I don’t think either this, or anything else in this subthread, captures it. Let me have a go.
People like some things and not others. For each person, we can give a number to each thing that says how much they like it or don’t. Suppose you must do one of two things. For each, look at how the world will be if you do it—every thing in the world—and all the people in the world, and add up all those numbers saying whether they like the things or not. Then do the thing that gives the biggest total.
Those numbers should be such that if one of two things will happen, each as often as the other, the number for this is half way between the numbers for those two things. And they should be such that each person will always do what makes their numbers biggest. And if two people care the same about a thing, they should give it the same number. We can’t really make all those things true, but we do the best we can.
(What if you must do one of two things, and one makes there be more people, or fewer people, or other people? That is hard and I will not try to say what to do then.)
It’s not perfect but I think it captures the key points: equal weights for all, consider all people, add up utilities, utilities should correspond to people’s preferences. And it owns up to some of the difficulties that I can’t solve in upgoer5 language because I can’t solve them at all.
Hmm. That’s part of it, but it doesn’t seem to capture the full scope of the philosophy; you seem to be emphasizing its egalitarian aspects more than the aggregation algorithm, and I think the latter’s really the core of it. Here’s my stab at preference utilitarianism:
An act is good if it helps people do what they want and get what they need. It’s bad if it makes people do things they don’t want, or if it keeps them from getting what they need. If it gives them something they want but also makes them do something they don’t want just as much, it isn’t good or bad.
There are no right or wrong things to want, just right or wrong things to do. Also, it doesn’t matter who the people are, or even if you know about them. What matters is what happens, not what you wanted to happen.
That is not what utilitarianism means. It means doing something is good if what happens is good, and doing something is bad if what happens is bad. It doesn’t say which things are good and bad.
You are right, I was getting confused by the name. And the wikipedia article is pretty bad in that it doesn’t give a proper concise definition, at least none that I can find. SEP is better.
It still looks like you need some consequentialism in the explanation, though.
Any topic for which Wikipedia and SEP don’t both have articles suffices :-). I think you mean: “I have yet to find a topic on which both Wikipedia and SEP have articles, and for which the Wikipedia article is better.” With which I strongly agree. SEP is really excellent.
I’m using one variety of “if”, used in some particular contexts when writing in English. I was doing so only for amusement—of course I don’t imagine that anyone has trouble understanding Jayson_Virissimo’s meaning—and from the downvotes it looks as if most readers found it less amusing than I hoped. Can’t win ’em all.
But it’s no more “not English” than many uses of, e.g., the following words on LW: “friendly”, “taboo”, “simple”, “agency”, “green”. (“Friendly” as in “Friendly AI”, which means something much more specific than ordinary-English “friendly”; “taboo” as in the technique of explaining a term without using that term or other closely-related ones; “simple” in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity, according to which e.g. a “many-worlds” universe is simpler than a collapsing-wave-function one despite being in some sense much bigger and fuller of strange things; “agency” meaning the quality of acting on one’s own initiative even when there are daunting obstacles; “green” as the conventional name for a political/tribal group, typically opposed to “blue”.)
Utilitarianism : Care the same whether everyone is happy; if they live near or if they live far, if you like them or if you not like them; everyone.
I don’t think either this, or anything else in this subthread, captures it. Let me have a go.
It’s not perfect but I think it captures the key points: equal weights for all, consider all people, add up utilities, utilities should correspond to people’s preferences. And it owns up to some of the difficulties that I can’t solve in upgoer5 language because I can’t solve them at all.
Hmm. That’s part of it, but it doesn’t seem to capture the full scope of the philosophy; you seem to be emphasizing its egalitarian aspects more than the aggregation algorithm, and I think the latter’s really the core of it. Here’s my stab at preference utilitarianism:
An act is good if it helps people do what they want and get what they need. It’s bad if it makes people do things they don’t want, or if it keeps them from getting what they need. If it gives them something they want but also makes them do something they don’t want just as much, it isn’t good or bad.
There are no right or wrong things to want, just right or wrong things to do. Also, it doesn’t matter who the people are, or even if you know about them. What matters is what happens, not what you wanted to happen.
That is not what utilitarianism means. It means doing something is good if what happens is good, and doing something is bad if what happens is bad. It doesn’t say which things are good and bad.
[this post is not in Up-Goer-5-ese]
The name for the type of moral theory in which
is “consequentialism.” Utilitarianism is a kind of consequentialism.
You are right, I was getting confused by the name. And the wikipedia article is pretty bad in that it doesn’t give a proper concise definition, at least none that I can find. SEP is better.
It still looks like you need some consequentialism in the explanation, though.
I have yet to find a topic, such that, if both Wikipedia and SEP have an article about it, the Wikipedia version is better.
Any topic for which Wikipedia and SEP don’t both have articles suffices :-). I think you mean: “I have yet to find a topic on which both Wikipedia and SEP have articles, and for which the Wikipedia article is better.” With which I strongly agree. SEP is really excellent.
You’re not using English “if”.
I’m using one variety of “if”, used in some particular contexts when writing in English. I was doing so only for amusement—of course I don’t imagine that anyone has trouble understanding Jayson_Virissimo’s meaning—and from the downvotes it looks as if most readers found it less amusing than I hoped. Can’t win ’em all.
But it’s no more “not English” than many uses of, e.g., the following words on LW: “friendly”, “taboo”, “simple”, “agency”, “green”. (“Friendly” as in “Friendly AI”, which means something much more specific than ordinary-English “friendly”; “taboo” as in the technique of explaining a term without using that term or other closely-related ones; “simple” in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity, according to which e.g. a “many-worlds” universe is simpler than a collapsing-wave-function one despite being in some sense much bigger and fuller of strange things; “agency” meaning the quality of acting on one’s own initiative even when there are daunting obstacles; “green” as the conventional name for a political/tribal group, typically opposed to “blue”.)