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(Another nice new discussion. - promoted by Seth Baum)
I've just read an interesting article on the political philosophy of John Rawls (http://tinyurl.com/578ba5). The article states that Rawls wrote his most famous work, A Theory of Justice, to overcome some of the problems of Utilitarianism. The example given in the article: "Suppose executing the Danish cartoonists will appease a Muslim mob, and that doing so increases total satisfaction. A utilitarian would have to endorse the execution."
This criticism of Utilitarianism, and all those of the same class, seem, in my opinion, to be fallacious. They arise because the criticisms often assume a sudden introduction and widespread acceptance of Utilitarianism by society at large, i.e, Instant Utilitarianism.
Wikipedia has a List of utilitarians page. It might be nice to give it some quick additions. It also doesn't have any references, which would be helpful for those who are not obviously utilitarians. Finally, I'm nervous about how to classify the numerous quasi/pseudo utilitarians that have populated economics over the years. For discussion, see the Wikipedia talk page or use the comment thread here.
Also in response to Toby's nice list of topics in utilitarianism. Desert in ethics means "that which is deserved". Utilitarianism is typically indifferent to desert, but some (e.g. Fred Feldman) have proposed building desert into a utilitarianism variation.
I have a simple alternative to negative utilitarianism;
A focus on optimizing lifelong individual happiness through individual rights (assigning higher value to sentient beings with more capacity to suffer and contribute to world improvement) while working towards the abolition of involuntary suffering.
Why?
1. avoidance of lump sum measurements of goodness in favor of individual rights meant to optimize lifelong individual happiness
2. negative utilitarianism does not imply that involuntary suffering should be eliminated - instead it focuses on eliminating suffering in order to increase the balance of pleasure over pain - while retaining involuntary suffering indefinately.
I hereby call this Abolitionism (you can send me money if you like)...
In Bentham's day, there was no biotechnological revolution, he couldn't have realized the possibilities for improving functionality and eliminating involuntary suffering. So he probably thought - you try the best to increase the good and decrease the bad while not expecting to get much higher than the hedonic treadmill allowed.
What major aspects of utilitarianism, either theoretical or applied, remain unsolved, or not yet solved to our satisfaction? Off the top of my head, I come up with infinite utility theory and the related "Is infinite utility possible?" (see Future of the Universe); "What is utility?" and the related "What is consciousness?". We could also add Where to donate? and how to best reduce existential risk and how best to solve many other problems if we'd like.
According to total utilitarianism, we should maximize the total amount of utility that ever gets experienced, regardless of who it occurs in. According to prior existence utilitarianism, we should maximize the total amount of utility that gets experienced by those individuals who would exist regardless of what we do. Thus, T says we can do good by bringing an individual into existence, whereas PE says we cannot.
Below: Some examples of where this debate comes up, and why I support T.
Should I try to reduce existential risk, or should I try to find something even more worthy of my time? While I of course do want to work on that project which is most worthy of my time, searching for optimal projects is itself a time consuming endeavor. How do I know what the optimal search length is?
This question gets into the matter of optimal decision procedures. This is a very important, and, to hear it from Toby Ord's excellent thesis (pdf) on the topic, often-overlooked component of utilitarianism.
Update: Irony- one week after writing this, I stumble upon an apparent error in the analysis that lead me to conclude existential risk reduction should be so heavily prioritized. (See big oops.) -June 29, 2007.
Richard Posner brought up a rich idea towards the end of his Slate debate with Peter Singer: hard vs soft utilitarianism. A hard utilitarian is one who follows utilitarianism to its complete logical conclusions, whatever they may be; a soft utilitarian is one who uses utilitarianism as a general guide but allows some logical inconsistency when logic sufficiently conflicts with intuition. A hard utilitarian is one who treats utilitarianism as the ultimate guide for behavior; a soft utilitarian is one who treats utilitarianism as a tool that's helpful for analyzing certain problems but inappropriate for others. A hard utilitarian is a zealot, a fanatic; a soft utilitarian likes the idea but is not compelled to go the distance.
Otherwise known as Pareto efficiency. It's the watered-down version of utilitarianism that serves as the backbone for most economics for the last 100 years or so. It's also just about the most minimalist ethics out there. I can only assume its popularity derives largely from how modest and unobjectionable its claim is:
If anything can be done that would make at least one individual better of without making anyone worse off, then it should be done.
However, its claims are for many (myself included), too modest, as it fails to consider any distributional issues. Amartya Sen put it well:
Utilitarianism's got a problem: It recommends maximizing total utility, but if there's even the slightest chance that this total utility could be infinitely large, then the whole system breaks down. Or at least that's the impression we get from reading Nick Bostrom's Infinite Ethics (pdf) paper.
I wrestled with this topic for quite some time recently. I've enjoyed this work more than just about anything else I've ever done (that's me in a nutshell: abstract math + ethics = fun), but it has also left me distressed for my beloved utilitarianism on more than one occasion. I've now got an approach that satisfies me, but perhaps yinz can pick it apart and send me back to square one.
The idea came from a comment buried in the middle of a mammoth series of testimonies to the UK government on climate change. The comment said we're not moving towards global utilitarianism. But, as flawed as I might find them, works like the Stern Review's PAGE and even Nordhaus's DICE are attempts to figure out how to maximize global utility. That Nordhaus discounts future utility is an important detail, but he still works with a framework that's in other respects similar to utilitarianism. And these works have been taken quite seriously by the global community. Are we looking at the first step towards global utilitarianism?
I don't follow the difference between preference and hedonistic utilitarianism. (see also) Isn't hedonistic pleasure just what comes from preference satisfaction? If not, where do these two flavors of utilitarianism differ? Perhaps preference utilitarianism is trying to require a higher level of thinking? For example, maybe I could get pleasure from unsuspected phenomenon that I hadn't thought about enough to "prefer". On the other hand, given that it brought me pleasure, I'm bound to prefer it. Perhaps preference utilitarianism is trying to capture a more sophisticated concept of utility than simple pleasure? For example, I might not prefer some pleasure-inducing intoxicant because even though it makes me feel happy, I recognize its superficiality and prefer something more meaningful. On the other hand, it is straightforward, and in my view appropriate, to use a definition of pleasure broad enough to capture this more sophisticated feeling. So, in the two cases I can think of where they may differ, they become equivalent to each other with the right definitions of preference and pleasure. Perhaps yinz know better than me.
Stentor Danielson at debitage has an interesting post up Why Utilitarians Have Become Conservative discussing Contemporary Political Philosophy by Will Kymlicka. Kymlicka's argument is summarized as: The original utilitarians (eg Bentham, Mill) were radical progressives; the new ones are either not radical (Hare) or possibly not progressive (Singer). A possible reason is that progress (gender, racial equality) occurred so utilitarianism is no longer radical. Danielson questions this, citing economic inequality and the penal system.
