Utilitarianism really falls at the first hurdle of any kind of evaluation of a moral system.
It has no real prescriptive power because it demands you be able to correctly foresee the outcome of your actions, something literally addressed by “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”, an adage of at least 400 years ago, and yet people will still gravitate towards it as if society did not explicitly caution us about that mindset forever now.
At this point I can’t help but look down on those who genuinely identify as utilitarian as either too young, too stupid, or actively malevolent and trying to find a way to justify their bad behaviours as errors rather than malice or negligence.
I’d offer you a counterpoint (ignoring the issue with Lutris and AI for a minute):
If you choose not to judge your own actions by the expected consequences of those actions for everyone involved, then how exactly are you supposed to judge them? If you’re following some rule that disagrees with the utilitarian view, then by definition it’s a rule that in your own opinion leads to a worse outcome for everyone.
It’s of course completely fine to not be utilitarian, but trying to claim that all utilitarians are either stupid or evil is just incorrect.
Utilitarianism really falls at the first hurdle of any kind of evaluation of a moral system.
It has no real prescriptive power because it demands you be able to correctly foresee the outcome of your actions, something literally addressed by “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”, an adage of at least 400 years ago, and yet people will still gravitate towards it as if society did not explicitly caution us about that mindset forever now.
At this point I can’t help but look down on those who genuinely identify as utilitarian as either too young, too stupid, or actively malevolent and trying to find a way to justify their bad behaviours as errors rather than malice or negligence.
I’d offer you a counterpoint (ignoring the issue with Lutris and AI for a minute):
If you choose not to judge your own actions by the expected consequences of those actions for everyone involved, then how exactly are you supposed to judge them? If you’re following some rule that disagrees with the utilitarian view, then by definition it’s a rule that in your own opinion leads to a worse outcome for everyone.
It’s of course completely fine to not be utilitarian, but trying to claim that all utilitarians are either stupid or evil is just incorrect.