If you were a total utilitarianist you would likely believe that accepting the offer is the only moral option.
You your specification doesn’t make this necessarily true. You set the bounds on the utility of the subsistence farmers to “> 0”, rather than “> current_you/100,000″. Of course total utilitarians being what they are (crazy), it is actually only required that “bonus_utility_for_Stark + subsistence_utility * 100,000 > current_you_utility”. ie. The total utilitarian would willingly submit 100,000 instances of himself to a negative utility fate worse than death if it made Stark (sufficiently) happy.
(Note the usage “total utilitarian” rather than “total utilitarianist”.)
The word “utilitarian” is already terrible (everything past the first four letters is a jumble of suffix); even if “utilitarianist” were a real word, it would be better not to use it.
I wonder how hard it would be to convince everyone (or at least a substantial minority of everyone) to switch to “utilist” or something equally concise.
I wonder how hard it would be to convince everyone (or at least a substantial minority of everyone) to switch to “utilist” or something equally concise.
I’d prefer to switch everyone to abandoning “utilitarian” entirely as a ridiculous (and abhorrent) value system that doesn’t deserve the privilege it seems to be granted by frequent reference.
You your specification doesn’t make this necessarily true. You set the bounds on the utility of the subsistence farmers to “> 0”, rather than “> current_you/100,000″. Of course total utilitarians being what they are (crazy), it is actually only required that “bonus_utility_for_Stark + subsistence_utility * 100,000 > current_you_utility”. ie. The total utilitarian would willingly submit 100,000 instances of himself to a negative utility fate worse than death if it made Stark (sufficiently) happy.
(Note the usage “total utilitarian” rather than “total utilitarianist”.)
Is “total utilitarianist” a thing (distinct from “total utilitarian)”?
The word “utilitarian” is already terrible (everything past the first four letters is a jumble of suffix); even if “utilitarianist” were a real word, it would be better not to use it.
I wonder how hard it would be to convince everyone (or at least a substantial minority of everyone) to switch to “utilist” or something equally concise.
I’d prefer to switch everyone to abandoning “utilitarian” entirely as a ridiculous (and abhorrent) value system that doesn’t deserve the privilege it seems to be granted by frequent reference.
Not that either I or google have heard of.