My Motivation For and Worry About Written Debates About Utilitarianism
The title is pretty self explanatory
One needn’t be a particularly avid reader of the blog, nor be very perceptive, to realize that I’m a big fan of utilitarianism. I think that utilitarianism is not only correct, but overwhelmingly so. It wins outright—by an overwhelming margin.
People often feel very confident in false views. Thus, to avoid falling into an echo chamber, it’s pretty useful to debate about utilitarianism. If I am correct about utilitarianism, it should lead to easy victories in written debates that are sufficiently detailed to resolve the issues. If I am not, however, then it would be much more likely that I’ll lose written debates.
Tragically, it takes much longer to put out a fire than it does to light one. Raising the organ harvesting objection to utilitarianism takes a very short time—responding to it takes many, many words. Thus, verbal debates with fifteen minute opening statements and rebuttals are totally untenable for arguing about utilitarianism.
Huemer was able to present 8 alleged counterexamples to utilitarianism in just over 500 words. Responding to all of those counterexamples took ten articles. It takes a much shorter time to present a counterexample than it does to debunk that counterexample.
This, I think, makes short debates favor the critic of utilitarianism. However, debates with longer word counts do, in my view, end up favoring the utilitarian. After all, one can’t very well present 20 distinct counterexamples to utilitarianism—the response to them would overlap considerably.
I think the last debate I had went pretty well—though my opponent was raising pretty bad objections. I think 5000 words—the word count for the debate articles—is enough for the reasons to favor utilitarianism to be sufficient to ultimately favor the utilitarian—at least, as long as they’re equipped with good arguments.
However, whether this is true remains to be seen—and will be seen in my upcoming debate. If Arjun rattles off 15 counterexamples to utilitarianism—I may be in a bit of trouble. However, as long as the number of arguments remains manageable, the fact that utilitarianism is the truth, the way, and the light, should favor it substantially.
The intuitionist objections tap into various intuitions, but there are only so many and some are going to overlap. I feel like you could come up with a million scenarios to demonstrate the demandingness objection, but if you deal with it once, there is no need to spill ink on it over and over. Similar with the omission-comission distinction. I do feel this is a legitimate concern.