It may be interesting to note that this outline implies that when we discuss questions like “What’s your utility function?” or “Do humans have utility functions?” we should be careful to distinguish what kind of utility function we are talking about. Examples:
a utility function that represents my revealed preferences
the utility function implied by my consequentialist moral principles
the utility function that corresponds to my intuitions about the desirabilities of various specific outcomes
the utility function I actually use when I engage in explicit consequentialist reasoning
the utility function I actually use when I engage in subconscious model-based decision making
the utility function I would eventually decide upon if I thought about it for a long time
the utility function that best captures my intuitions about what “my real values” means
the utility function that represents my real values (this may seem equivalent to the one above, except that I don’t seem to have clear intuitions in the matter, what intuitions I do have seem subject to change, and maybe there is a fact of the matter about what my real values are beyond my intuitions about it?)
Why are you referring to all of those as one’s “utility function”? I thought the term “utility function” referred to one’s terminal values. Your last example seems to refer to one’s terminal values, but the rest are just random instances of types of reasoning leading to instrumental values.
It may be interesting to note that this outline implies that when we discuss questions like “What’s your utility function?” or “Do humans have utility functions?” we should be careful to distinguish what kind of utility function we are talking about. Examples:
a utility function that represents my revealed preferences
the utility function implied by my consequentialist moral principles
the utility function that corresponds to my intuitions about the desirabilities of various specific outcomes
the utility function I actually use when I engage in explicit consequentialist reasoning
the utility function I actually use when I engage in subconscious model-based decision making
the utility function I would eventually decide upon if I thought about it for a long time
the utility function that best captures my intuitions about what “my real values” means
the utility function that represents my real values (this may seem equivalent to the one above, except that I don’t seem to have clear intuitions in the matter, what intuitions I do have seem subject to change, and maybe there is a fact of the matter about what my real values are beyond my intuitions about it?)
Why are you referring to all of those as one’s “utility function”? I thought the term “utility function” referred to one’s terminal values. Your last example seems to refer to one’s terminal values, but the rest are just random instances of types of reasoning leading to instrumental values.