The death penalty has various serious problems and lifetime imprisonment is really really expensive.
I guess we should be happy every time someone so thoroughly bad we want them out of society forever (like a serial murderer) does us the favour of killing themselves. Nothing of value is lost, and the justice system saves money. Right?
It seems to me it logically follows that we should incentivize such suicides. Like: 5000 dollars to a person of your choice if you're dead within the first year of your lifetime sentence, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
It feels very wrong and is clearly outside the overton window. But is there any reason to expect this wouldn't be a net benefit?
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People keep accusing me of being "uncharitable" when I claim that utilitarianism is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing because in order to remain logically consistent it must inevitably devolve into either mindless wire-heading or a fucking death cult. And yet here we are with one of my "strawmen" made flesh asking do we really need to value life? Really? and why cant we just euthanize the people [user] doesn't like.
On the off chance you're just naive and ignorant rather than a troll, the answer to your question in the OP is; No, we shouldn't, because we've already established that this is a slippery slope, and at the bottom of this slope lies a mountain of skulls.
You as a utilitarian may see that as a fair trade for some nebulous benefit but I do not
I think there's a lot of definitions of "utilitarianism" and they get kind of incorrectly smooshed together. On one level there's "human pleasure is the only goal and we should optimize for human pleasure". If you're optimizing solely for the short run, yes, it leads to that; if you're optimizing solely for the long run, then in the long run it perhaps leads to that; but sort of counterintuitively, if you're optimizing solely for the long run, then in the short run it reasonably doesn't lead to that, because in order to have the most humans to eventually be happy we need to accomplish a lot of other things before exterminating humanity.
Another thing that it's used to mean, though, is "any philosophy that optimizes for something", and there's plenty of somethings that don't result in that at all.
If I had to distil "utilitarianism" as I understand and use the use the term here on theMotte down to one or two sentences, it would be the confluence of the two ideas that "Moral behavior is behavior that optimizes for pleasure" and "Moral behavior is behavior that optimizes for the absence of suffering".
...and I stand by my position that the confluence of these two ideas is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing.
Given a robust background in game theory, I'd say that utility functions can be whatever it is that you think ought to be optimized for. If maximizing pleasure leads to "bad" outcomes, then obviously your utility function contains room for other things. If you value human flourishing, then define your utility function to be "human flourishing", and whatever maximizes that is utilitarian with respect to that utility function. And if that's composed of a complicated combination of fifty interlocking parts, then you have a complicated utility function, that's fine.
Now, taking this too broadly, you could classify literally everything as utilitarianism and render the term meaningless. So to narrow things down a bit, here's what I think are the broad distinguishers of utilitarianism.
1: Consequentialism. The following of specific rules or motivations of actions matter less than their actual outcomes. Whatever rules exist should exist in service of the greater good as measured by results (in expectation), and the results are the outcome we actually care about and should be measuring. A moral system that says you should always X no matter whether it helps people or hurts people because X is itself a good action is not-consequentialist and thus not utilitarian (technically you can define a utility function that increases the more action X is taken, but we're excluding weird stuff like that to avoid literally everything counting as stated above)
2: Moral value of all people. All people (defined as humans, or conscious beings, or literally all living creatures, or some vague definition of intelligence) have moral value, and the actual moral utility function is whatever increases that for everyone (you can define this as an average, or a sum, or some complicated version that tries to avoid repugnant conclusions). The point being that all the people matter and you don't define your utility function to be "maximize the flourishing of Fnargl the Dictator". And you don't get to define a subclass of slaves who have 0 value and then maximize the utility of all of the nonslaves. All the people matter.
3: Shut up and multiply. You should be using math in your moral philosophy, and expected values. If you're not using math you're doing it wrong. If something has a 1% chance of causing 5300 instances of X then that's approximately 53 times as good/bad as causing 1 instance of X (depending on what X is and whether multiple instances synergize with each other). If you find a conclusion where the math leads to some horrible result, then you're using the math wrong, either because you misunderstand what utilitarianism means, you're using a bad utility function, or your moral intuitions themselves are wrong. If you think that torturing someone for an hour is worse than 3↑↑↑3 people getting splinters it's because your tiny brain can't grasp the Lovecraftian horror of what 3↑↑↑3 means.
Together this means that utilitarianism is a broad but not all encompassing collection of possible moral philosophies. If you think that utilitarianism means everyone sitting around being wireheaded constantly then you've imagined a bad utility function, and if you switch to a better utility function you get better outcomes. If you have any good moral philosophy, then my guess is that there is a version of utilitarianism which closely resembles it but does a better job because it patches bugs made by people being bad at math.
Sometimes, I like to throw out my own robust background in game theory. This is one of those times. Behold!
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