Many philosophers have tried to defend Utilitarianism as a meta-ethical theory i.e. what speakers mean when they say an action is morally virtuous. Bernard Williams notably wrote a lot in criticism of these attempts. And trying to create a divide between ethics and public policy seems bound to fail because Utilitarianism often dictates courses of action that many think are unethical.
The average utility view implies that you should kill a happy person if they’re less happy than the average. I’ll take the Repugnant Conclusion over that any day.
So what if utility is a “theoretical construct”? How does that favor any particular view in population ethics over any other?
Ah, looks like I missed the mark with that objection. Is your point that when someone dies they still count toward the denominator but their utility drops to zero? Doesn’t that mean average utility will tend to decline over time as more and more generations are born and die (unless the living population or living people’s utility increases), since the denominator only ever gets bigger and the numerator doesn’t necessarily increase with it? That seems like an odd view, though it’s better than a position that says we ought to kill happy people to increase average utility.
In any event, the average utility principle has other weird implications—e.g., that it would be good to create miserable people if they would be better off than the current average, or that it would be bad to create happy people if they would be a little worse off than the current average. Or that it would be better to create a small number of miserable people than a large number of happy people who would still be below the current average, if the larger number of people would bring down the average more.
Everyone has a lifetime utility. Starting at any given point, the aim is to maximize the average over the remaining lives of existing people and the lives of those born in future. Since killing someone reduces their lifetime utility, without changing the number of people who exist, it reduces average utility.
"that it would be good to create miserable people if they would be better off than the current average" Apart from "current", which misses the point, and assuming that people aren't so miserable as to wish never to have been born, this is a correct implication. If you think (say) that Americans live miserable lives, then having somewhat happier (but still not very happy) children is a good thing,
My attempt to avoid wordiness didn’t serve me well. I meant “current” to stand in for a not-necessarily-temporal counterfactual baseline—the average utility we’d have but for (whatever the scenario is). And I was using “miserable” as an (admittedly unclear) shorthand for “so miserable it would have been better not to have been born.” Sorry I wasn’t clearer.
Classical utilitarianism is a theory of ethics, not of politics. See the SEP for how philosophers commonly talk of it: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/#ClaUti . So the first "observation" is objectively false as written and makes it hard for a literal-minded person like myself to proceed into the rest of the blog post.
More precisely, the "observation" would be better put as a claim that utilitarianism has been more successful politically than personally, or that it ought to be treated as a political theory rather than an ethical theory, or that the case for it in politics is better justified than in ethics.
As should be clear from the OP, I don't think the SEP has the authority to rule these matters. Bentham and the Mills wrote much more about political issues than about individual ethics.
Hm, that's an argument from authority of Bentham and Mills about their theory, but based on their choice of other writing topics and not on their writing about their theory.
Analogously, one might write a blog post saying "I've observed that Newtonian gravity is a theory of theology, not physics", justified by correctly pointing out that Newton wrote much more about theological issues than about physics.
FWIW, I prefer to take their arguments more literally. Bentham et al meant their theory to be a theory of ethics. Bentham et al might have been wrong about utilitarianism analogously to how Newton was wrong about gravity, but I don't think either were wrong about saying what they meant.
I'll quote SEP on this one ". In 1776, [Bentham] first announced himself to the world as a proponent of utility as the guiding principle of conduct and law in A Fragment on Government. " The title is pretty clear that political philosophy is the primary driver here. And that seems to be true of everything Bentham wrote. He might have thought that utilitarianism defined principles of individual conduct, but he never paid much attention to the issue. Everything he wrote was utiliitarian, and nearly all of it was about public policy,
Many philosophers have tried to defend Utilitarianism as a meta-ethical theory i.e. what speakers mean when they say an action is morally virtuous. Bernard Williams notably wrote a lot in criticism of these attempts. And trying to create a divide between ethics and public policy seems bound to fail because Utilitarianism often dictates courses of action that many think are unethical.
The average utility view implies that you should kill a happy person if they’re less happy than the average. I’ll take the Repugnant Conclusion over that any day.
So what if utility is a “theoretical construct”? How does that favor any particular view in population ethics over any other?
No it doesn't. Once someone has been born, they are included in the denominator.
Ah, looks like I missed the mark with that objection. Is your point that when someone dies they still count toward the denominator but their utility drops to zero? Doesn’t that mean average utility will tend to decline over time as more and more generations are born and die (unless the living population or living people’s utility increases), since the denominator only ever gets bigger and the numerator doesn’t necessarily increase with it? That seems like an odd view, though it’s better than a position that says we ought to kill happy people to increase average utility.
In any event, the average utility principle has other weird implications—e.g., that it would be good to create miserable people if they would be better off than the current average, or that it would be bad to create happy people if they would be a little worse off than the current average. Or that it would be better to create a small number of miserable people than a large number of happy people who would still be below the current average, if the larger number of people would bring down the average more.
Everyone has a lifetime utility. Starting at any given point, the aim is to maximize the average over the remaining lives of existing people and the lives of those born in future. Since killing someone reduces their lifetime utility, without changing the number of people who exist, it reduces average utility.
"that it would be good to create miserable people if they would be better off than the current average" Apart from "current", which misses the point, and assuming that people aren't so miserable as to wish never to have been born, this is a correct implication. If you think (say) that Americans live miserable lives, then having somewhat happier (but still not very happy) children is a good thing,
Thanks for the clarification.
My attempt to avoid wordiness didn’t serve me well. I meant “current” to stand in for a not-necessarily-temporal counterfactual baseline—the average utility we’d have but for (whatever the scenario is). And I was using “miserable” as an (admittedly unclear) shorthand for “so miserable it would have been better not to have been born.” Sorry I wasn’t clearer.
Classical utilitarianism is a theory of ethics, not of politics. See the SEP for how philosophers commonly talk of it: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/#ClaUti . So the first "observation" is objectively false as written and makes it hard for a literal-minded person like myself to proceed into the rest of the blog post.
More precisely, the "observation" would be better put as a claim that utilitarianism has been more successful politically than personally, or that it ought to be treated as a political theory rather than an ethical theory, or that the case for it in politics is better justified than in ethics.
As should be clear from the OP, I don't think the SEP has the authority to rule these matters. Bentham and the Mills wrote much more about political issues than about individual ethics.
Hm, that's an argument from authority of Bentham and Mills about their theory, but based on their choice of other writing topics and not on their writing about their theory.
Analogously, one might write a blog post saying "I've observed that Newtonian gravity is a theory of theology, not physics", justified by correctly pointing out that Newton wrote much more about theological issues than about physics.
FWIW, I prefer to take their arguments more literally. Bentham et al meant their theory to be a theory of ethics. Bentham et al might have been wrong about utilitarianism analogously to how Newton was wrong about gravity, but I don't think either were wrong about saying what they meant.
I'll quote SEP on this one ". In 1776, [Bentham] first announced himself to the world as a proponent of utility as the guiding principle of conduct and law in A Fragment on Government. " The title is pretty clear that political philosophy is the primary driver here. And that seems to be true of everything Bentham wrote. He might have thought that utilitarianism defined principles of individual conduct, but he never paid much attention to the issue. Everything he wrote was utiliitarian, and nearly all of it was about public policy,