This seems to be a relatively balanced article which discusses serveral concepts of utility with a focus on their problems, while acknowledging some of their use cases. I don’t think the downvotes are justified.
Hedonic and desire theories are perfectly standard, we had plenty of people talking about them here, including myself. Jeffrey’s utility theory is explicitly meant to model (beliefs and) desires. Both are also often discussed in ethics, including over at the EA Forum. Daniel Kahneman haswrittenabout hedonic utility. To equate money with utility is a common simplification in many economic contexts, where expected utility is actually calculated, e.g. when talking about bets and gambles. Even though it isn’t held to be perfectly accurate. I didn’t encounter the reproduction and energy interpretations before, but they do make some sense.
This seems to be a relatively balanced article which discusses serveral concepts of utility with a focus on their problems, while acknowledging some of their use cases. I don’t think the downvotes are justified.
These are not concepts of utility that I’ve ever seen anyone explicitly espouse, especially not here, the place to which it was posted.
Hedonic and desire theories are perfectly standard, we had plenty of people talking about them here, including myself. Jeffrey’s utility theory is explicitly meant to model (beliefs and) desires. Both are also often discussed in ethics, including over at the EA Forum. Daniel Kahneman has written about hedonic utility. To equate money with utility is a common simplification in many economic contexts, where expected utility is actually calculated, e.g. when talking about bets and gambles. Even though it isn’t held to be perfectly accurate. I didn’t encounter the reproduction and energy interpretations before, but they do make some sense.