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Meanwhile I would argue that's a feature rather than a bug. Utilitarianism is based on false premises and is a terrible basis for a system of morality.
Do you object to sum-of-utils, hedonism, consequentialism, or just the idea of a systematic universal set of moral values in the first place?
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Utilitarianism is the worst form of moral system, except for all the others that have been tried.
Meh. Literal bronze age religions seem to do better.
What are these false premises, and how do you measure “do better”?
The two big ones that spring immediately to mind are A) the premise that happiness/suffering/utility/QALYs (whatever you want to call it) is quantifiable and fungible. IE that there is either an equivalence or some sort of commutative quality between [Person A] being x amount "worse" off and [Person B] being x amount "better" off. and B) the assumption that multi-agent games have to follow the rules of inductive logic.
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That utility is fungible between people such that X's being made better off can morally offset Y's being made worse off.
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One for me is that it has no real hard edges to the solution set. There’s no real guarantee of rights, of equal treatment, or ownership of property. If the people making the decision decide that the answer is to strip some people of civil rights, there’s nothing intrinsic to utilitarian philosophy that says “that’s not a possible solution.”
Secondly, the person making the decision gets to define the terms. This is often, in practice, defined to the benefit of the person or group making the decision. If you asked the average person about pollution, it’s a problem that should be solved. If you ask the factory owner, it’s not obvious that pollution is a problem. Thus the solution is dictated by the whims of those empowered to make those decisions, even when conflicts of interest are obvious.
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That by doing advanced calculus on harm and good you will arrive at a moral outcome. Even utilitarians agree this is false, or at least get awfully quiet and hit the downvote button when you point out where their reasoning leads to.
Another issue is whether you can even meaningfully measure harm and good to begin with.
That, admittedly, I don't have an answer for, but I noticed you haven't asked that question to Celestial, even though he made the very same claim regarding "all the other" moral systems.
Okay, I'm in a town of 1000 people. One person has a factory that produces very nice shoes, but fills the air with smog. The smog makes everyone choke and gives everyone lung cancer. Should we forcibly close down the factory?
Now I'm in the same town, but instead of a factory, it's a slaughterhouse. The stench smells about as bad as the smog, but it doesn't cause lung cancer. Also, it provides much of the food for the town. Should we forcibly close down the factory?
The answer is yes in the first case, no in the second case. One comes to this conclusion by, uh, doing calculations on the outcome. The first has lower benefit, higher cost, the second has higher benefit, lower cost. How else can you come to this kind of conclusion, if not by doing calculations on harm and good
Maybe during the industrial revolution the air and water had to be a bit polluted because the only other option was no industry, but now we have better technology and can have industry with less pollution. Any rule in deontology or virtue ethics about how to make that decision just ends up deferring to the calculation of benefit.
Like, people exist, benefits and harms exist, actions lead to outcomes in incredibly complicated ways, whether you're a socialist or liberal or conservative or a nazi you need to judge actions based on their outcomes, and the calculations are complicated because the situations are complicated. Should we have a democracy or a monarchy? Under what conditions should we go to war? Should we have computers? Should we create advanced AI? Nonconsequentialist moral systems dodge these by taking the answers for granted and treating them as 'rules' or 'virtues'. But the virtues/rules themselves embed complexity that represents a calculation that some human, or perhaps a decentralized system of humans, made in the past.
I think this is false. Too see it, take an issue that people have an actual moral position on, rather than something that boils down to material comfort. Should we promote surrogacy if we can guarantee that outcomes are "good", or should we do everything we can to limit it, even if it meant [insert catastrophe of your choice]? My opinion is the latter, because I think surrogacy is wrong in itself.
What you said is also projection. It is utilitarians who try to hide their ontological / virtue-based morality behind utils and calculus. Like I pointed out above, you're not going to get utilitarians to endorse slavery, just because it increases utils. If they ever address you, it will be a copout like "nooo, slavery causes negative-infinity utils!"
I should've slotted in 'evolution' along with 'decentralized system of humans'. Yes, we should do that, and natural selection did do that when it created inborn moral instincts. At one point in the past, internal fertilization was unnatural, a freak accident of nature that one deformed organism happened to have, with all sorts of awful second order side effects. Except it turned out internal fertilization was beneficial for survival and capability, and it spread, and then the second-order effects were worked out, and now it's natural and good and we can't imagine anything else. *(I know natural selection is more complicated than that, but the argument still applies to however internal fertilization really evolved.)
I'm defending morality being contingent and relying on complex calculation. I'm not defending universalist egalitarian hedonic utilitarianism. I also don't have an infinitely strong principle against slavery!
According to you, maybe. According to me, not. So as you can see, I'm not hiding utilitarian analysis anywhere up my sleeves.
From where I sit it looks like you have an intrinsic moral reaction against slavery, and the complexity of the calculation is just there to hide the fact.
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