|
However, in the world we live in, it is arguably the case that utilitarianism demands that straight people be prioritized above LGBT people, because you can produce a case that the happiness produced by denying equality to LGBT people is greater than the happiness produced by establishing equality for LGBT people. Now, this isn't incontrovertible, but it is a massive flaw with utilitarianism that it requires deontological additions in order to force egalitarianism as necessarily the greatest good for the greatest number.
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 17:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 00:04 |
|
|
doverhog posted:Utilitarianism requires that you first set goals, or targets, against which every decision is measured. The goals chosen are not morally better than any others, they merely are the ones you as a group or individual are trying to achieve. Well, dude, I went with the very common goal of maximizing happiness in order to make that argument. Can you formulate that in such a way as to categorically exclude my argument without relying on deontological priors concerning what "real happiness" is or whatever? The Unholy Ghost posted:Hello hi sort of butting in here but I have a question regarding the KCA. The whole point is that there must be an initial event with no priors.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 17:18
|
|
|
The Unholy Ghost posted:But both ideas— an infinite chain or a single beginning without origin— are inconceivable to the human mind. Nope, they're not. The fact that we can talk about them makes them conceivable. We don't have an experience of them, but that's piffle. Nobody experiences supernovas either.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 17:24
|
|
|
doverhog posted:Do you truly believe people living in a state of prejudice and ignorance are maximally happy in the long term? So, you can't do it with utilitarianism alone. Concession accepted.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 17:26
|
|
|
doverhog posted:Maybe you could expand on what you mean with deontological priors W/R/T this argument. Your statement that people "in a state of ignorance and prejudice cannot be maximally happy" is built on an adherence to a prior rule, deontology, rather than purely utilitarian principles about maximizing happiness.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 17:33
|
|
|
Juffo-Wup posted:Unless he intends that to be an empirical claim, ofc? If you can definitely objectively quantify happiness, you've got more important things to do than engage in this silly argument. Publish, publish, publish, drat it.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 17:36
|
|
|
Juffo-Wup posted:Presumably, a utilitarian will want to identify 'happiness' by ostension. Either by pointing at a bundle of behaviors or pointing at a neural correlate would be sufficient. "This is the thing I'm interested in, maiximize this!" is what I imagine them saying. Oh, well, see, I was going to avoid any intimations that utilitarianism tends towards a horrific police state, but then you went ahead and made that argument for me. This doesn't actually address the argument I made, in favor of the presumption that obviously the "neural correlate" of someone who is free from prejudice, assuming that this can actually be determined and generalized, will be one that produces greater happiness than that of a prejudiced person. Indeed, someone who lives in a prejudiced society but considers that prejudice to be evil seems intuitively more likely to be unhappy, depressed, or anxious than someone who conforms to societal norms. The issue that utilitarianism is in many ways counter to liberal and leftist values remains.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:02
|
|
|
Juffo-Wup posted:This doesn't follow, or at least not obviously so. If you want me to take an argument seriously, you have to give me more than just the conclusion. How are you measuring "neural correlates", dude? quote:It will not come as a shock to a utilitarian that particular moral problems have empirical solutions that can only be imperfectly predicted from the armchair. This is how the theory is supposed to work. That utilitarianism fails to rule out certain forms of social organization or personal behavior a priori is a fairly weak criticism of it, seeing as that's the whole point. Oh my god, dude, can you respond to the actual argument? Like, how do we get away from the potential conclusion that the increase in happiness from gays being oppressed is greater than that from gay equality if that's an empirical conclusion, without escaping the bounds of utilitarianism?
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:13
|
|
|
doverhog posted:You are the one who claimed "maximum happiness" as the goal. So in other words, you're going to deal with this issue, which is hardly hypothetical, by dodging and ignoring it. Juffo-Wup posted:I'm not. I'm not even a utilitarian, I'm just not convinced your particular criticism of the theory ultimately works. Anyway, I think a utilitarian of a reasonable cast might say: the metaphysical ground of normative facts is neural. But our access to neural facts is imperfect, so our epistemic access to neural facts comes through observation of behavior, which is (we assume) correlated with neural facts. Or they might think the behavior is the metaphysical ground, maybe. Either way, pointing out problems with epistemic access to the ground of normative facts is at best a criticism of a moral theory as an operational guide to behavior, and does not address the truth or falsity of that theory's normative claims. I've said this before in other threads, but we should be careful to to conflate epistemic and metaphysical problems. No, dude, I'm saying that in order to measure happiness from neural correlates you're probably going to mandate regular brain scans for representative samples or whatever and that's basically an absurdist police state. Doing it from behaviors is less absurdist as far as policing goes, but still a loving police state.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:23
|
|
|
Juffo-Wup posted:Maybe! Or it might turn out that trying to carefully track every individual's personal utility (through brain scans or hidden cameras or commisars or whatever) actually is not the most effective way to maximize that value. I'm inclined to think that, if utilitarianism were true, it would not entail that we should institute a police state. It seems like that'd be a pretty unlikely way to make people happy, anyway. Okay, so we reject empirical attempts to measure the phenomena we are trying to maximize, as utilitarians. Am I reading this correctly?
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:28
|
|
|
Juffo-Wup posted:No, not necessarily. For example, a utilitarian might think that a good strategy would be to hire a bunch of sociologists and statisticians for the central government and pay them to use accepted social psych methods to determine what would make for effective social policy. I'm just saying that trying to measure the phenomena by brutally authoritarian methods might be contrary to trying to maximize them. Okay, but in reality you can't measure behaviors like that without extremely intrusive surveillance. So your conception makes it so that utilitarianism cannot actually know whether it has successfully maximized the phenomena it is measuring, in cases that are similar to real ones rather than idiotic hypotheticals.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:36
|
|
|
doverhog posted:Statistics measure things like that all the time, and are only mildly intrusive. Statistics don't measure behaviors, and the actual process of observing behaviors is extremely difficult when it comes to avoiding the sense of intrusion or being surveilled.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:41
|
|
|
doverhog posted:Not directly, but with enough data and correlations you can learn things about behavior. Anyway, you don't have to have perfect information to act in a certain way, in fact almost no one ever has. Why are you placing this burden of needing an oppressive amount of information on an utilitarian and no one else? I am a devil and here to do the devil's work, for all you know. You seem to not understand what empiricism means, though.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:49
|
|
|
Juffo-Wup posted:Well, imagine that we get together as utilitarians and decide that the behaviors we're interested in are the disposition to report "yes that is pleasant" or "no that is unpleasant" to various stimuli. This is something that psych and social psych nerds already spend a lot of time and money studying, and I don't feel like it contributes to a feeling that I'm being constantly surveilled. This is one of those idiotic hypothecticals.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:53
|
|
|
Juffo-Wup posted:How's that? Not even Epicurus promoted sensuality as the totality of pleasure. So it's like a utilitarianism built on maximizing toothbrushes.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:57
|
|
|
doverhog posted:In the absence of perfect knowledge you use the best available. You can't get a loving observation from statistical manipulations. Idiot.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 19:13
|
|
|
doverhog posted:Why are you so hostile? Anger has two beautiful daughters, hope and courage. Juffo-Wup posted:It seems like you're arguing that we are totally in the dark as to what makes people feel pleasure and what makes people feel pain, or even how to discover the answer to that question. Is this your position? What in the actual gently caress.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 19:20
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 00:04 |
|
|
Juffo-Wup posted:I am trying very hard to determine what your position is, and I'm finding it difficult. I swear it's in good faith. My task is made harder when you post stuff like this rather than an actual response to the substance of my comments. I'm getting that you're frustrated with the direction this conversation has taken, but not much else. No, I'm stunned that a post where I said that sensual pleasures are not the sum totality of pleasure is taken as "we cannot measure pleasure or pain in any way". I was hoping you weren't a total pinhead.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 20:40
|
|