But HU wouldn’t necessarily say that someone’s preference for something else than pleasure or pain would be mistaken—if it’s interpreted within a subjectivist framework, HU is just a description of preferences that are different.
I really don’t think that this is correct. If this were true, first of all, hedonistic utilitarianism would simply reduce to preference utilitarianism. In actual fact, neither view is merely about one’s own terminal values.
If someone, personally, cares only about pain and pleasure, but acknowledges that other people may have other things as terminal values, and thinks that The Good lies in satisfying everyone’s preferences maximally — which, for themselves, means maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, and for other people may mean other things — then that person is not a hedonistic utilitarian. They are a preference utilitarian. Referring to them as an HU is simply not correct, because that’s not how the term is used in the philosophical literature.
On the other hand, if someone cares only about pain and pleasure — both theirs and other peoples’ — and would prefer that everyone’s pleasure be maximized and everyone’s pain be minimized; but this person is not a moral realist, and has no opinion on what constitutes The Good or thinks there’s no fact of the matter about whether an act is right or wrong; well, then this person is not a utilitarian at all. Again, describing this person as a hedonistic or any other kind of utilitarian completely fails to match up with how the term is used in the philosophical literature.
As for ethical subjectivism — uh, I don’t think that’s an actual thing. I’d not heard of anything by that name until today. I don’t like going by wikipedia’s definitions of philosophical principles, so I tried tracking it down to a source, such as perhaps a major philosopher espousing the view or at least describing it coherently. No such luck. Take a look at that list of references on its wikipedia page; two are to a single book (written in 1959 by some guy I’ve never heard of — have you? — and the shortness whose wikipedia page suggests that he wasn’t anyone interesting), and one is to a barely-related page that mentions the thing once, in passing, by a different name. I’m not convinced. As best I can tell, it’s a label that some modern-day historians of philosophy have used to describe… a not-quite-consistent family of views. (Divine command theory, for one.)
But let’s attempt to take it at face value. You say:
Someone could be an ethical subjectivist and say that utilitarianism is the theory that best describes their particular attitudes, or at least that subset of their attitudes that they endorse.
Very well. Are their attitudes correct, do they think? If they say there’s no fact of the matter about that, then they’re not a utilitiarian. “Utilitiarianism” is a quite established term in the literature. You can’t just apply it to any old thing.
Of course, this is Lesswrong; we don’t argue about definitions; we’re interested in what people actually think. However in this case I think getting our terms straight is important, for two reasons:
When most people say they’re utilitarians, they mean it in the usual sense, I think. So to understand what’s going on in these discussions, and in the heads of the people we’re talking to, we need to know what is the usual sense.
If you hold some view which is not one of the usual views with commonly-known terms, you shouldn’t call it by one of the commonly-known terms, because then I won’t have any idea what you’re talking about and we’ll keep getting into comment threads like this one.
On the other hand, if someone cares only about pain and pleasure — both theirs and other peoples’ — and would prefer that everyone’s pleasure be maximized and everyone’s pain be minimized; but this person is not a moral realist, and has no opinion on what constitutes The Good or thinks there’s no fact of the matter about whether an act is right or wrong; well, then this person is not a utilitarian at all. Again, describing this person as a hedonistic or any other kind of utilitarian completely fails to match up with how the term is used in the philosophical literature.
You may be right to say that my use of “utilitarian” is different from how it’s conventionally used in the literature
… though, I just looked at the SEP entry on Consequentialism, and I note that aside for the title of one book in the bibliography, nowhere in the article is the word “realism” even mentioned. Nor does there seem to be an entry in the list of claims making up classic utilitarianism that would seem to require moral realism. I guess you could kind of interpret one of these three conditions as requiring moral realism:
Universal Consequentialism = moral rightness depends on the consequences for all people or sentient beings (as opposed to only the individual agent, members of the individual’s society, present people, or any other limited group).
Equal Consideration = in determining moral rightness, benefits to one person matter just as much as similar benefits to any other person (= all who count count equally).
Agent-neutrality = whether some consequences are better than others does not depend on whether the consequences are evaluated from the perspective of the agent (as opposed to an observer).
… but it doesn’t seem obvious to me why someone who was both an ethical subjectivist couldn’t say that “I’m a classical utiliarian, in that (among other things) the best description of my ethical system is that I think that the goodness of an action should be determined based on how it affects all sentient beings, that benefits to one person matter just as much as similar benefits to others, and that the perspective of the people evaluating the consequences doesn’t matter. Though of course others could have ethical systems that were not well described by these items, and that wouldn’t make them wrong”.
Or maybe the important part in your comment was the part ”...but this person is not a moral realist, and has no opinion on what constitutes The Good”? But a subjectivist doesn’t say that he has no opinion on what constitutes The Good: he definitely has an opinion, and there may clearly be a right and wrong answer with regard to the kind of actions that are implied by his personal moral system; it’s just that the thing that constitutes The Good will be different for people with different moral systems.
Consequenialism supplies a realistic ontology, since it’s goods are facts about the real world, and utilitarian supplies an objective epistemology, since different utilitarians of the same stripe can converge. That adds up to some of the ingredients of realism, but not all of them. What is specifically lacking is an justification of comsequentialist ends as being objectively good, and not just subjectively desirable.
Consequenialism supplies a realistic ontology, since it’s goods are facts about the real world,
For this to make it realist, the fact that the truth of those facts has value would also have to be mind-independent. Even subjectivists typically value facts about the external world (e.g. their pleasure).
(I like this quote from that article, btw: “So many debates in philosophy revolve around the issue of objectivity versus subjectivity that one may be forgiven for assuming that someone somewhere understands this distinction.”)
You may be right to say that my use of “utilitarian” is different from how it’s conventionally used in the literature; I’m pretty unfamiliar with the actual ethical literature. But if we have people who have the attitude of “I want to take the kinds of actions that maximally increase pleasure and maximally reduce suffering and I’m a moral realist” and people who have the attitude of “I want to take the kinds of actions that maximally increase pleasure and maximally reduce suffering and I’m a moral non-realist”, then it feels a little odd to have different terms for them, given that they probably have more in common with each other (with regard to the actions that they take and the views that they hold) than e.g. two people who are both moral realists but differ on consequentialism vs. deontology.
At least in a context where we are trying to categorize people into different camps based on what they think we should actually do, it would seem to make sense if we just called both the moral realist and moral non-realist “utilitarians”, if they both fit the description of a utilitarian otherwise.
I really don’t think that this is correct. If this were true, first of all, hedonistic utilitarianism would simply reduce to preference utilitarianism. In actual fact, neither view is merely about one’s own terminal values.
If someone, personally, cares only about pain and pleasure, but acknowledges that other people may have other things as terminal values, and thinks that The Good lies in satisfying everyone’s preferences maximally — which, for themselves, means maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, and for other people may mean other things — then that person is not a hedonistic utilitarian. They are a preference utilitarian. Referring to them as an HU is simply not correct, because that’s not how the term is used in the philosophical literature.
On the other hand, if someone cares only about pain and pleasure — both theirs and other peoples’ — and would prefer that everyone’s pleasure be maximized and everyone’s pain be minimized; but this person is not a moral realist, and has no opinion on what constitutes The Good or thinks there’s no fact of the matter about whether an act is right or wrong; well, then this person is not a utilitarian at all. Again, describing this person as a hedonistic or any other kind of utilitarian completely fails to match up with how the term is used in the philosophical literature.
As for ethical subjectivism — uh, I don’t think that’s an actual thing. I’d not heard of anything by that name until today. I don’t like going by wikipedia’s definitions of philosophical principles, so I tried tracking it down to a source, such as perhaps a major philosopher espousing the view or at least describing it coherently. No such luck. Take a look at that list of references on its wikipedia page; two are to a single book (written in 1959 by some guy I’ve never heard of — have you? — and the shortness whose wikipedia page suggests that he wasn’t anyone interesting), and one is to a barely-related page that mentions the thing once, in passing, by a different name. I’m not convinced. As best I can tell, it’s a label that some modern-day historians of philosophy have used to describe… a not-quite-consistent family of views. (Divine command theory, for one.)
But let’s attempt to take it at face value. You say:
Very well. Are their attitudes correct, do they think? If they say there’s no fact of the matter about that, then they’re not a utilitiarian. “Utilitiarianism” is a quite established term in the literature. You can’t just apply it to any old thing.
Of course, this is Lesswrong; we don’t argue about definitions; we’re interested in what people actually think. However in this case I think getting our terms straight is important, for two reasons:
When most people say they’re utilitarians, they mean it in the usual sense, I think. So to understand what’s going on in these discussions, and in the heads of the people we’re talking to, we need to know what is the usual sense.
If you hold some view which is not one of the usual views with commonly-known terms, you shouldn’t call it by one of the commonly-known terms, because then I won’t have any idea what you’re talking about and we’ll keep getting into comment threads like this one.
… though, I just looked at the SEP entry on Consequentialism, and I note that aside for the title of one book in the bibliography, nowhere in the article is the word “realism” even mentioned. Nor does there seem to be an entry in the list of claims making up classic utilitarianism that would seem to require moral realism. I guess you could kind of interpret one of these three conditions as requiring moral realism:
… but it doesn’t seem obvious to me why someone who was both an ethical subjectivist couldn’t say that “I’m a classical utiliarian, in that (among other things) the best description of my ethical system is that I think that the goodness of an action should be determined based on how it affects all sentient beings, that benefits to one person matter just as much as similar benefits to others, and that the perspective of the people evaluating the consequences doesn’t matter. Though of course others could have ethical systems that were not well described by these items, and that wouldn’t make them wrong”.
Or maybe the important part in your comment was the part ”...but this person is not a moral realist, and has no opinion on what constitutes The Good”? But a subjectivist doesn’t say that he has no opinion on what constitutes The Good: he definitely has an opinion, and there may clearly be a right and wrong answer with regard to the kind of actions that are implied by his personal moral system; it’s just that the thing that constitutes The Good will be different for people with different moral systems.
Consequenialism supplies a realistic ontology, since it’s goods are facts about the real world, and utilitarian supplies an objective epistemology, since different utilitarians of the same stripe can converge. That adds up to some of the ingredients of realism, but not all of them. What is specifically lacking is an justification of comsequentialist ends as being objectively good, and not just subjectively desirable.
For this to make it realist, the fact that the truth of those facts has value would also have to be mind-independent. Even subjectivists typically value facts about the external world (e.g. their pleasure).
Ethical subjectivism is also discussed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
(I like this quote from that article, btw: “So many debates in philosophy revolve around the issue of objectivity versus subjectivity that one may be forgiven for assuming that someone somewhere understands this distinction.”)
You may be right to say that my use of “utilitarian” is different from how it’s conventionally used in the literature; I’m pretty unfamiliar with the actual ethical literature. But if we have people who have the attitude of “I want to take the kinds of actions that maximally increase pleasure and maximally reduce suffering and I’m a moral realist” and people who have the attitude of “I want to take the kinds of actions that maximally increase pleasure and maximally reduce suffering and I’m a moral non-realist”, then it feels a little odd to have different terms for them, given that they probably have more in common with each other (with regard to the actions that they take and the views that they hold) than e.g. two people who are both moral realists but differ on consequentialism vs. deontology.
At least in a context where we are trying to categorize people into different camps based on what they think we should actually do, it would seem to make sense if we just called both the moral realist and moral non-realist “utilitarians”, if they both fit the description of a utilitarian otherwise.