Hmm this business of valuing pig lives doesn’t sit right with me.
My idea of utilitarianism is that everybody gets an equal vote. So you can feel free to include your weak preferences for more pigs in your self-interested vote, the same way you can vote for the near super-stimulus of crisp, flavoursome bacon. But each individual pig, when casting their vote, is completely apathetic about the continuation of their line.
So if you follow a utilitarian definition of what’s ethical, you can’t use “it’s good that there are pigs” as an argument for eating them being ethical. It’s what you want to happen, not what everyone on average wants to happen. I want to be king of the world, but I can’t claim that everyone else is unethical for not crowning me.
Leaving label definitions aside, I agree with you that IF there’s a uniquely ethical choice that can somehow be derived by aggregating the preferences of some group of preference-havers, then I can’t derive that choice from what I happen to prefer, so in that case if I want to judge the ethical costs of purchasing bacon I need to identify what everybody else prefers as part of that judgment. (I also, in that case, need to know who “everybody else” is before I can make that determination.)
Can you say more about why you find that premise compelling?
I find that premise compelling because I have a psychological need to believe I’m motivated by more than self-interest, and my powers of self-deception are limited by my ability to check my beliefs for self-consistency.
What this amounts to is the need to ask not just what I want, but how to make the world “better” in some more impartial way. The most self-convincing way I’ve found to define “better” is that it improves the net lived experience of other minds.
In other words, if I maximise that measure, I very comfortably feel that I’m doing good.
Personally I reject that premise, though in some contexts I endorse behaving as though it were true for pragmatic social reasons. But I have no problem with you continuing to believe it if that makes you feel good… it seems like a relatively harmless form of self-gratification, and it probably won’t grow hair on your utility function.
Hmm this business of valuing pig lives doesn’t sit right with me.
My idea of utilitarianism is that everybody gets an equal vote. So you can feel free to include your weak preferences for more pigs in your self-interested vote, the same way you can vote for the near super-stimulus of crisp, flavoursome bacon. But each individual pig, when casting their vote, is completely apathetic about the continuation of their line.
So if you follow a utilitarian definition of what’s ethical, you can’t use “it’s good that there are pigs” as an argument for eating them being ethical. It’s what you want to happen, not what everyone on average wants to happen. I want to be king of the world, but I can’t claim that everyone else is unethical for not crowning me.
Leaving label definitions aside, I agree with you that IF there’s a uniquely ethical choice that can somehow be derived by aggregating the preferences of some group of preference-havers, then I can’t derive that choice from what I happen to prefer, so in that case if I want to judge the ethical costs of purchasing bacon I need to identify what everybody else prefers as part of that judgment. (I also, in that case, need to know who “everybody else” is before I can make that determination.)
Can you say more about why you find that premise compelling?
I find that premise compelling because I have a psychological need to believe I’m motivated by more than self-interest, and my powers of self-deception are limited by my ability to check my beliefs for self-consistency.
What this amounts to is the need to ask not just what I want, but how to make the world “better” in some more impartial way. The most self-convincing way I’ve found to define “better” is that it improves the net lived experience of other minds.
In other words, if I maximise that measure, I very comfortably feel that I’m doing good.
Fair enough.
Personally I reject that premise, though in some contexts I endorse behaving as though it were true for pragmatic social reasons. But I have no problem with you continuing to believe it if that makes you feel good… it seems like a relatively harmless form of self-gratification, and it probably won’t grow hair on your utility function.