Let's imagine the case of killing (with no secondary effects) an innocent seriously depressed person (-1000 utility) who doesn’t want to kill themselves as it will affect their family (but only -999 utility). The utilitarian says we should kill the depressed person as then we get -999 utility but we lose -1000 utility which is a net gain of 1 utility. The family of the depressed person is now devastated and the depressed person, sure, isn’t depressed anymore but would rather he wasn’t killed and what he really didn’t want to happen, the misery of his family, happened. It’s just not clear how the world is a better place and yet: net gain of 1 utility.
This article just argues that it's prima facie good to kill people with negative utilities, if we assume no negative ripple effects or getting caught or anything. Your scenario is not the one discussed in the article and thus doesn't dispute the point. Once you agree that it's good to kill those with negative utility, it seems that the utilitarian point has been established.
> Killing people who have a negative quality of life makes them better off.
I get the intention behind this claim, but it's somewhat sloppily worded. After all, a person who currently has a negative quality of life might in the future have a positive quality of life, so killing them won't make them better off.
You also might run into Epicurean concerns about what it means to say that a person is better off dead, since when they're dead, they don't exist, so it doesn't make sense to make a comparison.
As a stylistic note, I would suggest using headers, making your paragraphs shorter, and using more numbered lists. When you pack seven arguments into a single paragraph, it can be difficult to keep it all in memory at once.
We're assuming they'll have a negative overall quality of life. When they're dead they don't exist, but if they did exist they'd be worse off; a comparison makes perfect sense. A person who is viciously tortured is worse off than if they didn't exist.
> One can never be particularly confident in their judgments about the hedonic value of another person
You have argued the exact opposite in several other posts. This seems to undermine the value of utilitarianism as a whole. Even if we were, say, 40% sure that hedonic utilitarianism is true and say that % was a plurality, making it impossible to apply in most circumstaces renders it useless as a driver for action. Theories like that of human rights can at least be applied with some regularity and expinded over time with fairly good precision. Hedonism on the other hand is extremely difficult to expond and develop guidance for because the foundational concept of "happiness" is defined in a way unique to each person.
> undermines desirable societal norms
You already disagree with almost all "mainstream" societal norms about ethics.
> They are cases in which
Motte and Bailey, you can't retreat from your position. If you believed that a person would probably have a bad life for longer then they have a good one, and that the spillover effects wouldn't outweigh the net benefit. You also believe that you have an obligation to kill them. This "absolute certainty" business is something your grafting on here to make yourself appear reasonable.
> absolute certainty that a person will be miserable for the next year and then die
Why not ask them if they want to die, and explain that your alien magic can see their future. If they refuse, it's hard to see who is being harmed. Why is it an ethical imperative to save someone from duffering that they knowingly eand willingly enact upon themselves? If the Aliens in this scenario have no other options, and can only kill him, then I would say that looking to make more options is almost always more productive then killing them.
> the utilitarian account begins to seem more intuitive.
It really does not.
> The intuition against killing seems dependent on the notion that it makes the victim worse off.
And besides, even if someone is "better off dead" its entirely possible that killing them is still bad. Opining about wich world state is better never supplies the answer to why making the best world possible is the ethical imperative.
There is something inherently bad about ending a being.
> Common sense would seem to hold that people can be better off dead, at least in some cases.
But there is sedom a case in which killing someone against their will and wants makes them better off.
> If a person is about to undergo unfathomable torture, it seems plausible that they’d be better off dead.
Perhaps if someone was about to be tortured and there was no time to act, they could be killed on the tehory that they would not want to be tortured and thus an emergency is present. This is not the general case. If someone can be fully informed about just how "unfathomable" this tortue is, why would they be harmed by accepting something willingly?
If I were to try and steel-man this scenario, perhaps thereis a situation where someone cannot be convinced that this torture is in fact about to happen to them and they laugh off your concerns. Well, for one, such a person might agree that they would want to die if this torture was real, in which case perhaps you could kill them. But if they didn't say such a thing, perhaps at some point "unfathomable" torture (which to somene of your imagination would be quite a lot) could outweigh their interest in life.
> Objective list theory [...] Desire theory
ok
> Killing people who have a negative quality of life makes them better off. This seems almost true by definition and follows from all theories of well-being.
This is nonsense. Dying is independently bad for someone even if their quality of life at the moment is better. We wouldn't say that someone experiencing a temporary depression was immidietely better off upon being killed.
This isn't just because of lost future value, but because killing inflicts a real harm upon them at that moment. Particuliarly becausse you are killing them without their consent, which essentially removes all of the agency which gives the world meaning.
> However, even if one believes in rights, it’s hard to make sense of a notion of rights that doesn’t apply in cases of making people better off.
This is the exact same "argument" against rights that you've given in all your prior posts against the, Just delete this sentence and say that you don't believe in rights.
In any event, the whole point of rights is that they apply even where violating someone would make a person "better off" . I.E. by wireheading them.
> it is not a violation of rights to give unconscious people surgery to save their life
Since consent can't be optained in such a case, we usually have a close relative who they as a general matter entrust legal responsibilitu to make such decisions. Though it would be a violation of rights if they had previously refused assent to this.
> A right that will never make anyone better off doesn’t seem to be very plausible.
Obviously if you single out only the cases where a right doesn't make people "better off" it will not make people better off. This is a tautology. Just say you don't believe in rights.
> Additionally, I’ve previously argued that there is no deep distinction between creating a new person with a good life and increasing the happiness of existing people.
This can be true yet not support an argument. Making a person with a bad life and worsening the life of someone who already exists are similiar. But ending a life unwillingly inflicts a unique harm because consent is inapplicable to people who don't exist, and because ending a an existene already here carries inherent badness.
> It seems reasonable to make them not have that dream
I think that messing with someone's mind like that violates a deontological side-constraint.
> it seems reasonable to make them not experience that day
You could ask them first. And if they want to experience that day, then who are you to deny them.
> However, if they don’t consent because of error on their part, then it would be reasonable to fix the error, much like it would be reasonable to force a deluded child to get vaccinated. Killing them seems plausibly analogous in this case.
This sentence is why people hate utilitarians. You will sit in a room in a first world country and declare that your ethical meditations have given you the right to reduce all objectors to 5-year-old antivaxxers who need you to make decisions for them. This is one of the central themes in many of the Anti-EA and anti-utilitarian articles you dismantle here.
No matter how strong your argumentation, this sort of sheer arrogance and hubris is one of the reasons why this brand of utilitarianism is rejected at first sight by many people.
And besides, what is "error"? If someome knows the consequences of their actions and can take them on, then you cannot declare your experiences and knowledge to be better then theirs and summarily kill them because they are in "error". We enforce the distinction between children and adults, and the mentally unwell and the fit because they cannot understand the world around them. Even then , mentally unwell people and children are protected at length by our legal systems in order to maximize their ability to make decisions in areas they are capable of understanding.
Merely disagreeing with your ultimate conclusions as to what makes them better off has never been understood as the rationale for confining decisionmaking by underage and unfit peoples.
In any event, I find enforcing the medical decisions of five-year-olds more plausible then your willingness to murder.
> First, there’s status quo bias, given that one upsets the status quo by killing someone.
People die all the time. You would get the same result if a trolly was about to hit someone and you had the chance to save them.
> Second, we rightly have a strong aversion to killing.
You spent the entire article above arguing against this.
> Third, it’s very easy to imagine acts becoming societal practices when evaluating their morality. However, killing unhappy people would clearly be a bad societal practice.
Ditto
Anyways, thanks for the great blog post as always. I hope you're having a good time at the top secret place you are in! :)
Let's imagine the case of killing (with no secondary effects) an innocent seriously depressed person (-1000 utility) who doesn’t want to kill themselves as it will affect their family (but only -999 utility). The utilitarian says we should kill the depressed person as then we get -999 utility but we lose -1000 utility which is a net gain of 1 utility. The family of the depressed person is now devastated and the depressed person, sure, isn’t depressed anymore but would rather he wasn’t killed and what he really didn’t want to happen, the misery of his family, happened. It’s just not clear how the world is a better place and yet: net gain of 1 utility.
This article just argues that it's prima facie good to kill people with negative utilities, if we assume no negative ripple effects or getting caught or anything. Your scenario is not the one discussed in the article and thus doesn't dispute the point. Once you agree that it's good to kill those with negative utility, it seems that the utilitarian point has been established.
Bro sends this article to that then I reply with that and you say it isn’t relevant 😭
I said I'd respond to objections to the article that you posted. I explained why your objection doesn't apply.
> Killing people who have a negative quality of life makes them better off.
I get the intention behind this claim, but it's somewhat sloppily worded. After all, a person who currently has a negative quality of life might in the future have a positive quality of life, so killing them won't make them better off.
You also might run into Epicurean concerns about what it means to say that a person is better off dead, since when they're dead, they don't exist, so it doesn't make sense to make a comparison.
As a stylistic note, I would suggest using headers, making your paragraphs shorter, and using more numbered lists. When you pack seven arguments into a single paragraph, it can be difficult to keep it all in memory at once.
We're assuming they'll have a negative overall quality of life. When they're dead they don't exist, but if they did exist they'd be worse off; a comparison makes perfect sense. A person who is viciously tortured is worse off than if they didn't exist.
> One can never be particularly confident in their judgments about the hedonic value of another person
You have argued the exact opposite in several other posts. This seems to undermine the value of utilitarianism as a whole. Even if we were, say, 40% sure that hedonic utilitarianism is true and say that % was a plurality, making it impossible to apply in most circumstaces renders it useless as a driver for action. Theories like that of human rights can at least be applied with some regularity and expinded over time with fairly good precision. Hedonism on the other hand is extremely difficult to expond and develop guidance for because the foundational concept of "happiness" is defined in a way unique to each person.
> undermines desirable societal norms
You already disagree with almost all "mainstream" societal norms about ethics.
> They are cases in which
Motte and Bailey, you can't retreat from your position. If you believed that a person would probably have a bad life for longer then they have a good one, and that the spillover effects wouldn't outweigh the net benefit. You also believe that you have an obligation to kill them. This "absolute certainty" business is something your grafting on here to make yourself appear reasonable.
> absolute certainty that a person will be miserable for the next year and then die
Why not ask them if they want to die, and explain that your alien magic can see their future. If they refuse, it's hard to see who is being harmed. Why is it an ethical imperative to save someone from duffering that they knowingly eand willingly enact upon themselves? If the Aliens in this scenario have no other options, and can only kill him, then I would say that looking to make more options is almost always more productive then killing them.
> the utilitarian account begins to seem more intuitive.
It really does not.
> The intuition against killing seems dependent on the notion that it makes the victim worse off.
And besides, even if someone is "better off dead" its entirely possible that killing them is still bad. Opining about wich world state is better never supplies the answer to why making the best world possible is the ethical imperative.
There is something inherently bad about ending a being.
> Common sense would seem to hold that people can be better off dead, at least in some cases.
But there is sedom a case in which killing someone against their will and wants makes them better off.
> If a person is about to undergo unfathomable torture, it seems plausible that they’d be better off dead.
Perhaps if someone was about to be tortured and there was no time to act, they could be killed on the tehory that they would not want to be tortured and thus an emergency is present. This is not the general case. If someone can be fully informed about just how "unfathomable" this tortue is, why would they be harmed by accepting something willingly?
If I were to try and steel-man this scenario, perhaps thereis a situation where someone cannot be convinced that this torture is in fact about to happen to them and they laugh off your concerns. Well, for one, such a person might agree that they would want to die if this torture was real, in which case perhaps you could kill them. But if they didn't say such a thing, perhaps at some point "unfathomable" torture (which to somene of your imagination would be quite a lot) could outweigh their interest in life.
> Objective list theory [...] Desire theory
ok
> Killing people who have a negative quality of life makes them better off. This seems almost true by definition and follows from all theories of well-being.
This is nonsense. Dying is independently bad for someone even if their quality of life at the moment is better. We wouldn't say that someone experiencing a temporary depression was immidietely better off upon being killed.
This isn't just because of lost future value, but because killing inflicts a real harm upon them at that moment. Particuliarly becausse you are killing them without their consent, which essentially removes all of the agency which gives the world meaning.
> However, even if one believes in rights, it’s hard to make sense of a notion of rights that doesn’t apply in cases of making people better off.
This is the exact same "argument" against rights that you've given in all your prior posts against the, Just delete this sentence and say that you don't believe in rights.
In any event, the whole point of rights is that they apply even where violating someone would make a person "better off" . I.E. by wireheading them.
> it is not a violation of rights to give unconscious people surgery to save their life
Since consent can't be optained in such a case, we usually have a close relative who they as a general matter entrust legal responsibilitu to make such decisions. Though it would be a violation of rights if they had previously refused assent to this.
> A right that will never make anyone better off doesn’t seem to be very plausible.
Obviously if you single out only the cases where a right doesn't make people "better off" it will not make people better off. This is a tautology. Just say you don't believe in rights.
> Additionally, I’ve previously argued that there is no deep distinction between creating a new person with a good life and increasing the happiness of existing people.
This can be true yet not support an argument. Making a person with a bad life and worsening the life of someone who already exists are similiar. But ending a life unwillingly inflicts a unique harm because consent is inapplicable to people who don't exist, and because ending a an existene already here carries inherent badness.
> It seems reasonable to make them not have that dream
I think that messing with someone's mind like that violates a deontological side-constraint.
> it seems reasonable to make them not experience that day
You could ask them first. And if they want to experience that day, then who are you to deny them.
> However, if they don’t consent because of error on their part, then it would be reasonable to fix the error, much like it would be reasonable to force a deluded child to get vaccinated. Killing them seems plausibly analogous in this case.
This sentence is why people hate utilitarians. You will sit in a room in a first world country and declare that your ethical meditations have given you the right to reduce all objectors to 5-year-old antivaxxers who need you to make decisions for them. This is one of the central themes in many of the Anti-EA and anti-utilitarian articles you dismantle here.
No matter how strong your argumentation, this sort of sheer arrogance and hubris is one of the reasons why this brand of utilitarianism is rejected at first sight by many people.
And besides, what is "error"? If someome knows the consequences of their actions and can take them on, then you cannot declare your experiences and knowledge to be better then theirs and summarily kill them because they are in "error". We enforce the distinction between children and adults, and the mentally unwell and the fit because they cannot understand the world around them. Even then , mentally unwell people and children are protected at length by our legal systems in order to maximize their ability to make decisions in areas they are capable of understanding.
Merely disagreeing with your ultimate conclusions as to what makes them better off has never been understood as the rationale for confining decisionmaking by underage and unfit peoples.
In any event, I find enforcing the medical decisions of five-year-olds more plausible then your willingness to murder.
> First, there’s status quo bias, given that one upsets the status quo by killing someone.
People die all the time. You would get the same result if a trolly was about to hit someone and you had the chance to save them.
> Second, we rightly have a strong aversion to killing.
You spent the entire article above arguing against this.
> Third, it’s very easy to imagine acts becoming societal practices when evaluating their morality. However, killing unhappy people would clearly be a bad societal practice.
Ditto
Anyways, thanks for the great blog post as always. I hope you're having a good time at the top secret place you are in! :)