I was about to cite the same sorts of things to explain why they DO disagree about what is good and bad. In other words, I agree with you about utilitarianism being wrong about the structure of ethics in precisely the way you described, but I think that also entails utilitarianism coming to different concrete ethical conclusions. If a murderer really likes murdering—it’s truly a terminal value—the utilitarian HAS to take that into account. On Eliezer’s theory, this need not be so. So you can construct a hypothetical where the utilitarian has to allow someone to be murdered simply to satisfy a (or many) murderer’s preference where on Eliezer’s theory, nothing of this nature has to be done.
That is a problem for average-over-agents utilitarianism, but not a fatal one; the per-agent utility function you use need not reflect all of that agent’s preferences, it can reflect something narrower like “that agent’s preferences excluding preferences that refer to other agents and which those agents would choose to veto”. (Of course, that’s a terrible hack, which must be added to the hacks to deal with varying population sizes, divergence, and so on, and the resulting theory ends up being extremely inelegant.)
I was about to cite the same sorts of things to explain why they DO disagree about what is good and bad. In other words, I agree with you about utilitarianism being wrong about the structure of ethics in precisely the way you described, but I think that also entails utilitarianism coming to different concrete ethical conclusions. If a murderer really likes murdering—it’s truly a terminal value—the utilitarian HAS to take that into account. On Eliezer’s theory, this need not be so. So you can construct a hypothetical where the utilitarian has to allow someone to be murdered simply to satisfy a (or many) murderer’s preference where on Eliezer’s theory, nothing of this nature has to be done.
That is a problem for average-over-agents utilitarianism, but not a fatal one; the per-agent utility function you use need not reflect all of that agent’s preferences, it can reflect something narrower like “that agent’s preferences excluding preferences that refer to other agents and which those agents would choose to veto”. (Of course, that’s a terrible hack, which must be added to the hacks to deal with varying population sizes, divergence, and so on, and the resulting theory ends up being extremely inelegant.)
True enough, there are always more hacks a utilitarian can throw on to their theory to avoid issues like this.