I’m here from your comment on Lukas’ post on the EA Forum. I haven’t been following the realism vs anti-realism discussion closely, though, just kind of jumped in here when it popped up on the EA Forum front page.
Are there good independent arguments against the absurd conclusion? It’s not obvious to me that it’s bad. Its rejection is also so close to separability/additivity that for someone who’s not sold on separability/additivity, an intuitive response is “Well ya, of course, so what?”. It seems to me that the absurd conclusion is intuitively bad for some only because they have separable/additive intuitions in the first place, so it almost begs the question against those who don’t.
So to (3), focussing on suffering-reduction and denying the absurd conclusion is fine, but this would not satisfy (1).
By deny, do you mean reject? Doesn’t negative utilitarianism work? Or do you mean incorrectly denying that the absurd conclusion doesn’t follow from diminishing returns to happiness vs suffering?
Also, for what it’s worth, my view is that a symmetric preference consequentialism is the worst way to do preference consequentialism, and I recognize asymmetry as a general feature of ethics. See these comments:
I’m here from your comment on Lukas’ post on the EA Forum. I haven’t been following the realism vs anti-realism discussion closely, though, just kind of jumped in here when it popped up on the EA Forum front page.
Are there good independent arguments against the absurd conclusion? It’s not obvious to me that it’s bad. Its rejection is also so close to separability/additivity that for someone who’s not sold on separability/additivity, an intuitive response is “Well ya, of course, so what?”. It seems to me that the absurd conclusion is intuitively bad for some only because they have separable/additive intuitions in the first place, so it almost begs the question against those who don’t.
By deny, do you mean reject? Doesn’t negative utilitarianism work? Or do you mean incorrectly denying that the absurd conclusion doesn’t follow from diminishing returns to happiness vs suffering?
Also, for what it’s worth, my view is that a symmetric preference consequentialism is the worst way to do preference consequentialism, and I recognize asymmetry as a general feature of ethics. See these comments:
[1]
[2]
[3]