Another thing that seems to be a factor, at least for me, is that there’s a term in my utility function for “fairness,” which usually translates to something roughly similar to “sharing of burdens.” (I also have a term for “freedom,” which is in conflict with fairness but is on the same scale and can be traded off against it.)
Why wouldn’t this be a situation in which “the complexity of human value” comes into play? Why is it wrong to think something along the lines of, “I would be willing to make everyone a tiny bit worse off so that no one person has to suffer obscenely”? It’s the rationale behind taxation, and while it’s up for debate many Less Wrongers support moderate taxation if it would help a few people a lot while hurting a bunch of people a little bit.
Think about it: the exact number of dollars taken from people in taxes don’t go directly toward feeding the hungry. Some of it gets eaten up in bureaucratic inefficiencies, some of it goes to bribery and embezzlement, some of it goes to the military. This means if you taxed 1,000,000 well-off people $1 each, but only ended up giving 100 hungry people $1000 each to stave of a painful death from starvation, we as utilitarians would be absolutely, 100% obligated to oppose this taxation system, not because it’s inefficient, but because doing nothing would be better. There is to be no room for debate; it’s $100,000 - $1,000,000 = net loss; let the 100 starving peasants die.
Note that you may be a libertarian and oppose taxation on other grounds, but most libertarians wouldn’t say you are literally doing morality wrong if you think it’s better to take $1 each from a million people, even if only $100,000 of it gets used to help the poor.
I could easily be finding ways to rationalize my own faulty intuitions—but I managed to change my mind about Newcomb’s problem and about the first example given in the above post despite powerful initial intuitions, and I managed to work the latter out for myself. So I think, if I’m expected to change my mind here, I’m justified in holding out for an explanation or formulation that clicks with me.
That makes no sense. Just because one thing cost $1, and another thing cost $1000, does not mean that the first thing happening 1001 times is better than the second one happening once.
Preferences logically precede prices. If they didn’t, nobody would be able to decide what they were willing to spend on anything in the first place. If utilitarianism requires that you decide the value of things based on their prices, then utilitarians are conformists without values of their own, who derive all of their value judgments from non-utilitarian market participants who actually have values.
(Besides, money that is spent on “overhead” does not magically disappear from the economy. Someone is still being paid to do something with that money, who in turn buys things with the money, and so on. And even if the money does disappear—say, dollar bills are burnt in a furnace—it still would not represent a loss of productive capacity in the economy. Taxing money and then completely destroying the money (shrinking the money supply) is sound monetary policy, and it occurs on a regular (cyclical) basis. Your whole argument here is a complete non-starter.)
Another thing that seems to be a factor, at least for me, is that there’s a term in my utility function for “fairness,” which usually translates to something roughly similar to “sharing of burdens.” (I also have a term for “freedom,” which is in conflict with fairness but is on the same scale and can be traded off against it.)
Why wouldn’t this be a situation in which “the complexity of human value” comes into play? Why is it wrong to think something along the lines of, “I would be willing to make everyone a tiny bit worse off so that no one person has to suffer obscenely”? It’s the rationale behind taxation, and while it’s up for debate many Less Wrongers support moderate taxation if it would help a few people a lot while hurting a bunch of people a little bit.
Think about it: the exact number of dollars taken from people in taxes don’t go directly toward feeding the hungry. Some of it gets eaten up in bureaucratic inefficiencies, some of it goes to bribery and embezzlement, some of it goes to the military. This means if you taxed 1,000,000 well-off people $1 each, but only ended up giving 100 hungry people $1000 each to stave of a painful death from starvation, we as utilitarians would be absolutely, 100% obligated to oppose this taxation system, not because it’s inefficient, but because doing nothing would be better. There is to be no room for debate; it’s $100,000 - $1,000,000 = net loss; let the 100 starving peasants die.
Note that you may be a libertarian and oppose taxation on other grounds, but most libertarians wouldn’t say you are literally doing morality wrong if you think it’s better to take $1 each from a million people, even if only $100,000 of it gets used to help the poor.
I could easily be finding ways to rationalize my own faulty intuitions—but I managed to change my mind about Newcomb’s problem and about the first example given in the above post despite powerful initial intuitions, and I managed to work the latter out for myself. So I think, if I’m expected to change my mind here, I’m justified in holding out for an explanation or formulation that clicks with me.
That makes no sense. Just because one thing cost $1, and another thing cost $1000, does not mean that the first thing happening 1001 times is better than the second one happening once.
Preferences logically precede prices. If they didn’t, nobody would be able to decide what they were willing to spend on anything in the first place. If utilitarianism requires that you decide the value of things based on their prices, then utilitarians are conformists without values of their own, who derive all of their value judgments from non-utilitarian market participants who actually have values.
(Besides, money that is spent on “overhead” does not magically disappear from the economy. Someone is still being paid to do something with that money, who in turn buys things with the money, and so on. And even if the money does disappear—say, dollar bills are burnt in a furnace—it still would not represent a loss of productive capacity in the economy. Taxing money and then completely destroying the money (shrinking the money supply) is sound monetary policy, and it occurs on a regular (cyclical) basis. Your whole argument here is a complete non-starter.)