All of zarraha's Comments + Replies

I don't see what the problem is. Utilitarianism says that there is, or ought to be, some objective utility function, the maximization of which is what determines "good" and "evil". This function need not be a linear combination of people's personal utility functions, it can be "well-being" as you describe, but this doesn't make it fundamentally different from other utility functions, it's simply a set of preferences (even if nobody in real life actually has these preferences in this precise order). Theor... (read more)

1Richard_Ngo
What you've defined above is just morality in general: basically any moral theory can be expressed as a "nonlinear" function of some properties of individuals plus some properties of the world. For example, in deontology one nonlinearity is the fact that murdering someone is nearly-infinitely bad. The key thing that utilitarianism does is claim that the function we should be maximising is roughly linear in well-being; my main point is clarifying that it shouldn't be linear in "utility" (in either a desire or an economic sense).
zarraha140

A somewhat moderate nitpick, a lot of your degrees of freedom don't multiply with each other. For example, #4 and #6. We have 2 types of lattitude systems, and we have 3 types of measurements (location, height, width) But this only gives us 4 possible combinations, not 6 (lattitude 1, lattitude 2, width, height). And a lot of your other degrees of freedom don't multiply like longitude/lattitude, or location also don't multiply with width/height. Similarly, #3 and #7 don't multiply. You only have two degrees of freedom correspondin... (read more)

6lemonhope
Thanks for pointing that out; I noticed that too. This is perhaps partly made up for by the fact that he doesn't count feet or the mouth of the Nile river as possibilities.