Rationality can be used toward any goal, including goals that don’t care about anyone’s preference. For example, there’s nothing in the math of utility maximisation that requires averaging over other agents’ preferences (note: do not confuse utility maximisation with utilitarianism, they are very different things, the former being a decision theory, the latter being a specific moral philosophy).
nshepperd, utilitarianism conceived as theory of value is not always carefully distinguished from utilitarianism—especially rule-utilitarianism—conceived as a decision procedure. This distinction is nicely brought out in the BPhil thesis of FHI’s Tony Ord, “Consequentialism and Decision Procedures”:
http://www.amirrorclear.net/academic/papers/decision-procedures.pdf
Toby takes a global utilitarian consequentialist approach to the question, ‘How should I decide what to do?” -
a subtly different question from ’”What should I do?”
Rationality can be used toward any goal, including goals that don’t care about anyone’s preference. For example, there’s nothing in the math of utility maximisation that requires averaging over other agents’ preferences (note: do not confuse utility maximisation with utilitarianism, they are very different things, the former being a decision theory, the latter being a specific moral philosophy).
nshepperd, utilitarianism conceived as theory of value is not always carefully distinguished from utilitarianism—especially rule-utilitarianism—conceived as a decision procedure. This distinction is nicely brought out in the BPhil thesis of FHI’s Tony Ord, “Consequentialism and Decision Procedures”: http://www.amirrorclear.net/academic/papers/decision-procedures.pdf Toby takes a global utilitarian consequentialist approach to the question, ‘How should I decide what to do?” - a subtly different question from ’”What should I do?”