defend the indefensible: utilitarianism

christianity for managers

― j., Friday, August 2, 2013 2:55 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

marry me

I slept on that tbh

recently finally read a couple things on moral antirealism; turns out I'm probably a moral error theorist

They must contend with the fact that the state remains the primary provider of basic social welfare for most poor citizens in most poor countries

is this is true? i was under the impression that states in poor countries were uh poor and didn't have much $ for social welfare programs

J-PAL are doing god's work imo

RCTs only capture a narrow view of impact. While they are good at measuring the proximate effects of a program on its immediate target subjects, RCTs are bad at detecting any unintended effects of a program, especially those effects that fall outside the population or timeframe that the organization or researchers had in mind. For example, an RCT might determine whether a bed net distribution program lowered the incidence of malaria among its target population. But it would be less likely to capture whether the program unintentionally demobilized political pressures on the government to build a more effective malaria eradication program, one that would ultimately affect more people.

this reads as grossly cynical to me. are the "political pressures" it is demobilizing people dying from malaria?

http://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9124145/effective-altruism-global-ai

I identify as an effective altruist: I think it's important to do good with your life, and doing as much good as possible is a noble goal. I even think AI risk is a real challenge worth addressing. But speaking as a white male nerd on the autism spectrum, effective altruism can't just be for white male nerds on the autism spectrum. Declaring that global poverty is a "rounding error" and everyone really ought to be doing computer science research is a great way to ensure that the movement remains dangerously homogenous and, ultimately, irrelevant.

lol i peeped a facebook comment today from a onetime student of mine who went on to move in elite academic circles and became an EA mover/shaker, and it did the exact same thing - downplayed every single potential catastrophic threat to human existence EXCEPT POSSIBLY THE HOSTILE AI

these dorks and their ~rationality~ smh

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/2015-06-16/plunder-africa?cid=soc-tw-rdr

For those who insist that foreign aid to Africa compensates for the role that rich countries, big businesses, and international organizations play in plundering the continent’s resource wealth, Burgis has a ready rejoinder. “In 2010,” he writes, “fuel and mineral exports from Africa were worth $333 billion, more than seven times the value of the aid that went in the opposite direction.” And African countries generally receive only a small fraction of the value that their extractive industries produce, at least relative to the sums that states in other parts of the world earn from their resources. As Burgis reveals, that is because multilateral financial institutions, led by the World Bank and its International Finance Corporation (IFC), often put intense pressure on African countries to accept tiny royalties on the sales of their natural resources, warning them that otherwise, they will be labeled as “resource nationalists” and shunned by foreign investors. “The result,” Burgis writes, “is like an inverted auction, in which poor countries compete to sell the family silver at the lowest price.”

Man, I keep saying I need to get a foreign affairs subscription.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/peter-singer-charity-effective-altruism/

Rather than asking how individual consumers can guarantee the basic sustenance of millions of people, we should be questioning an economic system that only halts misery and starvation if it is profitable. Rather than solely creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.

oh god... don't give money to poor people, abolish capitalism! is almost self parody

otm

imo

they're both wrong probably

I mean the Jacobin critique doesn't even entertain the EA/preference utilitarian argument on its own terms so it's kinda useless, I mean like

Effective Altruists gloss over important social relations, obscuring the morality (and efficacy) of giving to charity, or commanding others to do so, in the first place.

this is just ignoring the consequentialist premise instead of attacking it, "obscuring the morality" is meaningless, Singer makes specific claims about what is moral, viz., it is moral to do things that reduce the suffering of other beings and to not do them is immoral.

The reason Singer is wrong is because consequentialism is wrong, not because his ethics don't direct him towards the overthrow of capital (whatever that's supposed to look like)

^yes agree

perhaps the argument takes the form it does because it's meant to address the utilitarian position re doing the most good

Well in that case it's still ridiculous because "doing the most good" is a vacuous idea. Like whatever reason. I mean it's not wrong that resources, human energy, and (lol) capital are limited and people effectively altruizing might not have time or inclination to overthrow capital. Jacobin's Official Premises always just seem hilarious to me as an outsider I guess.

haha for a vacuous idea it is proving surprisingly rhetorically effective at converting a bunch of college educated randos with disposable income

college educated randos are susceptible to some dumb ideas (cf. fascism, etc)

like of course lawyers, bankers, and programmers are gonna fall in for the social project that flatters their "rationality"

If I.E. is a dumb idea, it must be one of the most beneficial dumb ideas ever!

actually silby i was thinking that EA's vogue among my philosophy-teaching friends might have something to do with their burning shame/need to feel effective (teach a student to fish kind of thing)

Haha, jeez, I meant E.A. in my post of course. (Where did I get I.E. from?)

Ineffective egoism?

it is moral to do things that reduce the suffering of other beings and to not do them is immoral.

a strictly utilitarian approach to the reduction of suffering in others will do some marginal good, but it is almost bound to have consequences less effective than what one imagined and the good effects will likely come mixed with unintended consequences that merely substitute another kind of suffering for the suffering one was looking to reduce.

it's not worthless, for example, to provide clean drinking water to a village that lacked it. this charitable act should have benefits one can see and quantify in terms of improved health in that village, and most people would agree that improved health is good in and of itself. but suffering is far more complex than good or bad health, pain or lack of pain, hunger or satiety, and its source will not be touched by providing someone with clean water. so, if you make reducing others' suffering the touchstone of your morality, you'd better be prepared to think about the source of suffering more deeply than Effective Altruism or utilitarianism does, or you'll just be engaged in a Sisyphean task.

The observation that many efforts to reduce suffering will be less effective than expected, or will have unintended consequences, is consistent with utilitarianism.

I don't know how to respond to the second part because I don't know what you think utilitarianism says about the sources of suffering.

actually silby i was thinking that EA's vogue among my philosophy-teaching friends might have something to do with their burning shame/need to feel effective (teach a student to fish kind of thing)

― j., Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:12 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

are they not able to soothe themselves with "teaching people how to think critically and systematically" anymore? bc like joking aside I think that's maybe a real thing and a totally reasonable reason to teach analytic philosophy. Though as Jacobin ably demonstrates it's not like Anglo-American analytic thinking will fly in every sphere. (I'm tired and talking out my butt but utilitarianism makes me angry).

no, i think that economic pressures within academia are disillusioning them about that - if it was ever real, and enough, it's not now, so they need to have a credible sale to make to institutions/students that they can deliver the change we so ardently need

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/08/heres-why-no-one-cares-about-modern-philosophy

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/08/so-much-for-trying-to-bring-philosophy-to-the-public.html

gawd reading through this and masochistically skimming through tannsjo's 'understanding ethics' book makes me embarrassed to have any association with the thing called 'philosophy'

lol 'If I were feeling generous, I would describe the response as pathetically stupid.' our main PR guy folx

Imagine for a second that the Genesis story is actually true. Under the actualist view, Adam and Eve could have morally refrained from having children, even if, had they decided differently, billions of billions of happy persons would have been around!

Can't actualism make an exception for cases where you're the anointed progenitor of all mankind?

billions of billions of happy persons

nb: this is not an actual number

yes it is, it's quintillions

The reason Singer is wrong is because consequentialism is wrong...

― go hang a salami I'm a canal, adam (silby), Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:47 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i never studied philosophy and would actually like to know what this means

here's the flopson defence of utilitarianism, plz tell me why its wrong

- quantities we care about in moral considerations are denoted in different units

- for example: having money makes me feel good, and having free time to do nothing also makes me feel good

- if you wanted to determine whether i was better off in two different states in the world, one in which i worked 12 hours a day and had lots of money, and one in which i worked 8 hours a day, had less money but more free time, you can't just do that by comparing money OR free time. if you do it comparing only money, the best world would be one where i work every waking hour. if you do it comparing only free time, the best world is one in which i sit on my ass all day. despite liking both things, i don't like either of those worlds

- the solution is to define some mapping (norm or ordering) from a 2-dimensional money-free time space to a 1-dimensional space... hey, why don't we call it utility? B-)

i don't see how you can make a moral statement in the context where you have quantities measured in different units without implicitly using utilitarianism.. but curious to find out

it's quintillions

it only falls in the range of quintillions for a determinate number of billions, between 1 billion billions and one thousand billion billions, but "billions of billions" leaves both terms indeterminate and so afaics it means only "some very big number".

why should there be some analysis of all existing moral practice into uniform terms in the first place, flopson? you need an existence proof first so that you're in a position to claim that there's any reason to think your mapping tracks the moral reality, otherwise it may just be a destructive, rationalizing overlay onto our actual lives

You guys have probably discussed this over and over and over, but I still don't believe there are any people out there who aren't consequentialists. Whenever I discuss things with a 'deontologist', she'll say something like 'Consequentialism is wrong, because it'll have this and this and this unintended consequence'....

On the other hand, I believe it could very well be, that it might bring about the best consequences, and therefore be the right thing to do for a consequentialist, to lie and claim to be a deontologist, because it's just that much simpler and easier for people to understand. But then if I say that to a 'consequentialist' he'll say 'oh, but lying is wrong'.

Of course, I do understand why so many philosophers fight against consequentialism, because there's no way in hell to morally defend wasting ones time speaking philosophically.

When asked about the trolley-problem, will you:

1) Answer that you allow the men to die
2) Answer that you'll kill the fat man
or
3) Answer that IT DOESN'T MATTER and do something more valuable than thinking about fucking trolleys.

Please don't think too much about it. The right answer is c.

consequentialism probably has enough malleability for it to be justified in all kinds of increasingly convoluted ways, but i think that reveals that the problem with being 'a consequentialist' is less about it being wrong as such than about it being a really not very useful lens to view practical ethics through

why should there be some analysis of all existing moral practice into uniform terms in the first place, flopson? you need an existence proof first so that you're in a position to claim that there's any reason to think your mapping tracks the moral reality, otherwise it may just be a destructive, rationalizing overlay onto our actual lives

― j., Thursday, August 27, 2015 8:12 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you can prove existence in many cases, just prove there's a contraction (in my example that's just concave in both arguments, which is realistic), zap it with a fixed point theorem, boom.

but i don't think my argument is utilitarianism is useful in every case, it's just inevitable in an important subclass of cases. i think that's a strong enough claim

my suspiscion has always been that all ethics is consequentialist; it is the precondition for anything having any moral weight & the difference between the hypothetical and real actions

flopson (et al) as I've alluded upthread I think consequentialist theories fail to correctly specify what actions are moral b/c I am basically a moral error theorist (based on my limited reading), i.e. moral propositions are all false. In my particular case my not-well-developed intuition is that moral propositions are all false because, for a moral proposition ("It is moral to do X") to be true, it would have to derive the authority to obligate me from somewhere, and I don't think that there are any such things from which authority can be derived.

Even leaving that aside, I think Singer and his adherents basically are sophists in their more popularized arguments about reducing suffering. Leading people by the nose by getting them to agree that they'd save a child drowning in a pond and then arguing that they therefore, to be consistent, must agree that effective altruism is a moral imperative is basically a political hoodwink, not a good argument.

My further and even less-well-developed intuition is that in point of fact people do not engage in moral reasoning all that often when making decisions; I suspect that they do whatever it is they do for some uncomputable collection of reasons and then pattern-match it after the fact to the collection of moral propositions they want to believe they adhere to. Which even if moral theories were ever true would make them of dubious use.

also Brian Leiter is a twit

yeah despite my explanation above that's what i don't get - where the fuck did the inbuilt philosophical hostility toward sophistry go?!? singerism is clearly an attempt to manipulate people into moral compliance, yet so many argumentatively hygienic people are total subscribers

(maybe in fact they maintain principled reservations for academic purposes but this is their little bit of cynicism, to profess what's good for the masses)

actually, once a very pro-singer philosopher i know contacted me while working on a piece for one of those 'just the arguments hard and fast' commercial books, and asked me how to formalize an argument correctly (something we had learned plenty about in school, this one no less than anyone else). i was aghast, the task was so rudimentary…

thx silby

for a moral proposition ("It is moral to do X") to be true, it would have to derive the authority to obligate me from somewhere, and I don't think that there are any such things from which authority can be derived

philosophers seem to always thirst for another deeper thing behind the thing in question... but it never ends... i had to ban myself from thinking that way after getting spending a whole acid trip in a recursive loop. good luck though.

people do not engage in moral reasoning all that often when making decisions; I suspect that they do whatever it is they do for some uncomputable collection of reasons and then pattern-match it after the fact to the collection of moral propositions they want to believe they adhere to

this is probably literally true, but idk... it's kind of like austrian economists being like "the market is too complex to understand, submit to it and let the price vector take a whizz all over you." like we still need some shitty model of ethics to help us understand what to do when stuff gets fucked up

when i was in high school i saw peter singer in an astra taylor documentary where she interviews celeb philosophers, and i remember being pretty into his part and telling my friend about it the next day, "hey, there's this philosopher who says we should give all our money to oxfam, crazy shit" and he was like "pfft... you needed a philosopher to tell you that bro?"

i think my problem with the jacobin piece upthread is you can apply the argument in that piece to anything that is not uh, single-handedly overthrowing capitalism, or whatever. the only exception is the author says at one point that philantrophy subsidizes capitalism which is what put the person in the ditch in the first place, but that's an unbacked empirical claim whereas vicious cycle of poverty is extremely well documented as well as fact that a random income shock can often snap you out of it. as i said upthread, this EA stuff only exists J-PAL has done the best empirical social science work ever and we have some strong results about poverty now

also, like, i don't even think EA is necessarily at odds with orthodox marxism... if having a revolution is the best thing poors can do with their money send them an unconditional cash transfer maybe they'll use it to have a revolution who knows

j. presumably you agree that the state should redistribute wealth from rich people to poor people... what other argument exists for that other than utility is concave in wealth?

they don't deserve it and we do

interesting.... so if an unequal distribution were deserved (hypothetical), no problem? even if you could make poors better off by taking away just desserts from rich?