It seems to me that if utilitarianism is to mean anything then the utility of the last two options should be the same—if we’re allowed to assign utility values to the history of whether she was born and died, even though both possible paths result in the same world-state, then it would be equally valid to assign different utilities to different actions that people took even if they turned out the same, and e.g. virtue ethics would qualify as a particular kind of utilitarianism.
Whatever action I take right now, eventually the macroscopic state of the universe is going to look the same (heat death of the universe). Does this mean the utilitarian is committed to saying that all actions available to me are morally equivalent? I don’t think so. Even though the (macroscopic) end state is the same, the way the universe gets there will differ, depending on my actions, and that matters from the perspective of preference utilitarianism.
What, then, would you say is the distinction between a utilitarian and a virtue ethicist? Are they potentially just different formulations of the same idea? Are there any moral systems that definitely don’t qualify as preference utilitarianism, if we allow this kind of distinction in a utility function?
Do you maybe mean the difference between utilitarianism and deontological theories? Virtue ethics is quite obviously different, because it says the business of moral theory is to evaluate character traits rather than acts.
Deontology differs from utilitarianism (and consequentialism more generally) because acts are judged independently of their consequences. An act can be immoral even if it unambiguously leads to a better state of affairs for everyone (a state of affairs where everyone’s preferences are better satisfied and everyone is happier, say), or even if it has absolutely no impact on anyone’s life at any time. Consequentialism doesn’t allow this, even if it allows distinctions between different macroscopic histories that lead to the same macroscopic outcome.
Whatever action I take right now, eventually the macroscopic state of the universe is going to look the same (heat death of the universe). Does this mean the utilitarian is committed to saying that all actions available to me are morally equivalent? I don’t think so. Even though the (macroscopic) end state is the same, the way the universe gets there will differ, depending on my actions, and that matters from the perspective of preference utilitarianism.
What, then, would you say is the distinction between a utilitarian and a virtue ethicist? Are they potentially just different formulations of the same idea? Are there any moral systems that definitely don’t qualify as preference utilitarianism, if we allow this kind of distinction in a utility function?
Do you maybe mean the difference between utilitarianism and deontological theories? Virtue ethics is quite obviously different, because it says the business of moral theory is to evaluate character traits rather than acts.
Deontology differs from utilitarianism (and consequentialism more generally) because acts are judged independently of their consequences. An act can be immoral even if it unambiguously leads to a better state of affairs for everyone (a state of affairs where everyone’s preferences are better satisfied and everyone is happier, say), or even if it has absolutely no impact on anyone’s life at any time. Consequentialism doesn’t allow this, even if it allows distinctions between different macroscopic histories that lead to the same macroscopic outcome.
No, deontologists are simply allowed to consider factors other than consequences.