hot take: utilitarianism is broken, the only way to fix it is to invent economics—you can’t convert utility between agents, and when you try to do anything resembling that, you get something that works sort of like (but not exactly the same as) money.
That sounds like it’s talking about some version of preference utilitarianism (in which utility is defined the way economics does it, and we try to maximize the sum of each agent’s own utility function), whereas this post says that it’s talking about classical utilitarianism. I think that for classical utilitarianism, it’s enough to just know your own ideal exchange rates for different kinds of pain and pleasure, and then you can try to take actions which shift the world’s overall ratio of pain/pleasure towards something that’s good according to your own utility function.
hot take: utilitarianism is broken, the only way to fix it is to invent economics—you can’t convert utility between agents, and when you try to do anything resembling that, you get something that works sort of like (but not exactly the same as) money.
That sounds like it’s talking about some version of preference utilitarianism (in which utility is defined the way economics does it, and we try to maximize the sum of each agent’s own utility function), whereas this post says that it’s talking about classical utilitarianism. I think that for classical utilitarianism, it’s enough to just know your own ideal exchange rates for different kinds of pain and pleasure, and then you can try to take actions which shift the world’s overall ratio of pain/pleasure towards something that’s good according to your own utility function.
That’s hardly a hot take, seeing as how Oskar Morgenstern got there first (in 1975).