Second, we stop pretending that the ethical maxim of utilitarianism is “Maximize utility”. Instead, we should acknowledge how utilitarianism is actually practiced; maintaining utility is the gold standard that makes you a basically decent person, and increasing utility is the aspirational standard which makes you a good person
Yes. In particular, if falling bellow the standard implies that you get blamed or punished, utilitarianism sets an unreasonably high standard. There is the problem that you are not cognitevely able to perform perfect utilitarian calculations , on top of the fact that you haven’t got enough krasia to implement them.
You can kinda solve the problem by separating the theoretical standard from a practical standard, but that manourvre only gives the game away that utilitarianism is only answering theoretical questions, and needs to be supplemented by something else.
(Theoretical-but-not-practical is a bit of a theme here. Aumann’s theorem is
theoretical-but-not-practical under most circumstances, Aumann’s theorem is
theoretical-but-not-practical under most circumstances, so is Bayes, so is Solomonoff).
Yes. In particular, if falling bellow the standard implies that you get blamed or punished, utilitarianism sets an unreasonably high standard. There is the problem that you are not cognitevely able to perform perfect utilitarian calculations , on top of the fact that you haven’t got enough krasia to implement them.
You can kinda solve the problem by separating the theoretical standard from a practical standard, but that manourvre only gives the game away that utilitarianism is only answering theoretical questions, and needs to be supplemented by something else.
(Theoretical-but-not-practical is a bit of a theme here. Aumann’s theorem is theoretical-but-not-practical under most circumstances, Aumann’s theorem is theoretical-but-not-practical under most circumstances, so is Bayes, so is Solomonoff).
If you figure there’s an 80⁄20 rule in place, ‘it’s not perfect, but it works’ can be very efficient.