Your proposition is: “Utils come from you doing what you want, not being happy or successful, therefore, forcing people to do something they do not directly want to do is necessarily bad for their utility.” This claim appears to contradict reality, or else it redifines utility into something new and quite different.
A necessary implication of this view would be that, given the constraints they faced, everyone is at their maximum possible utility, i.e. there is no choice that you (or anyone) would go back and change. Period. Full stop. Nothing you could have done would make your utility higher than it is.
This may be true for you personally, but I sincerely doubt that. Indeed, I doubt it’s true for anyone with a working long-term memory. Thus, your definition is either empirically false or it redefines utility into something unrecognizable.
As your premise is false, the conclusion is trivial and unsupported.
Of course, if I misunderstand you, or if this theory can be supported by a true premise with a conventional concept of utility, please do so; the general idea is interesting and the post is certainly thought-provoking.
Couple defenses/explanations for the “Your utility is already maximized” conclusion:
-Coercion: changing facts about choices (i.e. removing coercion) might increase your utility, but, if you can’t change the constraints you faced, you would not have changed a single decision.)
-Information: One could argue you’d now change your choice due to better information. But if better information would increase your utility, then your utility stemmed from the consequences of your decision, not your making the decision itself, thus falsifying the original proposition.
-Unconsidered alternatives—it is possible that your utility would be higher if you had realized an alternative choice that never came to mind. Thus, all decisions you made you chose the best of the options you considered; were you aware of more options, you might have actually done better. It’s unclear from the phrasing of this proposition if this would count as utility increasing. Nevertheless, I doubt there’s anyone who does not think his utility would be higher had he made a different choice that had come to mind at the time.
Your proposition is: “Utils come from you doing what you want, not being happy or successful, therefore, forcing people to do something they do not directly want to do is necessarily bad for their utility.” This claim appears to contradict reality, or else it redifines utility into something new and quite different.
A necessary implication of this view would be that, given the constraints they faced, everyone is at their maximum possible utility, i.e. there is no choice that you (or anyone) would go back and change. Period. Full stop. Nothing you could have done would make your utility higher than it is.
This may be true for you personally, but I sincerely doubt that. Indeed, I doubt it’s true for anyone with a working long-term memory. Thus, your definition is either empirically false or it redefines utility into something unrecognizable.
As your premise is false, the conclusion is trivial and unsupported.
Of course, if I misunderstand you, or if this theory can be supported by a true premise with a conventional concept of utility, please do so; the general idea is interesting and the post is certainly thought-provoking.
Couple defenses/explanations for the “Your utility is already maximized” conclusion: -Coercion: changing facts about choices (i.e. removing coercion) might increase your utility, but, if you can’t change the constraints you faced, you would not have changed a single decision.) -Information: One could argue you’d now change your choice due to better information. But if better information would increase your utility, then your utility stemmed from the consequences of your decision, not your making the decision itself, thus falsifying the original proposition. -Unconsidered alternatives—it is possible that your utility would be higher if you had realized an alternative choice that never came to mind. Thus, all decisions you made you chose the best of the options you considered; were you aware of more options, you might have actually done better. It’s unclear from the phrasing of this proposition if this would count as utility increasing. Nevertheless, I doubt there’s anyone who does not think his utility would be higher had he made a different choice that had come to mind at the time.