Find out how utilitarian you are - a mega thread of philosophy polls

completely eliminates second-order effects (and I answered accordingly). However, I suspect many people will consider second-order effects anyway. If something is sufficiently strange, I think explicitly stating it, even in unambiguous language, it is often not enough; you have to make it super-extra clear.

[-]2723142y10

Agreed. Take the unhappy pregnant parent raising the hypothetically future happy child - unfortunately I just couldn't decouple this.

As an unhappy parent, my unhappiness gets transmitted to my children, and their unhappiness feeds back to me in a negative feedback loop. We're all unhappy. (And, indeed, the literature on postpartum depression and its resultant effects on children are quite clear on this as well - it's not just my personal experience.)

My rationalisation of this is that I'm a negative utilitarian and I'm not a longtermist - I don't think the future child's theoretical happiness can outweigh the the mother's present unhappiness.

But in actuality I think it's probably a decoupling issue.

[-]JBlack2y20

It looks like a very specific form of utilitarianism: something like linear state sum hedonic utilitarianism.

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