(If someone believes that there is a way how these interpersonally comparable utilities could actually be grounded in physical reality, I’d be extremely curious to hear it.)
I wonder if I am misunderstanding what you are asking, because interpersonal utility comparison seems like an easy thing that people do every day, using our inborn systems for sympathy and empathy.
When I am trying to make a decision that involves the conflicting desires of myself and another person; I generally use empathy to put myself in their shoes and try to think about desires that I have that are probably similar to theirs. Then I compare how strong those two desires of mine are and base my decision on that. Now, obviously I don’t make all ethical decisions like that, there are many where I just follow common rules of thumb. But I do make some decisions in this fashion, and it seems quite workable, the more fair-minded of my acquaintances don’t really complain about it unless they think I’ve made a mistake. Obviously it has scaling problems when attempting to base any type of utilitarian ethics on it, but I don’t think they are insurmountable.
Now, of course you could object that this method is unreliable, and ask whether I really know for sure if other people’s desires are that similar to mine. But this seems to me to just be a variant of the age-old problem of skepticism and doesn’t really deserve any more attention than the possibility that all the people I meet are illusions created by an evil demon. It’s infinitesimally possible that everyone I know doesn’t really have mental states similar to mine at all, that in fact they are all really robot drones controlled by a non-conscious AI that is basing their behavior on a giant lookup table. But it seems much more likely that other people are conscious human beings with mental states similar to mine that can be modeled and compared via empathy, and that this allows me to compare their utilities.
In fact, it’s hard to understand how empathy and sympathy could have evolved if it they weren’t reasonably good at interpersonal utility comparison. If interpersonal utility comparison was truly impossible then anyone who tried to use empathy to inform their behavior towards others would end up being disastrously wrong at figuring out how to properly treat others, find themselves grievously offending the rest of their tribe, and would hence likely have their genes for empathy selected against. It seems like if interpersonal utility comparison was impossible humans would have never evolved the ability or desire to make decisions based on empathy.
I am also curious as to why you refer to to utility as “ghostly.” It seems to me that utility is commonly defined as the sum of the various desires and feelings that people have. Desires and feelings are computations and other processes in our brains, which are very solid real physical objects. So it seems like utility is at least as real as software. Of course, it’s entirely possible that you are using the word “utility” to refer to a slightly different concept than I am and that is where my confusion is coming from.
I wonder if I am misunderstanding what you are asking, because interpersonal utility comparison seems like an easy thing that people do every day, using our inborn systems for sympathy and empathy.
When I am trying to make a decision that involves the conflicting desires of myself and another person; I generally use empathy to put myself in their shoes and try to think about desires that I have that are probably similar to theirs. Then I compare how strong those two desires of mine are and base my decision on that. Now, obviously I don’t make all ethical decisions like that, there are many where I just follow common rules of thumb. But I do make some decisions in this fashion, and it seems quite workable, the more fair-minded of my acquaintances don’t really complain about it unless they think I’ve made a mistake. Obviously it has scaling problems when attempting to base any type of utilitarian ethics on it, but I don’t think they are insurmountable.
Now, of course you could object that this method is unreliable, and ask whether I really know for sure if other people’s desires are that similar to mine. But this seems to me to just be a variant of the age-old problem of skepticism and doesn’t really deserve any more attention than the possibility that all the people I meet are illusions created by an evil demon. It’s infinitesimally possible that everyone I know doesn’t really have mental states similar to mine at all, that in fact they are all really robot drones controlled by a non-conscious AI that is basing their behavior on a giant lookup table. But it seems much more likely that other people are conscious human beings with mental states similar to mine that can be modeled and compared via empathy, and that this allows me to compare their utilities.
In fact, it’s hard to understand how empathy and sympathy could have evolved if it they weren’t reasonably good at interpersonal utility comparison. If interpersonal utility comparison was truly impossible then anyone who tried to use empathy to inform their behavior towards others would end up being disastrously wrong at figuring out how to properly treat others, find themselves grievously offending the rest of their tribe, and would hence likely have their genes for empathy selected against. It seems like if interpersonal utility comparison was impossible humans would have never evolved the ability or desire to make decisions based on empathy.
I am also curious as to why you refer to to utility as “ghostly.” It seems to me that utility is commonly defined as the sum of the various desires and feelings that people have. Desires and feelings are computations and other processes in our brains, which are very solid real physical objects. So it seems like utility is at least as real as software. Of course, it’s entirely possible that you are using the word “utility” to refer to a slightly different concept than I am and that is where my confusion is coming from.