easily answer if you want to get useful data.

That's true, but it is also an inherently problematic approach if (as will almost certainly be the case when it comes to issues of ethics, politics, etc.) the things you really want to know are not easily elicited by questions that people will be able to easily answer, and vice versa — the questions that people can easily answer don't actually tell you what you really want to know about those people's views, attitudes, etc.

In any case, what I meant wasn't that "EAs are not well-versed enough in moral philosophy" is a problem for the survey — what I meant was that it's a problem for the EA movement.

Well, we must not be hedonistic utilitarians then, right? Because if we were, and we could, we would.

Edit: Also, what the heck are you talking about?

(Assuming that we wish to choose one in the first place, of course - I do think that there is merit in just accepting that they're all flawed and then not choosing to endorse any single one.)

Well, that's been my policy so far, certainly. Some are worse than others, though. "This ethical framework breaks in catastrophic, horrifying fashion, creating an instant dystopia, as soon as we can rewire people's brains" is pretty darn bad.

But HU wouldn't necessarily say that someone's preference for something else than pleasure or pain would be mistaken - if it's interpreted within a subjectivist framework, HU is just a description of preferences that are different.

I really don't think that this is correct. If this were true, first of all, hedonistic utilitarianism would simply reduce to preference utilitarianism. In actual fact, neither view is merely about one's own terminal values.

If someone, personally, cares only about pain and pleasure, but acknowledges that other people may have other things as terminal values, and thinks that The Good lies in satisfying everyone's preferences maximally — which, for themselves, means maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, and for other people may mean other things — then that person is not a hedonistic utilitarian. They are a preference utilitarian. Referring to them as an HU is simply not correct, because that's not how the term is used in the philosophical literature.

On the other hand, if someone cares only about pain and pleasure — both theirs and other peoples' — and would prefer that everyone's pleasure be maximized and everyone's pain be minimized; but this person is not a moral realist, and has no opinion on what constitutes The Good or thinks there's no fact of the matter about whether an act is right or wrong; well, then this person is not a utilitarian at all. Again, describing this person as a hedonistic or any other kind of utilitarian completely fails to match up with how the term is used in the philosophical literature.

As for ethical subjectivism — uh, I don't think that's an actual thing. I'd not heard of anything by that name until today. I don't like going by wikipedia's definitions of philosophical principles, so I tried tracking it down to a source, such as perhaps a major philosopher espousing the view or at least describing it coherently. No such luck. Take a look at that list of references on its wikipedia page; two are to a single book (written in 1959 by some guy I've never heard of — have you? — and the shortness whose wikipedia page suggests that he wasn't anyone interesting), and one is to a barely-related page that mentions the thing once, in passing, by a different name. I'm not convinced. As best I can tell, it's a label that some modern-day historians of philosophy have used to describe... a not-quite-consistent family of views. (Divine command theory, for one.)

But let's attempt to take it at face value. You say:

Someone could be an ethical subjectivist and say that utilitarianism is the theory that best describes their particular attitudes, or at least that subset of their attitudes that they endorse.

Very well. Are their attitudes correct, do they think? If they say there's no fact of the matter about that, then they're not a utilitiarian. "Utilitiarianism" is a quite established term in the literature. You can't just apply it to any old thing.

Of course, this is Lesswrong; we don't argue about definitions; we're interested in what people actually think. However in this case I think getting our terms straight is important, for two reasons:

1. When most people say they're utilitarians, they mean it in the usual sense, I think. So to understand what's going on in these discussions, and in the heads of the people we're talking to, we need to know what is the usual sense.

2. If you hold some view which is not one of the usual views with commonly-known terms, you shouldn't call it by one of the commonly-known terms, because then I won't have any idea what you're talking about and we'll keep getting into comment threads like this one.

Out of curiosity, what was your reason for asking about my ethical views in detail? I did somewhat enjoy writing out that comment, but I'm curious as to whether you were planning to go somewhere with this.