My impression of the thought experiment is that there’s suppose to be no implication that their side winning the war would be any better than the other side winning. Their side winning is explicitly about maintaining social status and authority. “Keep harm at a low level” might mean “lower than a Hobbesian war of all against all”, not necessarily low by our standards.
It seems like maybe the thought experiment could be improved by explicitly rephrasing it to make their nation be a pretty terrible place by our standards and winning the war be bad overall. That would rather complicate things though when the point is Bob being tortured and killed.
So maybe it should be the country is at peace and “The president feels much more relaxed and it able to work better at crafting his new anti-homosexuality legislation” or something like that?
However, I do on an unrelated note really like your comment about “Imagine a world in which this particular form of morality inexplicably produces positive results. Don’t you feel silly trying to defend your morality now?”. I’ve noticed (...although I have trouble thinking of actual examples, but I’m sure I’ve seen some) that in a fair amount of fiction there’s a tendency to have Utilitarian villains with plans that will clearly bring about terrible results, as a result of them having made a very obvious error which the heroes are for some reason able to spot, which when used as an argument against Utilitarianism is pretty much literally “this particular form of morality inexplicably produces negative results”.
(obviously it’s entirely possible for Utilitarians to make mistakes which have horrendous consequences. It’s just that as a rule, on average, Utilitarianism will get you better consequences from a Utilitarian standpoint than non-consequential Hollywood Morality. Which is exactly why it’s such an appealing argument to use in fiction, because it’s a plausible scenario which leads to obviously incorrect conclusions if generalized.)
My impression of the thought experiment is that there’s suppose to be no implication that their side winning the war would be any better than the other side winning. Their side winning is explicitly about maintaining social status and authority. “Keep harm at a low level” might mean “lower than a Hobbesian war of all against all”, not necessarily low by our standards. It seems like maybe the thought experiment could be improved by explicitly rephrasing it to make their nation be a pretty terrible place by our standards and winning the war be bad overall. That would rather complicate things though when the point is Bob being tortured and killed. So maybe it should be the country is at peace and “The president feels much more relaxed and it able to work better at crafting his new anti-homosexuality legislation” or something like that?
However, I do on an unrelated note really like your comment about “Imagine a world in which this particular form of morality inexplicably produces positive results. Don’t you feel silly trying to defend your morality now?”. I’ve noticed (...although I have trouble thinking of actual examples, but I’m sure I’ve seen some) that in a fair amount of fiction there’s a tendency to have Utilitarian villains with plans that will clearly bring about terrible results, as a result of them having made a very obvious error which the heroes are for some reason able to spot, which when used as an argument against Utilitarianism is pretty much literally “this particular form of morality inexplicably produces negative results”. (obviously it’s entirely possible for Utilitarians to make mistakes which have horrendous consequences. It’s just that as a rule, on average, Utilitarianism will get you better consequences from a Utilitarian standpoint than non-consequential Hollywood Morality. Which is exactly why it’s such an appealing argument to use in fiction, because it’s a plausible scenario which leads to obviously incorrect conclusions if generalized.)