Utilitarianism - The Only Philosophical School Worth Shit

malt ipecac said:
That's right - it is an assumption, and if you don't accept that assumption then the rest doesn't necessarily make sense. I think it's a reasonable assumption, though, because (many) resources are zero-sum. For example: a world with 800 billion people would be a less happy one than our world of 8 billion people.

To use a barn as an example of a smaller "world": Imagine you start with one family of 4 chickens living in the barn and the barn's dimensions are 20m wide by 20m long x 5m high. If you keep adding chickens, you'll eventually end up with a a barn looking like one of those PETA videos about factory farming. If you keep adding more without stopping, you'll end up with a barn so densely packed it's a black hole.
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We aren't chickens.

And we aren't undifferentiated human units, who all respond identically to a given environment.

There are other, unspoken assumptions in the argument as well, the largest being that there's no means to increase the happiness of individuals as the population grows. This is what I mean when I say happiness isn't zero sum: it isn't a finite resource. It's not something we mine or harvest, or even manufacture. It's a state of being. A response to environment and stimuli.

This model assumes that happiness is zero sum, by ruling out the possibility that adding more people might make everyone happier, and by ruling out the ability for people to improve their lives in some way.

Unlike the chickens in your example, we can, to a greater or lesser degree, influence our environment and make decisions to increase our personal well-being, and the well-being of others.

It's absurd to argue about this planet having 800 billion people on it, but lets assume that could happen. A utilitarian response wouldn't be to wallow in the net utility of a larger population, regardless of individual happiness; it would be to try and find some way to increase the happiness of each member of the population, as that would increase the utility of society beyond that achieved by a large population of suicidally depressed wage-cagers. A large, happy population is a greater good than a large, unhappy one.
 
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teriyakiburns said:
We aren't chickens.

And we aren't undifferentiated human units, who all respond identically to a given environment.
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That's 100% correct and I agree with you. The claim was made using an average, and (like any time an average or a median is used) that average is used intentionally to simplify what's going on so that we can represent it in equation. Think about it: if you aren't allowed to use one number to represent happiness, how could you represent happiness in a utilitarian equation? Parfit was not a utilitarian, but because such simplification is intrinsic to utilitarian thinking, he framed the thought experiment in those terms.

Rejecting the validity of treating humans like chickens in my example is actually a great reason to reject utilitarianism. If you reject the use of an average because it treats people like undifferentiated chickens, that thought experiment doesn't make sense. But neither does the utilitarian argument. The only difference between "adding up everyone's happiness" and "calculating everyone's average happiness" is one division operation at the end.

teriyakiburns said:
There are other, unspoken assumptions in the argument as well, the largest being that there's no means to increase the happiness of individuals as the population grows. This is what I mean when I say happiness isn't zero sum: it isn't a finite resource. It's not something we mine or harvest, or even manufacture. It's a state of being. A response to environment and stimuli.

This model assumes that happiness is zero sum, by ruling out the possibility that adding more people might make everyone happier, and by ruling out the ability for people to improve their lives in some way.
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So, again, I agree with your broader criticism that it's silly to take such calculus seriously. But from a mathematical perspective, it's incorrect to say the model assumes that happiness is zero-sum. If we graph it out, "happiness" would actually look like an S-shaped curve (we're only dealing with quadrant I in the upper-right). That means you can keep increasing total happiness forever by adding more people, but you realize decreasing marginal happiness with each person.

Sorry for using calculus, but the "marginal happiness" would be represented by the slope of the curve, and when you increase the x-value (x == number of people), you increase the y-value (y == total happiness) but decrease the slope (marginal happiness). The reason the slope decreases is that other resources (e.g., food, water, personal space) are limited.

teriyakiburns said:
It's absurd to argue about this planet having 800 billion people on it, but lets assume that could happen. A utilitarian response wouldn't be to wallow in the net utility of a larger population, regardless of individual happiness; it would be to try and find some way to increase the happiness of each member of the population, as that would increase the utility of society beyond that achieved by a large population of suicidally depressed wage-cagers. A large, happy population is a greater good than a large, unhappy one.
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That could very well be the way a utilitarian chooses to respond. The example I gave, however, is only focused on making a judgment about what kind of hypothetical world is better. Intervening in that world to improve it would be the "next step" that comes after that judgment.

I'm curious. Which would you say is better?
  • A large, somewhat-happy population
  • A small, very-happy population
Or do you even think that's a question worth asking?
 
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From a utilitarian perspective, are pics related good or bad?
time travel brain chemicals.jpg

the happy face.png
 
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Eris! said:
But what reason do we have to care about having a positive impact on the world?
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It's possible that reincarnation is true. If reincarnation exists, you should care about improving the world simply out of self interest. If you improve the world and are reincarnated into this world, your future lives will suck less.
no_death.png
 
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Sorry, you can't just show me anime girls and expect me to cave in. At least unless they're way cuter.
 
"The idea that ideas should be useful" is too broad and subjective. Libtards think opening the border and transing kids is useful. And just because something is useful doesn't mean it's useful for everybody, or even morally acceptable.

Ideas should be good. That's broad and technically subjective too, but at least a bit more narrow. Useful things can be bad, like abortion, so that doesn't work.
 
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