When I was a grad student, my advisor used to respond to any question that started "Imagine a possible world in which..." by just saying "No, I'd rather not." :gigachad:
I don't know too much about utilitarianism, but I guess the experiment illustrates the impossibility to figure out the utility to other beings.
This issue occasionally rears it's head in vegan discussions when people try to "rank" various animals.
Right, Utilitarianism (correctly so oftentimes) gets lambasted because it can quickly go from "greater good" thinking to "How many lives can be measurably improved by
stealingredistributing this homeless person's organs?"
How does failing to accept some shitty impossible thought experiment designed to dismiss ideas of maximizing human happiness make someone a sociopath?
I don't think it's a shitty impossible thought experiment, I think it's very accurate critique on how utilitarian philosophy gets used IRL by rich "philanthropists" and the US state department in order to hide and justify unethical behaviour.
Claiming something maximizes utility != that thing actually maximizing utility.
Rich "philanthropists" and the State Department might say they are maximizing utility, but that doesn't mean it's true.
"If we measure your idea using the completely nonsensical metric of 'because I said so', your idea is nonsensical."
Why is it a nonsensical metric to measure an idea based on the consequences of the key object of the idea? I mean utility is a quantity that we can in principle measure in any way we'd like.
Utilitarianism, like most ethical philosophies, is a framework for thinking about the concept of ethics and as such two people using the same framework can come to wildly different conclusions. There’s communist and AnCap utilitarians who lay out the logic behind their beliefs in a (technically) sound fashion. I don’t really get people labeling themselves “utilitarians” to be honest.
And it should be noted I don’t really think there’s ANY ethical philosophy that doesn’t have some weird hypothetical situation someone could dream up where the logic of the framework can be used to justify bizarre and/or horrible things. It’s really a question of how likely such a situation would be to ever actually occur.
I find this shit interesting but I think as materialists we shouldn’t waste too much energy one. People don’t do bad things cuz they haven’t been presented a totally coherent moral philosophy yet, they generally do bad things for material reasons. Some tech bro billionaires being utilitarians isn’t the reason their amoral bone heads.
but we SHOULD be concerned about this, much less unrealistic thought experiment: https://medium.com/@AmericanPublicU/drowning-child-scenario-exposes-moral-hypocrisy-part-i-4b308e36b1d5 https://medium.com/@AmericanPublicU/drowning-child-scenario-exposes-moral-hypocrisy-part-ii-257e1e9e5475
as in, i am and i am having a mental breakdown
I would encourage you to log off if this philosophy debate is causing you mental anguish.
I’m just saying I don’t think convincing Elon Musk to be a deontologist is going to make him shut down his child labor lithium mines.
i can't log off from my brain though, knowing im using energy and resources and everything that could be given to those in need. every time i eat food that i don't strictly need or turn on a computer or draw or write or do anything that requires extra calories i'm failing millions of people
Okay, I’m telling you now you need to log off, and stop reading philosophy dork blogs online, those weirdos are pure ideology and basically treat trying to write themselves into weird logical boxes as some kind of sport. Be a materialist not an idealist.
You personally eating slightly more than your body needs doesn’t affect world hunger at all, it’s not like if you bought less groceries Safeway would FedEx the left overs to some village in Africa. They’d just throw it out. There’s enough food for everyone and then some in the world right now it’s just not being distributed properly, this is the materialist way to think about this. Personal asceticism doesn’t help the suffering in anyway, what will is a restriction of society, something with you doodling or writing poems has no effect on.
maybe, but i can still give all my money and time to charities and groups. in a sense, aren't a comitting a moral failing by not choosing to organize every moment for socialism outside of the rest time i need to stay sane and a job i need to stay alive?
no because you need to take some time for yourself or you burn out you have to treat yourself nicely as well as other people
yeah you need the rest time to stay sane and should no more feel guilty about that than eating to not starve
You could go figure out the exact minimum amount of time that you need to spend resting and staying sane, but the effort to do this would also burn you out, so you need to go take a break from that. And you could go stress out about how much rest you need to be able to go back to thinking about how much time you need to spend to rest, but this too will burn you out, so you need to take a break from that.
And this will continues to apply to however many meta-levels of stuff to stress out about you invent, so go outside.
Log off, touch grass. You’re not helping anyone by killing yourself over thought experiments.
but from the perspective shown by the trolley problem or whatever, i am basically killing people when i choose to do something selfish instead of helping them not die. so the 35000 children dying every day are at least partially my fault. i could save dozens of them from early childhood diseases just by sending enough money for medicine to survive. i basically killed a dozen people today
on second thought this is probably true, but it also implies that everyone on the planet has probably "killed" someone at least a hundred times (especially if we count choosing to eat to not starve instead of giving) so im not sure if any of this matters. moral nihilism might be it at that point
im sorry i said the sociopath thing. i can see now i have no right to have said that
You're not the same poster as the person I used to say "That sounds like OCD, maybe see a therapist" to, right? Because, damn, the intensity of focus you have on this really reminds me of my own struggles with moral OCD.
wow thanks guess ill go off myself or somethign i guess so i stop consuming resources
i didn't want to live spending my entire life either worrying about not doing enough or forcing myself to give up everything i enjoy to do more. but i realize now that is counterrevolutionary and wrong. i am angry. i dont want to go into my emotions around this too much because it feels kind of like larping but the anger i have against the people who've made this world the way it is is too much to feel like it should be real. i did a cursory glance at forums for assisted suicide and the amount of people instead of making me feel heard or like i found good information just made me angry. theres so many people killing themselvse because theyre hurting. IM DONE. capitalists should be feeling all this pain and all this hurt. not children in Palestine. not me, i guess. im so fucking sick of all of these useless SHITS talking about AI and the singularity and bullshit useless arguing about egregores or some dumb ass shit.
so fuck it! i'm going to be the first actual "effective altruist" on Planet Earth. At least that's kinda cool, right? and thinking about it, dedicating my whole life to communism isn't that bad. there's meaning in it. it's not like i can utilitarianistically justify causing myself to live in the streets (holy death from cold batman)
im sorry i trauma dumped on you the way i did. that was not justified. please forgive me.
So if you did indeed answer “yes” to every question in the scenario, the only conclusion is that you should be offering every resource at your disposal to help children dying around the world,
Yes, that would be very moral. People who donate lots of money their money and take vows of poverty are recognized by soceity as having done a good thing. the fact that you don't donate every resource you have except for those which sustain your life and allow you to keep gathering more resources means you are not the most moral, perfect, unreproachable being on the planet, which must come as a shock to you, and people that donate more than you are more good than you.
i mean i already knew that
it's not that i'm worse than someone else, but that from an opportunity cost perspective, the failure to help a child in need is the same as killing them. so i'm basically killing dozens/thousands/however much the 20$ i could have made mowing lawns when i'm drawing makes
arguably the same could be said about energy bills and time so if you spend 30 minutes on this site in your free time instead of organizing or sigma grindsetting for extra money you're killing twice as many people
do YOU spend everything except your bare minimum resources in selfless endeavours?
That's the point. None of us are perfectly or even maximally moral. The idea is to be more moral when you can. By trying to make this an all-or-nothing question, you are setting yourself up to give up on morality as a whole, and become entirely self interested.
I won't debate this with you on philosophical grounds, but I will say that my advice on the most moral thing you could do right now is to stop fixating on this topic. Take a gentle, gradual approach, and ask yourself what small and simple things you could do to improve the lives of the people you care about. Somewhere down the road, you can start to broaden your scope.
i dont think my brain works that way. whenever i try to "take a break" from a concept like this i always just disconnect entirely and then find it again and the same thing happens. my brain just doesn't think of things in a way that isn't "optimal", it actually hurts to do "suboptimal" things. even the knowledge that eventually ill have to give up everything that gives me pleasure, but gradually, causes me anxiety, too. my thinking is too long term. i think it's just easier to "rip off the bandaid" so to speak but i guess whatever
Oh, I'm completely giving you advice that I would be terrible at accepting. It's only because I've gone through that sort of cycle so many times that I've been able to be aware of the problem, and sort-of-a-little-bit get better at dealing with it.
In my experience, there's some problems you can solve that way, and when it works, it can work really well. But there are some problems where it's just not right for the job. If you get caught in a cycle like that I try and remember that it's probably more useful to use the time to learn how to be adaptable in your approach and your thinking than it is to actually solve the problem.
yeah i think part of it is just "trust the process" combined with "you're not gonna be perfect" in retrospect, it's probably about as good of an idea to obsess over the definition of relaxation and stuff as it is to obsess over every line i make when drawing
after actually walking away for a bit i've realized this is the only time my anxiety has actually been encouraging me to be a better person so :thumb-cop: yay
kinda hope this stays around because its reminding me of my org meetings and stuff i normally have a hard time remembering (in the short time it's been a thing)
i cannot express how much of an improvement "utilitarianistic thirdworldism" is as a thing to worry about adhering to over the multitudes of random things my GAD brain comes up with
I totally get trying to manage "if I'm going to be stuck focusing somewhere, here's a better place than most". It just looked like it was starting to get away from you at some points in this thread.
Also, I wanted to say that if you have to let yourself "disconnect entirely" from something and come back to it, you're not completely starting over, some of it does stick around, even if it doesn't feel like it. That's especially true when you've found a healthier outlet.
it's not a good critique because everyone already uses the logic that organisms which can feel more have more moral significance. We will kill the thousands of individual organisms in an ant-hill because the pleasure we get from not having an ant-hill outweighs the anguish the ants feel.
this ignores veganism as a concept, pretty much. most vegans don't support killing insects
Vegans generally still believe in self defense, which applies to parasites. You're not morally obligated to degrade your health for another animal, you're just not supposed to kill for frivolous reasons like personal taste preferences, because that's no different than killing for sport.
Vegans avoid killing animals where it is possible and practical. They do not relocate every invertebrate in the soil when they need to build a new house. they certainly still apply different moral weights to different animals.
I do not accept the validity of hypotheticals and thought experiments. I’m fully empirical-pilled
Even if it is an impossible creature, the current neoliberal hellscape does treat the billionaire class as utility monsters that must be prioritized up to and including the destruction of everything around them, as if they did receive greater net positives than the rest of society combined from those hoarded resources.
Further, the "effective altruism" movement claims to be all about maximizing utility and they follow the above ideology quite closely, seeing the further enrichment of the ruling class as not only a net positive but necessary to bring about the robot god of the future that will surely fix everything.
As much as it is understandable and relatable to crave a better world at the expense of the status quo we have today, I urge you to remember that not only is :melon-musk: part and perpetuator of that status quo (after all, he even tweets about his desire to put highways and cars on Mars!) but he's also so personally inept and incompetent that even if he actually sought to make the world a better place beyond mere marketing hype and boosting his brands, he is staggeringly unqualified to deliver on those promises and would get in the way.
The utility monster does exist though, the utility monster is NGOs ran by billionaires, it's the US state department, it exists in justifying more drilling permits. There are lots of examples in the real world that sort of operate on exactly this logic. It's not justified as "pleasure", but lots of evil gets justified essentially as providing more utility than it costs in suffering.
yeah that would be bad under utilitarianism as utilitiarianism does have the advantage or saying you have to think about other people
For me a core part of taking the utility monster argument in good faith is that the monster isn't just lying. It has to genuinely get more utility, not just be a regular guy with a propaganda industry. For USAID or similar to be a utility monster, the good they do by giving out food would have to outweigh the harm the cause by furthering US imperialism. If I believed that, I wouldn't be on this website. It doesn't matter how they justify it, their actual actions are a net harm, so the utilitarian thing to do is to starve them of resources.
A Utility Monster is a thought experiment by Robert Nozick, which critisizes utilitarianism. He asks us to imagine a monster which recieves more utility (more pleasure basically) from each unit of resources than any humans do. It is therefore logical, and indeed morally required, to give everything to the monster. For example, if we had a piece of cake, the Utility Monster would get 1000 times more joy out of eating it than any human, so the action that would cause the most total pleasure would always be to give the cake to the monster.
The pun based 'Utility Monster' depicted in the comic gets a great deal of pleasure from destroying pipes. Apparently that pleasure is so great it outweighs the pain it would cause us to have the pipes destroyed. Since that would still result in more net pleasure, it is morally required to destroy the pipes. Peter Singer is a contemporary utilitarian.
For example, if we had a piece of cake, the Utility Monster would get 1000 times more joy out of eating it than any human, so the action that would cause the most total pleasure would always be to give the cake to the monster.
"Oh yeah? Well what if I took your idea to an impossible extreme? Not so smart then, huh?"
have you considered that if you watch it with the frames shuffled in completely random order then it would be incomprehensible
That isn't how he already makes them?
alright but if you just included the assumption that all people are capable of the same levels of happiness and pain then the main thing about utilitarianism is that it does encourage people to think about the welfare of others
medical care during an emergency is exactly where utilitarianism thrives the most and the focus is on maximising the number of lives saved
I would argue triage follows the moral logic of utilitarianism
maybe but that's not a base assumption of the philosophy so much as it is the person doing the value judgement. the situation is more nuanced than utilitarians being cartoon villains
Most of them are either completely useless or actively harmful.
Like the one about the AI that will punish anyone who didn't actively work towards making it. At best it's useless because it will never exist, at worst it's actively harmful because the existence of the thought experiment itself will cause people to make it real.
But this one isn't, this is a valid critique at a very obvious and very real issue with an ethical framework that is at the core of the socio-political structure we currently live under.
The Torment Nexus is right around the corner, as inspired by the book Please Don't Build the Torment Nexus! :so-true:
basically, morality is a lie, eat hot chip, kill the rich, do nice things because the community of humanity is a living body that thrives on cooperation
we must not see our devotion to others as do-gooding merely for others; rather we must conceive our lives and interests as bound up with those of others.
What if I got more utility out of monster-killing than the Utility Monster got out of monstering?
Logically, I would have to put the monster to the sword and have everyone in town toss me coin and drink
But this does exist and frequently exists throughout history.
Time and time again, it's argued that Bezos (or whoever) will get more utility out of the surplus value than the workers, therefore it is moral and just that Bezos is ludicrously rich.
I respect utilitarianism because 1) I'm too dumb to have any other ethic system and 2) it's pro-guillotining billionaires and redistributing their capital.
