On Conflation In Philosophy
And how it makes our thinking worse
Consider the following thought experiment.
You can push a person of a bridge in front of a train, which would cause him to die but would press a button that would cause him to be used as a mere means to feed a small child to the utility monster.
While maybe this is counterintuitive — this is clearly not the best argument against utilitarianism. By merging together so many different intuitions, it loses some of its force. This isn’t a good thought experiment because it mixes together too many intuitions. However, this is a way that many counterintuitive implications of utilitarianism are inflated — many different unrelated intuitions are merged together, for especially unintuitive results. I’ll list a few examples
One class of cases involves inflicting suffering on current people to increase the welfare of future people. This conflates two intuitions: that future people don’t matter and that pleasure and pain are incommensurable.
This intuition conflates the intuition about doing and allowing, the intuition that donating isn’t equivalent to saving a life, and demandingness intuitions.
This intuition conflates rights-based considerations, the asymmetry between pleasure and pain, desert-based intuitions, and retributivist intuitions.
The utility monster conflates aggregative and rights intuitions.
Once you start noticing this trend, it pops up everywhere. These cases don’t isolate the intuitions. Thus, in such cases, it’s best to isolate singular intuitions, rather than consider them as a packaged deal.
Do a search on "the whole God issue so far" quotes included. The arguments for utilitarianism, have a utility problem themselves, much like all moral theorizing has the problem of whether one is morally obligated to pay any attention to any moral theorizing in the first place. If not, then you can just ignore all theories of ethical and moral obligation--and with moral imunity due to the consequent irrelevance. If there is a moral obligation to pay attention to moral theorizing, then there's already an unargued, unelaborated, and unmentioned moral obligation running in the background of cognition itself.
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