At least deontological theories propose specific precepts about what is probably good: not murdering, not stealing, and so on. All of those are on the table if you’re a utilitarian and that makes you someone I don’t want to be around or to have moral authority over me.
Utilitarianism says that murdering is bad because it reduces utility. You’re concerned that if murdering increased utility, then utilitarianism would endorse murdering.
But doesn’t that objection apply to deontology too? Deontology says that murdering is bad because you have a duty to refrain from murdering. So we should be concerned about circumstances in which a person would infer that they have a duty to murder.
In practice, there are cases where people come to believe that doing a particular murder would increase utility … and there are also cases in which people come to believe that they have a duty to murder. Some serial killers, spree killers, and terrorists seem to hold this position. The guy who threw the firebomb at Sam Altman’s house seems to have held this position: that consistency entailed a duty to use violent force.
So are utilitarians really worse to be around, or to exercise moral authority, than deontologists? They seem to suffer very similar failure cases! Perhaps what we should care about is not whether people are utilitarians or deontologists, but rather whether they have the sort of cognitive habits that keep them safely far away from the error of believing that a murder is what the world needs right now.
Exactly. And I’m saying the kind of person who has the kind of cognitive habits that lead to them embracing utilitarianism is the kind of person who is more likely to have worse failure modes and be more likely to embrace to-me-morally-wrong attitudes, because utilitarianism is itself an absolutist philosophy. It’s like the “every happy family is alike” thing, except the opposite: every absolutist morality is wrong in some way while there is a happy infinity of moral variety which is much less likely to be fundamentally opposed to any given thing I think is good or for any given thing I think is bad, because they only have a specific number of hypotheses rather than following a rule.
Like any generalisation like this, it does not apply to individuals. I am making the connection though, that generally, a more absolutist-endorsing kind of person will be more atrocity-committing. This is because all systems are either wrong or incomplete (we know from Godel) so the solution is that there is no privileged system, but there are still hypotheses about any given situation.
To boil it down even further, I think utilitarians are making a worse type of cognitive error than deontologists because they are or call themselves utilitarians.
I would like to live in a world with people who consider committing atrocities straightforwardly bad, and would be less comfortable with people who went “well, hold on, maybe there’s some situation where this is the right thing-” No. Wrong thing wrong, bad thing bad. Stop trying to find ways it isn’t bad, you’re making me very uncomfortable, because it’s the exact kind of thing someone who wants to do bad things would do.
My point wasn’t “Utilitarians are good actually.” It was “Given the concerns you’re expressing, deontologists are at least as bad as utilitarians, so it’s weird that you’re preferring them.”
Also, there’s another word for “the sort of cognitive habits that keep them safely far away from the error of believing that a murder is what the world needs right now”.
That word is “virtue”.
The criterion to care about, given your expressed concerns, is not whether a person assents to one ethical theory over another, but whether that person is virtuous; whether they have habits of thought and behavior that lead them to do good and shun evil.
(Oh, and being virtuous is different from “believing in virtue ethics”. There are virtuous people of every ethical theory and none.)
Fair enough. I’m preferring them based on personal experience, which is not something you have access to. Generally, most people don’t think about ethics and morality at all, but deontologists IME (mostly Christians) do. That makes them, generally speaking, better than average at morality while being “normal people.” Utilitarians on the other hand I have mostly encountered online, and particularly on this site there is the explicit endorsement of the Repugnant Conclusion as “Just Multiply.” That’s what I’m pushing back against: be more like a normal person and think about morality using your judgement, don’t “Just Multiply” because the results will be terrible.
Utilitarianism says that murdering is bad because it reduces utility. You’re concerned that if murdering increased utility, then utilitarianism would endorse murdering.
But doesn’t that objection apply to deontology too? Deontology says that murdering is bad because you have a duty to refrain from murdering. So we should be concerned about circumstances in which a person would infer that they have a duty to murder.
In practice, there are cases where people come to believe that doing a particular murder would increase utility … and there are also cases in which people come to believe that they have a duty to murder. Some serial killers, spree killers, and terrorists seem to hold this position. The guy who threw the firebomb at Sam Altman’s house seems to have held this position: that consistency entailed a duty to use violent force.
So are utilitarians really worse to be around, or to exercise moral authority, than deontologists? They seem to suffer very similar failure cases! Perhaps what we should care about is not whether people are utilitarians or deontologists, but rather whether they have the sort of cognitive habits that keep them safely far away from the error of believing that a murder is what the world needs right now.
Exactly. And I’m saying the kind of person who has the kind of cognitive habits that lead to them embracing utilitarianism is the kind of person who is more likely to have worse failure modes and be more likely to embrace to-me-morally-wrong attitudes, because utilitarianism is itself an absolutist philosophy. It’s like the “every happy family is alike” thing, except the opposite: every absolutist morality is wrong in some way while there is a happy infinity of moral variety which is much less likely to be fundamentally opposed to any given thing I think is good or for any given thing I think is bad, because they only have a specific number of hypotheses rather than following a rule.
Like any generalisation like this, it does not apply to individuals. I am making the connection though, that generally, a more absolutist-endorsing kind of person will be more atrocity-committing. This is because all systems are either wrong or incomplete (we know from Godel) so the solution is that there is no privileged system, but there are still hypotheses about any given situation.
To boil it down even further, I think utilitarians are making a worse type of cognitive error than deontologists because they are or call themselves utilitarians.
I would like to live in a world with people who consider committing atrocities straightforwardly bad, and would be less comfortable with people who went “well, hold on, maybe there’s some situation where this is the right thing-” No. Wrong thing wrong, bad thing bad. Stop trying to find ways it isn’t bad, you’re making me very uncomfortable, because it’s the exact kind of thing someone who wants to do bad things would do.
My point wasn’t “Utilitarians are good actually.” It was “Given the concerns you’re expressing, deontologists are at least as bad as utilitarians, so it’s weird that you’re preferring them.”
Also, there’s another word for “the sort of cognitive habits that keep them safely far away from the error of believing that a murder is what the world needs right now”.
That word is “virtue”.
The criterion to care about, given your expressed concerns, is not whether a person assents to one ethical theory over another, but whether that person is virtuous; whether they have habits of thought and behavior that lead them to do good and shun evil.
(Oh, and being virtuous is different from “believing in virtue ethics”. There are virtuous people of every ethical theory and none.)
Fair enough. I’m preferring them based on personal experience, which is not something you have access to. Generally, most people don’t think about ethics and morality at all, but deontologists IME (mostly Christians) do. That makes them, generally speaking, better than average at morality while being “normal people.” Utilitarians on the other hand I have mostly encountered online, and particularly on this site there is the explicit endorsement of the Repugnant Conclusion as “Just Multiply.” That’s what I’m pushing back against: be more like a normal person and think about morality using your judgement, don’t “Just Multiply” because the results will be terrible.
I basically agree with you regarding virtue.