Incoherent. The only thing that drives a belief in Util, as a good friend of mine once said is: "Happiness is good, asking why happiness is good is like asking why 2+2 = 4, it just is!". That's a raw intitutive assertion, one that people can simply disagree with. Most of the virtues of utilitarianism can be captured by other systems that don't rely on happiness being good, and the ones that do not rely entirely on this assertion.
You have misunderstood the point of the article. I am a phenomenal conservative, thinking that seemings give us prima facie justification. However, we can have debunkings of our seemings. Throughout this article I presented a series of considerations favoring utilitarianism, explaining why the intuitions that we have are the ones we'd be expected to have on the hypothesis that utilitarianism is true.
The claim that utilitarianism is only justified by the claim that happiness is good is a blatant falsehood. For one, there are many utilitarians who are not hedonists. If you would like to see my case for utilitarianism, I'd suggest reading through the upwards of 30 articles I've written on the subject--none of which have relied purely on the intuition that happiness is good, or on my compendium of all of them (https://benthams.substack.com/p/all-my-writings-on-utilitarianism).
The claim that the virtues of utilitarianism can be captured by other systems is another fabrication. As I've argued elsewhere, utilitarianism can be deduced from a variety of plausible axioms, has a good historical record, does well in terms of theoretical virtues, is the best explanation of numerous facets of our moral experience, and is rigorously confirmed by the fact that every time utilitarianism seems wrong, we can find independent potent argument to debunk intuition underlying the opposition to utilitarianism. It also unlike other systems has clearly defined parameters and avoids paradoxes. Please tell me which other systems have several independent ways of being derived from plausible first principles, depend on simple axioms, have an excellent historical track record, and have been robustly confirmed even in cases of apparent counterexamples.
Your quote, incidentally, is another fabrication. At no point did I say that this judgment was what derived a belief in utilitarianism. Rather, the point in dispute related to the ontological foundations of morality. I held that, much like there are certain true mathematical axioms that have no deeper account, the same is true of morality. Asking why utilitarianism is true is much like asking why the law of non contradiction is true. There can be dispute about whether or not it is true, yet if it is true, it won't be true in virtue of deeper more fundamental facts. There are some things that are true with no deeper accounts.
As anyone who is at all familiar with my blog will be aware of, I do not think that there's nothing more to say in support of utilitarianism, beyond appealing to the obviousness of the judgment that happiness is good and pain isn't. I have written more than 30 articles on the subject--no one who has seriously read them could be under the delusion that that is the epistemic foundation for my moral views.
Given these many virtues of utilitarianism, the point of this article was to describe what we'd expect to be the case if utilitarianism were true. We'd expect it to sometimes diverge from our intuitions, given that our intuitions are far from perfect. I presented numerous considerations about why the type of divergence from our intuitions is what we'd expect on the hypothesis that utilitarianism were correct. Do you have anything to say about these considerations?
Incoherent. The only thing that drives a belief in Util, as a good friend of mine once said is: "Happiness is good, asking why happiness is good is like asking why 2+2 = 4, it just is!". That's a raw intitutive assertion, one that people can simply disagree with. Most of the virtues of utilitarianism can be captured by other systems that don't rely on happiness being good, and the ones that do not rely entirely on this assertion.
You have misunderstood the point of the article. I am a phenomenal conservative, thinking that seemings give us prima facie justification. However, we can have debunkings of our seemings. Throughout this article I presented a series of considerations favoring utilitarianism, explaining why the intuitions that we have are the ones we'd be expected to have on the hypothesis that utilitarianism is true.
The claim that utilitarianism is only justified by the claim that happiness is good is a blatant falsehood. For one, there are many utilitarians who are not hedonists. If you would like to see my case for utilitarianism, I'd suggest reading through the upwards of 30 articles I've written on the subject--none of which have relied purely on the intuition that happiness is good, or on my compendium of all of them (https://benthams.substack.com/p/all-my-writings-on-utilitarianism).
The claim that the virtues of utilitarianism can be captured by other systems is another fabrication. As I've argued elsewhere, utilitarianism can be deduced from a variety of plausible axioms, has a good historical record, does well in terms of theoretical virtues, is the best explanation of numerous facets of our moral experience, and is rigorously confirmed by the fact that every time utilitarianism seems wrong, we can find independent potent argument to debunk intuition underlying the opposition to utilitarianism. It also unlike other systems has clearly defined parameters and avoids paradoxes. Please tell me which other systems have several independent ways of being derived from plausible first principles, depend on simple axioms, have an excellent historical track record, and have been robustly confirmed even in cases of apparent counterexamples.
Your quote, incidentally, is another fabrication. At no point did I say that this judgment was what derived a belief in utilitarianism. Rather, the point in dispute related to the ontological foundations of morality. I held that, much like there are certain true mathematical axioms that have no deeper account, the same is true of morality. Asking why utilitarianism is true is much like asking why the law of non contradiction is true. There can be dispute about whether or not it is true, yet if it is true, it won't be true in virtue of deeper more fundamental facts. There are some things that are true with no deeper accounts.
As anyone who is at all familiar with my blog will be aware of, I do not think that there's nothing more to say in support of utilitarianism, beyond appealing to the obviousness of the judgment that happiness is good and pain isn't. I have written more than 30 articles on the subject--no one who has seriously read them could be under the delusion that that is the epistemic foundation for my moral views.
Given these many virtues of utilitarianism, the point of this article was to describe what we'd expect to be the case if utilitarianism were true. We'd expect it to sometimes diverge from our intuitions, given that our intuitions are far from perfect. I presented numerous considerations about why the type of divergence from our intuitions is what we'd expect on the hypothesis that utilitarianism were correct. Do you have anything to say about these considerations?