According to the The PhilPapers Survey, 25.8% of surveyed philosophers were consequentialists of some form. That makes it hard to argue for a consensus about maximizing expected utility.
There are a lot of philosophers who buy into maximizing expected utility, but aren’t consequentialists. Proof: If you look at philosophers specializing in decision theory, 58% buy into consequentialism link. Of this group, the vast majority would go for something very close to expected utility maximization.
Part of this has to do with consequentialism not having a crisp definition that fits philosophers’ intuitive usage. Some think consequentialism must be agent-neutral and get off the boat there (but could still be EU maximizers). Others have preferences that could (if made more coherent) satisfy the axioms of decision theory, but don’t think that the utility function that represents those preferences also orders outcomes in terms of goodness. I.e., these people want to be EU maximizers, but don’t want to maximize goodness (maybe they want to maximize some weighting of goodness and keeping their hands clean).
Valid point. The question asked was “Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?” (Note I actually quoted from the wrong entry above with the correct value as 23.6% but this makes little difference). It seems fair that the vast majority of deontologists and virtue ethicists are not EU maximizers. So, let’s include everyone who picked consequentalist or “other” as an option. This should presumably overestimate the fraction which we care about for this purpose. That’s a total of 55.9%, only slightly over half. Is that a consensus?
There are a lot of philosophers who buy into maximizing expected utility, but aren’t consequentialists. Proof: If you look at philosophers specializing in decision theory, 58% buy into consequentialism link. Of this group, the vast majority would go for something very close to expected utility maximization.
Part of this has to do with consequentialism not having a crisp definition that fits philosophers’ intuitive usage. Some think consequentialism must be agent-neutral and get off the boat there (but could still be EU maximizers). Others have preferences that could (if made more coherent) satisfy the axioms of decision theory, but don’t think that the utility function that represents those preferences also orders outcomes in terms of goodness. I.e., these people want to be EU maximizers, but don’t want to maximize goodness (maybe they want to maximize some weighting of goodness and keeping their hands clean).
Valid point. The question asked was “Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?” (Note I actually quoted from the wrong entry above with the correct value as 23.6% but this makes little difference). It seems fair that the vast majority of deontologists and virtue ethicists are not EU maximizers. So, let’s include everyone who picked consequentalist or “other” as an option. This should presumably overestimate the fraction which we care about for this purpose. That’s a total of 55.9%, only slightly over half. Is that a consensus?