First, I don’t buy the process of summing utilons across people as a valid one. Lots of philosophers have objected to it. This is a bullet-biting club, and I get that. I’m just not biting those bullets. I don’t think 400 years of criticism of Utilitarianism can be solved by biting all the bullets. And in Eliezer’s recent writings, it appears he is beginning to understand this. Which is great. It is reducing the odds he becomes a moral monster.
Second, I value things other than maximizing utilons. I got the impression that Eliezer/Less Wrong agreed with me on that from the Complex Values post and posts about the evils of paperclip maximizers. So great evils are qualitatively different to me from small evils, even small evils done to a great number of people!
I get what you’re trying to do here. You’re trying to demonstrate that ordinary people are innumerate, and you all are getting a utility spike from imagining you’re more rational than them by choosing the “right” (naive hyper-rational utilitarian-algebraist) answer. But I don’t think it’s that simple when we’re talking about morality. If it were, the philosophical project that’s lasted 2500 years would finally be over!
You were the one who claimed that the mental discomfort from hearing about torture would swamp the disutility from the dust specks—I assumed from that, that you thought they were commensurable. I thought it was odd that you thought they were commensurable but thought the math worked out in the opposite direction.
I believe Eliezer’s post was not so much directed at folks who disagree with utilitarianism—rather, it’s supposed to be about taking the math seriously, for those who are. If you’re not a utilitarian, you can freely regard it as another reductio.
You don’t have to be any sort of simple or naive utilitarian to encounter this problem. As long as goods are in any way commensurable, you need to actually do the math. And it’s hard to make a case for a utilitarianism in which goods are not commensurable—in practice, we can spend money towards any sort of good, and we don’t favor only spending money on the highest-order ones, so that strongly suggests commensurability.
First, I don’t buy the process of summing utilons across people as a valid one. Lots of philosophers have objected to it. This is a bullet-biting club, and I get that. I’m just not biting those bullets. I don’t think 400 years of criticism of Utilitarianism can be solved by biting all the bullets. And in Eliezer’s recent writings, it appears he is beginning to understand this. Which is great. It is reducing the odds he becomes a moral monster.
Second, I value things other than maximizing utilons. I got the impression that Eliezer/Less Wrong agreed with me on that from the Complex Values post and posts about the evils of paperclip maximizers. So great evils are qualitatively different to me from small evils, even small evils done to a great number of people!
I get what you’re trying to do here. You’re trying to demonstrate that ordinary people are innumerate, and you all are getting a utility spike from imagining you’re more rational than them by choosing the “right” (naive hyper-rational utilitarian-algebraist) answer. But I don’t think it’s that simple when we’re talking about morality. If it were, the philosophical project that’s lasted 2500 years would finally be over!
You were the one who claimed that the mental discomfort from hearing about torture would swamp the disutility from the dust specks—I assumed from that, that you thought they were commensurable. I thought it was odd that you thought they were commensurable but thought the math worked out in the opposite direction.
I believe Eliezer’s post was not so much directed at folks who disagree with utilitarianism—rather, it’s supposed to be about taking the math seriously, for those who are. If you’re not a utilitarian, you can freely regard it as another reductio.
You don’t have to be any sort of simple or naive utilitarian to encounter this problem. As long as goods are in any way commensurable, you need to actually do the math. And it’s hard to make a case for a utilitarianism in which goods are not commensurable—in practice, we can spend money towards any sort of good, and we don’t favor only spending money on the highest-order ones, so that strongly suggests commensurability.