I am mostly like Bob (although I don’t make up stuff about burnout), but I think calling myself a utilitarian is totally reasonable. By my understanding, utilitarianism is an answer to the question “what is moral behavior.” It doesn’t imply that I want to always decide to do the most moral behavior.
I think the existence of Bob is obviously good. Bob is in, like, the 90th percentile of human moral behavior, and if other people improved their behavior, Bob is also the kind of person who would reciprocally improve his own. If Alice wants to go around personally nagging everyone to be more altruistic, then that’s her prerogative, and if it really works, I am even for it. But firstly, I don’t see any reason to single out Bob, and secondly, I doubt it works very well.
You doubt that it would work very well if Alice nags everyone to be more altruistic. I’m curious how confident you are that this doesn’t work and whether you’d propose any better techniques that might work better?
For myself, I notice that being nagged to be more altruistic is unpleasant and uncomfortable. So I might be biased to conclude that it doesn’t work, because I’m motivated to believe it doesn’t work so that I can conveniently conclude that nobody should nag me; so I want to be very careful and explicit in how I reason and consider evidence here. (If it does work, that doesn’t mean it’s good; you could think it works but the harms outweigh the benefits. But you’d have to be willing to say “this works but I’m still not okay with it” rather than “conveniently, the unpleasant thing is ineffective anyway, so we don’t have to do it!”)
(PS. yes, I too am very glad that people like Bob exist, and I think it’s good they exist!)
I am mostly like Bob (although I don’t make up stuff about burnout), but I think calling myself a utilitarian is totally reasonable. By my understanding, utilitarianism is an answer to the question “what is moral behavior.” It doesn’t imply that I want to always decide to do the most moral behavior.
I think the existence of Bob is obviously good. Bob is in, like, the 90th percentile of human moral behavior, and if other people improved their behavior, Bob is also the kind of person who would reciprocally improve his own. If Alice wants to go around personally nagging everyone to be more altruistic, then that’s her prerogative, and if it really works, I am even for it. But firstly, I don’t see any reason to single out Bob, and secondly, I doubt it works very well.
You doubt that it would work very well if Alice nags everyone to be more altruistic. I’m curious how confident you are that this doesn’t work and whether you’d propose any better techniques that might work better?
For myself, I notice that being nagged to be more altruistic is unpleasant and uncomfortable. So I might be biased to conclude that it doesn’t work, because I’m motivated to believe it doesn’t work so that I can conveniently conclude that nobody should nag me; so I want to be very careful and explicit in how I reason and consider evidence here. (If it does work, that doesn’t mean it’s good; you could think it works but the harms outweigh the benefits. But you’d have to be willing to say “this works but I’m still not okay with it” rather than “conveniently, the unpleasant thing is ineffective anyway, so we don’t have to do it!”)
(PS. yes, I too am very glad that people like Bob exist, and I think it’s good they exist!)