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Out of all of the moral codes prescribed, utilitarianism is the only one that stands up to every test ever. It's so good that we can even judge fictional and ancient moral standards by it.

There hasn't been a single line of attack save one that it hasn't weathered. The second best argument that it has ever had was the whole 'enslave a minority to benefit a majority' thing and even that doesn't hold up--utilitarianism by itself has three lines of attack against it.

Of course, the biggest problem with it is that there is no way (yet) to measure or even objectify quality of life or human happiness and that is where it runs into problems. Of course even with this enormous weakness it stands head and shoulders above other moral systems.

Utilitarianism really kicks that much ass.

I agree. Good outcomes are good, and bad outcomes are bad. We should praise people who try to achieve good ends and criticize people who try to achieve bad ends, because even if those particular attempts fail to achieve their desired ends, most people do succeed at goals (at least eventually, and certainly on the small scale). So, since getting more people to attempt to achieve good or bad outcomes is an outcome that is good or bad, Utilitarianism weathers the freak manslaughter accident and the bumbling killer attack very well.

In short, since rewards and punishments are judged by the effects they would have rather than on the effects they respond to, the most simplistic attack against it fails utterly. Utilitarianism has no problem creating and maintaining a logical seeming legal code or of promoting egalitarianism, scientific inquiry, and prosperity.

The biggest weakness of the theory is the definition of "Good" in the first place - which is necessarily up for debate. You can make a perfectly good strawman around "Grapefruit Utilitarianism" where you claim that the highest good outcome possible is the creation and storage of as many grapefruits as possible, irregardless of all other factors. That's a tough line of argument for the Utilitarian to deal with, because Ethical Calculus is not settled, and there is no obvious way to settle it. Thus, Grapefruit Utilitarianism could be "right." Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence and all that.

-Username17

Utilitarianism is the basis for a theory of justice that is quite compelling, and which can be used to argue logically for what should and should not be criminalized as well as what the punishments for performing criminalized actions should be. This contrasts sharply with divine mandate ethics, whose only answer to any of those questions is "Because I feel that my gods want it that way."

So under Utilitarianism we can do a study that demonstrates effects of raising or lowering the speed limit or raising or lowering the drinking age and make informed policy decisions based on those demonstrated effects. Intention based ethical systems have no reasons available for why their legal code should change. And divine mandate ethics specifically claims that the legal code never should and that we are all blasphemers for our failure to flog shellfish eaters.

In short, since Utilitarianism is ends based, it brings Justice into the realm of things that can be scientifically scrutinized and modified. A Utilitarian proposition can be falsified and replaced. Which is why Utilitarianism is "right" and other ethical systems are wrong.

-Username17

Ok, seriously.

The Means, justify any Good End? Then a certian Adolf Hitler should be lauded by the german people as a hero: He took a whipped, defeated country ravaged by decades of economic crisis and gave his people hope while bootstrapping them into a top tier superpower that could take on the world, and almost succeeded. Sure his idology was hateful and he is responsible for ushering in war that killed somewhere between 60 and 80 million people and his destroyed country was divided up between foreign invaders, but the german people:

...should praise people who try to achieve good ends.... even if those particular attempts fail to achieve their desired ends...

And that is how I [/godwin].

The problem with Utilitarianism is that it only works in hindsight, because we exist in a world where if you are stopped before your goals are met, you are judged where you were stopped. Hitler had planned a vast utopia, for arians, and I might of vastly bennifited from his vision, and those who are of another demographic who would dissagree with me would not have been born because their grandparrents would have been burned alive in ovens; but since he didn't succeed we have jews and poles and homosexuals and everyone else, and he is known by history as a villain, a deciever, and a tyrant who pussed out and "become an hero" while his country he loved so much burned.

Only if you agree his ends were good. Utilitarianism doesn't say that his ends were good or not.

-Crissa

Hicks wrote:The problem with Utilitarianism is that it only works in hindsight

No. That accusation is demonstrably false. You can only know for sure in hindsight, and you adjust your future behavior based on that hindsight. But your actions at any given point are supposed to be what you have reason to think will provide the best results for the future. Then, if it turns out that what you thought was going to produce good results actually produces bad results, you're supposed to abandon it.

Praise and condemnation are generated by whether people are doing best practices as understood at the time they are doing them. The retrospective final analysis is merely to set an objective benchmark on what best practices actually are.

Utilitarianism is an adaptive moral system. Retrospection and measurement of actual effects determines what actions actually produce good and bad results, and thus what actions should be praised or condemned from then on. If it turns out that Prohibition is a ghastly, costly failure, you drop it like a hot potato. You don't bother condemning people who didn't know any better, because condemning people acting on good faith with the information they had at the time doesn't do any good.

Condemnation is reserved for people who are doing things that you and they have reason to believe will cause bad results. And you give that condemnation even if the bad results don't happen. Because that's how you incentivize people to not do things that will lead to bad results. Since you can't incentivize people to not have done things that did lead to bad results.

And you understand that Godwinning doesn't mean that you win, right? And that in fact, if you pull it in response to something that has nothing to do with Hitler at all, that it makes you look like a damn idiot? Hitler started a war with the Soviet Union and the Holocaust, resulting in the total deaths of about 40 million people. Those are ends that basically no one describes as good. If you thought that was a good end result, then arguing for similar policies in the future would make sense, but most people are not going to agree with you.

-Username17

Hicks wrote:The Means, justify any Good End?

I can at least respect the logic of someone who takes effective actions in support of a goal I regard as monstrous. Thats not at all incompatible with shooting them in the face for having horrible goals.

The means + the ends have to be justified as a whole since this is the real world and the two always come as a single unit. In another concession to reality we work with the expected ends rather than the actual ends since we can't see the future. Despite that "I expected it would have a good overall result" is only an acceptable line if you research an action first. Negligence is not an excuse.

You know what this reminds me of? One of those pathfinding algorithms, where the basic algorithm is simple and elegant, and you wonder what the big deal is, and then you notice that there's a blank spot for a "heuristic function", and it turns out that said function is horribly tricky and makes the difference between excellent pathfinding and sprites slowly moving in circles while bumping into each-other. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, it just means that "Utilitarianism" by itself doesn't tell us much - a lot depends on your "Good" function.

Also, I'm not sure how much any "means" separate from the ends exist in practice. Really, doesn't anything whose effects stick around and was intentional count as an end? As in, if you "clean" the kitchen by putting everything dirty in a bag and throwing it away, you can't claim that the subsequent lack of plates, glasses, and cooking equipment is a "means" which is justified by the "end" of having a clean kitchen. You did it intentionally, it continues to remain the case, it's an end.

Which is why I don't think the Godwin was much of a counter. If your ends are a vast utopia and a bunch of dead people, that doesn't count as "good" by most metrics.

The great thing is, humans are much better at coming up with and acting on heuristics like 'greatest good' than computers (at least for the moment). Although defining "utility" is one of the main reasons that utility theory isn't very useful predictively, people can very easily set goals or sets of goals and then try to work towards them. For example, 'free medical care for everyone' is a fairly abstract goal that could none the less be selected, worked towards, and evaluated. So could 'make sure no one starves', 'give everybody access to the accumulated knowledge of the world', and 'Lower the incidence of people harming each other'.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Out of all of the moral codes prescribed, utilitarianism is the only one that stands up to every test ever. It's so good that we can even judge fictional and ancient moral standards by it.

There hasn't been a single line of attack save one that it hasn't weathered. The second best argument that it has ever had was the whole 'enslave a minority to benefit a majority' thing and even that doesn't hold up--utilitarianism by itself has three lines of attack against it.

Of course, the biggest problem with it is that there is no way (yet) to measure or even objectify quality of life or human happiness and that is where it runs into problems. Of course even with this enormous weakness it stands head and shoulders above other moral systems.

Utilitarianism really kicks that much ass.

None of what you said is remotely true.

Utilitarianism fails utterly on 4 grounds.

1) It's impossible to enact. Literally no one is smart enough to figure out what action they could take at a given moment that would result in the greatest amount of happiness in the world. Judging the morality of an action based on whether or not it turns out well is just plain untenable. It doesn't work and can't work because people aren't smart enough and do not have enough information to work that way.

2) The "enslave the minority to benefit the majority" thing (which is really more along the lines of scapegoating someone for the benefit of the community than actual enslavement in argument, by the way. Basically the end of The Dark Knight if Batman didn't choose to take the blame, but was blamed anyway) has 0 lines of attack under Utilitarianism. None. There is one under Rule Utilitarianism, but once you go that route, you don't really have a consequentialist system at all, so there really isn't a point.

3) It doesn't acknowledge that there are actions that are more moral than a person is required, or can be expected to be. Look, risking your life to save someone else is a noble thing to do. It's just not one you can be morally required to do. Utilitarianism demands that you do so.

4) It ascribes morality to decisions that normally wouldn't be considered "moral". The total amount of happiness in the world could be affected by what you eat for breakfast. It really could. Does that make your choice of cereal a moral one (ignoring for a second possible ethical problems from the company that created the cereal)?

You want a solid ethical theory, I recommend taking the Categorical Imperative, then make it a bit more flexible by introducing a hierarchy of sins that allows you to bend the universal laws when you can foresee unintended consequences that the rigidity of hard and fast rules creates.

Just because Utilitarianism doesn't always have a definite known answer doesn't mean it isn't something to aspire to.

And just because you don't know the answer makes it the most likely to work in real life. Everything you do really does have consequence; the smallest ant and all.

It certainly beats out many authoritarian doctrines.

-Crissa

Neeek wrote:You want a solid ethical theory, I recommend taking the Categorical Imperative, then make it a bit more flexible by introducing a hierarchy of sins that allows you to bend the universal laws when you can foresee unintended consequences that the rigidity of hard and fast rules creates.

Oh fuck that nonsense. Categorical Imperatives are just a lame attempt at coming up with Rule Utilitarianism from the back end. They can't even handle division of labor, let alone any actually difficult moral question. The fact is that Categorical Imperatives are by definition imperatives - and they do not change. And the counterfact is: no matter how good your moral imperatives look today, in the future they are going to be shitty and irrelevant. At best.

Utilitarianism is not a set of rules for what to do in specific situations. It is a process to determine what a set of rules should look like and do. Utilitarianism is the one and only moral system that is subject to scientific inquiry. And as such, it will always eventually beat any worldview you or anyone else can come up with. The very thing you claim to be its weakness:

It's impossible to enact. Literally no one is smart enough to figure out what action they could take at a given moment that would result in the greatest amount of happiness in the world.

...is actually its strength. You can't know whether one untried system will turn out better than another untried system. But you can try them and see. And you can get that data and you can respond to it. And the response is that then you do know which action will result in the best future result and then you're smart enough to enact properly on that issue.

Biology doesn't know precisely what chemical signals are used to recognize cancerous cells. But we use scientific inquiry and we fucking find out. Ethicists don't know precisely what the best regulatory systems for financial markets are. But we use scientific inquiry and we fucking find out. Except that without an ends-based criteria for judging "bestness" our inquiries can't even make or test hypotheses.

Science is the only way forward. It's the only way forward in medicine, it's the only way forward in engineering. And it's the only way forward in ethics. And without an Ends-Based system of judging ethical actions, we can't do science at all. And then we can't go forward. At all.

Utilitarianism isn't just the best way forward. It's the only way forward. Because any other ethical system is just some static thing that can only be enacted to a greater or lesser degree but will never move us forward from itself until we reject it. It is precisely because we don't know everything that we have to embrace a moral system based around guessing and checking. Because that's the only way we'll ever know any more than we do now.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Except that without an ends-based criteria for judging "bestness" our inquiries can't even make or test hypotheses.

See, it's statements like these that make me wish you would actually solidly define the ends-based criteria you're talking about. It's a tautology that more good = more better. The question is what's good. So what is it, exactly, that we should be maximizing? Hedonism? Preference satisfaction? Political participation? Chocolate? And here's the kicker: why? On what basis do we choose what we should be maximizing?

Gelare wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:Except that without an ends-based criteria for judging "bestness" our inquiries can't even make or test hypotheses.

See, it's statements like these that make me wish you would actually solidly define the ends-based criteria you're talking about. It's a tautology that more good = more better. The question is what's good. So what is it, exactly, that we should be maximizing? Hedonism? Preference satisfaction? Political participation? Chocolate? And here's the kicker: why? On what basis do we choose what we should be maximizing?

I think the idea here is that what is "good" can change over time and with evidence, as opposed to having a simple authoritation pronouncement of what is, and will always be, good.

The problem is that what I feel is good is different from what you feel is good and whether or not either of us is willing to submit to a society governed by the other's definition. For example, I would probably live happily in the society of Frank-istan, but I would likely be an armed insurrectionist in Tzor-ania.

violence in the media wrote:I think the idea here is that what is "good" can change over time and with evidence, as opposed to having a simple authoritation pronouncement of what is, and will always be, good.

I'm fine with that, but you still, at some level, need to determine what the good is, and whether you're just pronouncing chocolate to be good in itself or if you're engaging in some kind of process which happens to report that chocolate is what is good, or whether you've got a process to create a process, you have to justify yourself at some point. So what's good, and on what grounds?

Well, my definition of Good is maximizing pleasure felt for everybody while minimizing displeasure felt for everybody (not the sum of all pleasure felt, using a mathematical function that make everybody having medium pleasure better than 80% of people High pleasure and 20% Low pleasure, and equivalent for displeasure. This in order to avoid the "enslave the minority for the benefit of the majority")

Having more time for things you like to do raises pleasure.
Having more choice for thing you'd like to do raises pleasure.
Dying earlier than possible negates a lot of potential pleasure.

Brainwashed pleasure should not count.

FrankTrollman wrote: Utilitarianism is not a set of rules for what to do in specific situations. It is a process to determine what a set of rules should look like and do.

It's impossible to enact. Literally no one is smart enough to figure out what action they could take at a given moment that would result in the greatest amount of happiness in the world.

...is actually its strength. You can't know whether one untried system will turn out better than another untried system. But you can try them and see. And you can get that data and you can respond to it. And the response is that then you do know which action will result in the best future result and then you're smart enough to enact properly on that issue.
-Username17

My problem with utilitarianism is that while this may be true, its pretty fucking useless to me right now. Who gives a fuck if your actions can be used to improve moral codes in the future if it doesn't help decide how to act right now?

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And people are pretty negative about experimenting with peoples lives, even when it could be really useful. For example in psychology theres a lot of fuss about informed consent even though it can directly harm experiments.

The very process of utilitarianism is going to cause huge backlashes that in the real world will negatively affect the process. For example one result of your description of utilitarianism is that the rules should continually be changed and tested to see if they lead to better results. And so you should, for example, change the laws about assault and stalking to see if that leads to a better world.

But the first few times people get raped and killed (to give the worst possible results) and then get away with it due to the laws being changed there will be such backlash that future utilitarianism will be stunted.

Gelare wrote:It's a tautology that more good = more better.

Then you've already accepted Utilitarianism. Remember that in Categorical Imperative or Divine Mandate, more good isn't more better. Following the rules, regardless of what follows from them, is supposed to be the bestest of all.

If you think that the core concept of Utilitarianism is a tautology - and honestly I don't disagree with you - then it probably seems like Utilitarianism isn't really all that special. But keep in mind that a majority of the people in the world do not subscribe to that philosophy even today. There are billions of people on Earth who have adopted a plan in which demonstrating the doing things like this instead of like that will result in 45,000 less people dying every year does not make them conclude that you should do it like "this."

The simple, obvious, glaring truth of Utilitarianism is actually rejected by the followers of every single major religion.

Parthenon wrote:My problem with utilitarianism is that while this may be true, its pretty fucking useless to me right now. Who gives a fuck if your actions can be used to improve moral codes in the future if it doesn't help decide how to act right now?

Wat?

Seriously, that makes no sense. There are also a past body of people and actions that those people have taken. You can learn from their successes and failures just as future generations can learn from yours.

The fact that science is an adaptive process that is continually improving itself does not mean at any level that it can't give you a best case snaphot at the moment.

John Stuart Mill supported the Death Penalty, just as Kant did. It seemed like the best idea at the time. Modern Utilitarianism does not, on the grounds that the Death Penalty does not reduce violent crime and actually increases unrest. Kantianism still supports the death penalty, because the Imperative doesn't have any criteria for changing or adapting itself. Utilitarianism does, so the advice it offers continually changs as more evidence comes in.

But at any given moment it can give you moral advice. Evidence Based moral advice.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

Gelare wrote:It's a tautology that more good = more better.

Then you've already accepted Utilitarianism. Remember that in Categorical Imperative or Divine Mandate, more good isn't more better. Following the rules, regardless of what follows from them, is supposed to be the bestest of all.

Yeah, disagree. It's not a surprising move for you to make, but just because more good = more better doesn't mean I automatically accept Utilitarianism. There's a couple ways I could go about denying that, but none of them are what I'm interested in right now. What I want to know is this:

me wrote:So what's good, and on what grounds?

Even if I grant you everything you could possibly ask for, you still have to justify for me what it is, exactly, that you're calling good, and why. Falgund's definition, for example, is painfully incomplete and probably incoherent. So who else wants to take a crack at it?

Meh, that too is obviously refined as you get more evidence about what it is that is better. Currently for healthcare we use DALYies per dollar. If someone comes up with a better measure for establishing what's a good healthcare policy, we can all switch.

cthulhu wrote:Meh, that too is obviously refined as you get more evidence about what it is that is better. Currently for healthcare we use DALYies per dollar. If someone comes up with a better measure for establishing what's a good healthcare policy, we can all switch.

But based on what? It clearly isn't decided based on anything in Utilitarianism, because you have to decide what the good is before you can aim to maximize it. And Utilitarianism is a system which instructs you to maximize something. So unless you can tell me what it is you're maximizing, and how you decide what you're maximizing, you really can't tell me anything at all.

In this case, it's assuming not being in crippling pain is better than being in crippling pain. DALYies define good as years of life in which you are not unable to function or dead, and bad as years of life where you are unable to function or dead.

Gelare wrote:

cthulhu wrote:Meh, that too is obviously refined as you get more evidence about what it is that is better. Currently for healthcare we use DALYies per dollar. If someone comes up with a better measure for establishing what's a good healthcare policy, we can all switch.

But based on what? It clearly isn't decided based on anything in Utilitarianism, because you have to decide what the good is before you can aim to maximize it. And Utilitarianism is a system which instructs you to maximize something. So unless you can tell me what it is you're maximizing, and how you decide what you're maximizing, you really can't tell me anything at all.

I don't think it has to be based on anything, provided everyone agrees to go along with it and make an honest attempt to accumulate evidence for the outcomes that result from whatever you choose, however it is chosen. You could pick it by vote, coin flip, or Jeopardy episode--that doesn't matter. What matters is that everyone has decided that maximizing happiness, as defined by dopamine levels in the brain, is the right thing to do until we decide that the pursuit or measurement needs to change or be qualified or modified in some way.

violence in the media wrote:I don't think it has to be based on anything, provided everyone agrees to go along with it and make an honest attempt to accumulate evidence for the outcomes that result from whatever you choose, however it is chosen. You could pick it by vote, coin flip, or Jeopardy episode--that doesn't matter. What matters is that everyone has decided that maximizing happiness, as defined by dopamine levels in the brain, is the right thing to do until we decide that the pursuit or measurement needs to change or be qualified or modified in some way.

But that's a terrible answer. You're telling me that what makes Utilitarianism right isn't that it's a solid moral philosophy of any kind, what makes it right is that we all agree on it, which, indeed, is a perfectly respectable position to hold if you're a Libertarian, and respecting human autonomy and choice is of central importance to you, but not if you're a Utilitarian. And since, contrary to what you say, not everyone (indeed, almost no one) has decided that maximizing dopamine levels in the brain is the moral thing to do, your morality by consensus theory actually means you're not just wrong but also bad for not going with the majority on this one. Try again.