There is a meta question here whether morality is based on personal intuition or calculations. My own inclination is that utility calculations would only make a difference “in the margin” but the high level decision are made by our moral intuition.
That is, we can do calculations to decide if we fund Charity A or Charity B in similar areas, but I doubt that for most people major moral decisions actually (or should) boil down to calculating utility functions.
But of course to each their own, and if someone finds math useful to make such decisions then whom am I to tell them not to do it.
Yeah, I think calculations can be a tool but ultimately when deciding a framework we’re trying to synthesise our intuitions into a simple set of axioms from which everything proceeds. But the intuitions remain the origin of it all. You could design some game theoretical framework for what guarantees a society to run best without appealing to any moral intuition, but that would probably look quite alien and cold. Morality is one of our terminal values, we just try to make sense of it.
There is a meta question here whether morality is based on personal intuition or calculations. My own inclination is that utility calculations would only make a difference “in the margin” but the high level decision are made by our moral intuition.
That is, we can do calculations to decide if we fund Charity A or Charity B in similar areas, but I doubt that for most people major moral decisions actually (or should) boil down to calculating utility functions.
But of course to each their own, and if someone finds math useful to make such decisions then whom am I to tell them not to do it.
Yeah, I think calculations can be a tool but ultimately when deciding a framework we’re trying to synthesise our intuitions into a simple set of axioms from which everything proceeds. But the intuitions remain the origin of it all. You could design some game theoretical framework for what guarantees a society to run best without appealing to any moral intuition, but that would probably look quite alien and cold. Morality is one of our terminal values, we just try to make sense of it.