My model of other people says that a significantly smaller percentage of people would accept losing a dollar in order to grant one person ten grand, than would accept a dust speck in order to save one person 50 years of torture.
As does mine.
gRR is not claiming that nonutilitarian choices are preferable because the utility function has non-zero terms for preferences of other people. It is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.
That’s consistent with my understanding of their claim as well.
I feel like this is misinterpreting gRR’s comment.
Sure, although updating upon reading your response, I now suspect that I have misinterpreted your comment. But I’ll explain how I saw things when I first commented.
Basically it looked like you were perceiving gRR’s argument as a specific instance of the following general argument:
(1a) lots of people might agree to take a small decrease in utility in order to provide lots of utility / avoid lots of disutility for an individual even if the total decrease in utility over all the people is substantially larger than the individual utility granted / disutility averted
(2a) whenever lots of people would agree to that, it is a good idea to do it
(3) therefore it is a good idea to take small amounts of utility from many people to give lots of utility / prevent lots of disutility to one person provided all/an overwhelming majority of the people agree to it
You were then trying to reveal the fault in gRR’s general argument by presenting a different example ($1m → $10k) and asking if the same argument would still hold there (which you presume it wouldn’t). Then you suggested throwing another premise, (1b) I have nonzero terms for others’ preferences, and presumably replacing (2a) by (2b) which adds the requirement of (1b), and asking if that would make the argument hold.
But gRR was not asserting that general argument—in particular, not premise (2a)/(2b). So it seemed like you seemed to be trying to tear down an argument that gRR was not constructing.
As does mine.
That’s consistent with my understanding of their claim as well.
Can you expand further on why you feel like this?
Sure, although updating upon reading your response, I now suspect that I have misinterpreted your comment. But I’ll explain how I saw things when I first commented.
Basically it looked like you were perceiving gRR’s argument as a specific instance of the following general argument:
You were then trying to reveal the fault in gRR’s general argument by presenting a different example ($1m → $10k) and asking if the same argument would still hold there (which you presume it wouldn’t). Then you suggested throwing another premise, (1b) I have nonzero terms for others’ preferences, and presumably replacing (2a) by (2b) which adds the requirement of (1b), and asking if that would make the argument hold.
But gRR was not asserting that general argument—in particular, not premise (2a)/(2b). So it seemed like you seemed to be trying to tear down an argument that gRR was not constructing.