I’d feel much more comfortable with someone not in control over their own utility function than someone that is in control, based on the people I have encountered in life so far.
May I ask what kind of experiences you base this on?
Getting mugged, getting asked for bribes by gov officials, entitled crazy road rage people in traffic.
Mind you this was (maybe overly) contextualized by the OP being an argument against social norms that force people to sacrifice personal utility even when it might produce net negative utility overall.
In a broader context, status quo ethics dissidents often explicitly did the opposite, martyrising themselves for the public good. After all people fought throughout history to expand the circle of Who Matters to include more and more people.
So I guess there’s also a strong dose of living in the western world at the end of history: “we’ve got the right liberal ethics now and deviations from them tend to result in total utility losses”. I’m not giving modern human rights advocates in most of the rest of the world enough credit. Or heck vegans and whatnot in the west. Who knows how the future will judge the moral circles we draw.
Blast from the past, hadn’t thought about this in ages.
May I ask what kind of experiences you base this on?
Getting mugged, getting asked for bribes by gov officials, entitled crazy road rage people in traffic.
Mind you this was (maybe overly) contextualized by the OP being an argument against social norms that force people to sacrifice personal utility even when it might produce net negative utility overall.
In a broader context, status quo ethics dissidents often explicitly did the opposite, martyrising themselves for the public good. After all people fought throughout history to expand the circle of Who Matters to include more and more people.
So I guess there’s also a strong dose of living in the western world at the end of history: “we’ve got the right liberal ethics now and deviations from them tend to result in total utility losses”. I’m not giving modern human rights advocates in most of the rest of the world enough credit. Or heck vegans and whatnot in the west. Who knows how the future will judge the moral circles we draw.
Blast from the past, hadn’t thought about this in ages.