Eli: I wouldn’t argue otherwise, though I think that sometimes people think they are applying “utilitarianism” when in fact they are just going with “what sounds good” to them based on very limited information.
This is probably just something I should think harder about and go off and make a post on my own blog about, but one thing I’ve noticed recently is that many people claim that their preferred option provides the most utility, when in fact, there are other options they haven’t even considered. So as I conceded above, the nursing home scenario (in which people don’t even consider that perhaps nursing homes aren’t necessary, or that they might do more harm than good) is probably a manifestation of “lazy thinking”, but it seems as if there’s a particular kind of lazy thinking that the structure of utilitarian/consequentialist thinking enables, if not the actual content.
That is, what looks like the “greatest good” on the surface might not actually be, and people need to be wary of assuming they’ve “found the answer” to a particular problem, particularly if “the answer” entails treating some groups of people in ways that would be considered unethical if applied to other groups. E.g., a person can’t just stick their mother-in-law in a nursing home because they find her irritating; however, if she has any trouble whatsoever managing daily living tasks, society will justify and enable nursing-home placement almost without question.
Hmm. In some respects this actually relates back to the original post, in the sense that people might be tempted to choose a socially acceptable/enabled option and feel that their job is “done”, when in fact, they could add more value to more people’s lives by taking the reputational risk of an “outside the box” option.
Eli: I wouldn’t argue otherwise, though I think that sometimes people think they are applying “utilitarianism” when in fact they are just going with “what sounds good” to them based on very limited information.
This is probably just something I should think harder about and go off and make a post on my own blog about, but one thing I’ve noticed recently is that many people claim that their preferred option provides the most utility, when in fact, there are other options they haven’t even considered. So as I conceded above, the nursing home scenario (in which people don’t even consider that perhaps nursing homes aren’t necessary, or that they might do more harm than good) is probably a manifestation of “lazy thinking”, but it seems as if there’s a particular kind of lazy thinking that the structure of utilitarian/consequentialist thinking enables, if not the actual content.
That is, what looks like the “greatest good” on the surface might not actually be, and people need to be wary of assuming they’ve “found the answer” to a particular problem, particularly if “the answer” entails treating some groups of people in ways that would be considered unethical if applied to other groups. E.g., a person can’t just stick their mother-in-law in a nursing home because they find her irritating; however, if she has any trouble whatsoever managing daily living tasks, society will justify and enable nursing-home placement almost without question.
Hmm. In some respects this actually relates back to the original post, in the sense that people might be tempted to choose a socially acceptable/enabled option and feel that their job is “done”, when in fact, they could add more value to more people’s lives by taking the reputational risk of an “outside the box” option.