Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 20: Why Your Prior Should Be Higher
Utilitarianism is the default
One consideration favoring utilitarianism, that I’ve overlooked so far, is that it’s a very intuitive principle. Generally, when people first hear about utiltarianism it just seems obviously true. It’s only when people are presented with objections to utilitarianism that they abandon it, in favor of some other theory. However, the starting intuitiveness of utilitarianism counts in favor of believing it. Generally, if something seems true, that gives us prima facie reason to believe that it is true. In the absence of a defeater, we’re reasonable to trust the reliability of our sense, cognitive processes, and many others. The notion that one should try to make the world as good as possible just seems obvious upon first blush.
This means that utilitarianism should be the default. If we cannot give a decisive objection to utilitarianism, we should continue believing it. As I have argued previously, the common objections to utilitarianism actually are evidence for utilitarianism. While it produces results that are unintuitive at first, they turn out to be correct. Much like a scientific theory making correct predictions is confirmed, a moral theory making correct moral predictions is similarly confirmed.
So we should start with a high prior in utilitarianism. We then update on all of the cases and they confirm utilitarianism. Thus, we should be overall very confident in utilitarianism.
This initial intuitiveness is often overlooked—given how much utilitarians reject common sense intuitions, they often ignore that utilitarianism is itself very intuitive. This is a mistake. A theory being very intuitive counts in favor of it.
This fact about utilitarianism seeming intuitive at first is far from decisive. But it is worth considering when analyzing utilitarianism.