Don’t know if I am preaching to the choir, but with how much libs try to use the trolley problem to support their favorite war criminal, it got me thinking just how cringe utilitarianism is.

Whatever utilitarianism may be in theory, in practice, it just trains people to think like bureaucrats who belive themselves to be impartial observers of society (not true), holding power over the lives of others for the sake of the common good. It’s imo a perfect distillation of bourgeois ideology into a theory of ethics. It’s a theory of ethics from the pov of a statesman or a capitalist. Only those groups of people have the power and information necessary to actually act in a meaningfully utilitarian manner.

It’s also note worthy just how prone to creating false dichotomies and ignoring historical context utilitarians are. Although this might just be the result of the trolley problem being so popular.

  • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    I mean, you won’t be finding many people who actually adopt explicit codes of ethics in general

    Yeah, this is just theoretical. I am pretty much assuming we are talking about computers calculating morality here rather than actual people.

    There are better analogies that would involve just using set theory

    Yeah, scratch my analogy. It’s actually kind of terrible.

    instead of [an action being good because it has such-and-such consequences], [you have a duty to perform actions that are evaluated to have such-and-such consequences].

    Well, the latter is just called act utilitarianism, which is more or less any moral system which is deontological but tries to approximate utilitarianism. Basically, you create a deontological ruleset which tries to predict in advance what maximises utility.

    It only approximates utilitarianism as I see it because once a deontological ruleset is laid out, you can’t change it. If you then encounter an action which will have negative conquerors, but you should do according to your ruleset, you have to do it, or else you are just doing utilitarianism and calling it deontology.

    You can improve the approximation arbitrarily by making a richer and richer ruleset, but this requires more and more knowledge and computing beforehand.

    • Tomorrow_Farewell [any, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Well, the latter is just called act utilitarianism

      Given that, under that system, you have a duty to do something, it is deontological.

      Basically, you create a deontological ruleset which tries to predict in advance what maximises utility

      It’s not really predicting anything, not necessarily. Who or what evaluates the possible consequences of an action can be determined in a lot of ways that are more granular than just being on a per-rule basis.

      It only approximates utilitarianism as I see it because once a deontological ruleset is laid out, you can’t change it

      The same applies to all the other codes of ethics, considering that they are just systems of logic.

      If you then encounter an action which will have negative conquerors, but you should do according to your ruleset, you have to do it, or else you are just doing utilitarianism and calling it deontology

      If the predictions regarding the consequences of a particular actions are reevaluated and it is no longer a good action under a given utilitarian code of ethics, it also becomes a non-good action under the equivalent deontological code of ethics/you no longer have a duty to perform it.

      I think, you have a very narrow and naive view of deontology, which seems to often be instilled in students when Kantian deontology is taught to them using very primitive examples.

      But also, I very much do posit that, as prescriptive systems, deontological ones, consequentialist ones, and deontological-consequentialist mixed ones can’t really be distinguished in any significant manner. As such (provided that we are working with a utilitarian system that does not involve any elements of virtue-based codes of ethics), I can just say ‘utilitarianism is just deontology in a trench coat’.

      You can improve the approximation arbitrarily by making a richer and richer ruleset

      I have provided a method for finding an equivalent deontological code of ethics that differs from the original one in terms of the cardinality of the set of rules by an addition of just one axiom.

      • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        I think, you have a very narrow and naive view of deontology, which seems to often be instilled in students when Kantian deontology is taught to them using very primitive examples.

        Maybe this is the case.