But a good utilitarian will certainly take into account the likelyhood of bad information and act appropriately. Hence the great utilitarian Mill’s advocacy of minimal interference in people’s lives in On Liberty, largely on the basis of the ways that ubiquitous bad information will make well-intentioned interference backfire often enough to make it a lower expected utility strategy in a very wide range of cases.
A competent utilitarian might be able to take into account the limitations of noisy information, maybe even in some way more useful than passivity. That’s not the same class of problem as information which has been deliberately and systematically corrupted by an actual conspiracy in order to lead the utilitarian decisionmaker to the conspiracy’s preferred conclusion.
But a good utilitarian will certainly take into account the likelyhood of bad information and act appropriately. Hence the great utilitarian Mill’s advocacy of minimal interference in people’s lives in On Liberty, largely on the basis of the ways that ubiquitous bad information will make well-intentioned interference backfire often enough to make it a lower expected utility strategy in a very wide range of cases.
A competent utilitarian might be able to take into account the limitations of noisy information, maybe even in some way more useful than passivity. That’s not the same class of problem as information which has been deliberately and systematically corrupted by an actual conspiracy in order to lead the utilitarian decisionmaker to the conspiracy’s preferred conclusion.