Another problem I like: in our world people have very real preferences over how one should go about analyzing moral problems (including preferences over how to engage in meta-ethics). You’ll find that most people are very anti-utilitarian. A true preference utilitarian will self-modify into an agent that thinks about morality in the way most preferred by the population, i.e., vaguely moral realist virtue ethics. This is less of a problem with extrapolated-preference utilitarianism (but then, how do you utilitarian-justifiably determine how to extrapolate preferences, except by looking at existing preferences about extrapolation-like processes?), and barely a problem at all for non-preference utilitarianism, as far as I can see.
Also note that the epistemic problem of preference elicitation is very real here, and in fact I do not see why a preference utilitarian wouldn’t be obliged to engage in preference elicitation in an itself-utilitarianly-justified manner, which won’t seem as epistemically sound as what a utilitarian would naively reckon to be a good faith preference elicitation algorithm. In general I think preference utilitarianism runs into many of the same problems as epistemic majoritarianism. A term that covers both cases might be “decision-policy majoritarianism”.
Another problem I like: in our world people have very real preferences over how one should go about analyzing moral problems (including preferences over how to engage in meta-ethics). You’ll find that most people are very anti-utilitarian. A true preference utilitarian will self-modify into an agent that thinks about morality in the way most preferred by the population, i.e., vaguely moral realist virtue ethics. This is less of a problem with extrapolated-preference utilitarianism (but then, how do you utilitarian-justifiably determine how to extrapolate preferences, except by looking at existing preferences about extrapolation-like processes?), and barely a problem at all for non-preference utilitarianism, as far as I can see.
Also note that the epistemic problem of preference elicitation is very real here, and in fact I do not see why a preference utilitarian wouldn’t be obliged to engage in preference elicitation in an itself-utilitarianly-justified manner, which won’t seem as epistemically sound as what a utilitarian would naively reckon to be a good faith preference elicitation algorithm. In general I think preference utilitarianism runs into many of the same problems as epistemic majoritarianism. A term that covers both cases might be “decision-policy majoritarianism”.