PhilosophyMemes

204 readers

158 users here now

Memes must be related to phil.

The Memiverse:
!90s_memes@quokk.au
!y2k_memes@quokk.au
!sigh_fi@quokk.au

founded 4 weeks ago

MODERATORS

Deceptichum@quokk.au

132

100 utility (quokk.au)

submitted 1 week ago by Deceptichum@quokk.au to c/philosophymemes@quokk.au

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Trolley is a good example. Or "You run into a burning house and can either save a dog or a human who is in coma". Like, don't even pretend you have a metric for situations that specific. There is also longtermism which I'm sure not all utilitarians subscribe to, basically saying there will be so many people in the future that it's more important to invest in the technology of my stakeholders than to help our contemporaries. And it doesn't matter that I'm rich because I will have more offspring than the poor so it's a net positive. As if you could foresee all the consequences. What you can in fact foresee is the consequence of treating people as your equals.

[–] SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Three good examples - I'd say that

the trolley problem is a reasonable application of utilitarianism, not depending on any other metric than "it is good to stop a person from dying". The main problem with applying it in practice is not the arithmetic (which is sound), but that you are almost never guaranteed that killing the one person will actually save the others.
comatose man vs dog in burning building is a good example of a case where utilitarianism can't give you an answer, but can give you a way of investigating the problem by discussing what utility is in this situation
longtermism is like the reverse of utilitarianism to me. Utilitarianism asks you to ignore the abstract to justify ethics based on actual consequences. Longtermism asks you to ignore the consequences of the present in favor of some made up abstract future utility. It's the opposite of utilitarianism.

Ultimately, utilitarianism isn't about calculating which situation gives more utility, but about critically investigating whether your actions actually make the world a better place.