re: utilitarianism, the usual sort of thing that pops into my mind is weighing of some minor discomfort versus a significant one, like one person getting their eye poked out with a pen versus an equivalent amount of displeasure spread among thousands of people stepping in something sticky, plus one more person stepping in something sticky. The utility seems higher if we agree to poke the person’s eye out, but its intuitively unsatisfying, at least to me, which makes me think that whatever rules makes things seem “bad” or “good” that I’m currently running on aren’t strictly utilitarian. I might be thinking of raw pain for pain though, and not adding enough people-stepping-in-sticky-stuff to account for the person who’s been poked in the eye suffering in other ways, like losing depth perception, not being able to see out of half of their original visual field, etc.
re: utilitarianism, the usual sort of thing that pops into my mind is weighing of some minor discomfort versus a significant one, like one person getting their eye poked out with a pen versus an equivalent amount of displeasure spread among thousands of people stepping in something sticky, plus one more person stepping in something sticky. The utility seems higher if we agree to poke the person’s eye out, but its intuitively unsatisfying, at least to me, which makes me think that whatever rules makes things seem “bad” or “good” that I’m currently running on aren’t strictly utilitarian. I might be thinking of raw pain for pain though, and not adding enough people-stepping-in-sticky-stuff to account for the person who’s been poked in the eye suffering in other ways, like losing depth perception, not being able to see out of half of their original visual field, etc.