philo

Sounds like Rawls's "original position."

I would want to maximize the statistical expectancy value for my surplus of happiness over suffering in this society. The only thing I can control to this end is the design of the society itself. Given this constraint, I would design its institutions to optimize for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In other words, the thought experiment you describe would make me a utilitarian.

TROLLL

i have to tell you, it tickles me, that two of the most hardline utilitarians on this board are the first two contributors to this fantasy scenario, with hardline utilitarian answers. It's not that the responses are laughable; so much as it's the contrast between a sort of a Dr Seuss' "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" approach to the question v. the ideologically hardened responses that provide the laughs. Neither aspect of the question is comic unto itself, but the combo promotes an understated sort of "New Yorker" type of enunciated "heh".

@ Thomas, specifically: my standard response to a lot of utilitarians regarding your response, were they to make it, would be: can you explain the maths involved? And can you describe the specifics regarding the institutions you would design to optimize human happiness, assuming that you wouldn't have the opportunity to design (or define) humanity? It seems to me that a lot of your response could only be proven by "trial and error", and that thus you are only half (give or take) right.

Given the option of being an idealist, a pessimist, or an utilitarian, and being granted the result of being correct --would you actually opt for the utilitarian result? (i know that the OP scenario was technically different, but the two questions do seem to be somewhat related.)

(In other words, would the thought experiment described actually make you a utilitarian, or has experience, and methods to make it seem correct, deemed that the appropriate response is utilitarianism?)

In a related side note, it seems to me that most utilitarianism is rooted in a belief in an "objective quantifier", or a "metaphorical equalizer" within most situations. Is this a mistaken belief, and how so or how not?

PS: While i am obviously being critical of utilitarianism here, i'd like to make it clear that as a skeptical pragmatist, i find utilitarianism persuasive, which inspires me to play "the Devil's advocate" all the more.

First, I don't think Joefromchicago is a Utilitarian. And even if he were, it certainly isn't "a hardline Utilitarian answer" to point to Rawls's Original Position. Second though, let me address your specific questions:


Basically, yes. Maximizing for utility comes down to finding the best possible tradeoff between efficiency and equality, both of which we can measure in quantitative terms. Granted, Utilitarians disagree about the specific quantitative terms to use. They also disagree about the proper rate for trading off efficiency against equality. That's why I'm hedging my "yes" to your question with the word "basically". But even so, our intellectual grasp on the concept of utility is at least as tight as the medical profession's grasp on the concept of health. So if medicine is rigorous and realistic enough to work as a science, Utilitarianism certainly is rigorous and realistic enough to work as a political and moral philosophy.


My social contract would start with a presumption of anarchy, because I expect, as a rule, that laissez-faire leads to competitive markets, which in turn maximize the general welfare. But the rule has exceptions. Market failure does happen, in ways that economists understand well enough for practical purposes. Therefore, I would then add public interventions that are narrowly tailored to correct those market failures. This includes government itself, which is a source of both positive externalities, negative externalities, asymmetric information, and monopoly power. That makes government an intellectual hairball to deal with, but I think Utilitarians have the intellectual tools to untangle it.


I agree, but I don't see how that's a philosophical problem. Why shouldn't the people behind Rawls's veil of ignorance have a library? Why wouldn't they inform their decisions by reading up on the practical consequencees of particular social institutions?


It would make me a Utilitarian. I'm egoistic. I'm rational. I want to maximize the expectancy value of pleasure I experience throughout my life. The library I just mentioned has informed me about the world I'm about to be born into, so I know approximately how it works. But I don't know my future place in the society I'm creating. Hence, the best I can do for myself is to create one that maximizes the average surplus of pleasure over pain, given the realities of the world. As it happens, that's the goal of Utilitarianism, too. Observe, however, that my Utilitarianism would be a conclusion of the thought experiment, not an assumption.


I can't answer that question, because I have no idea what the terms "objective quantifier" and "metaphoric equalizer" mean.

It seems to me that the utilitarian strategy is what we adopt when the utopian one is impossible. Or perhaps we just try to approximate the utopian strategy is closely as possible; is that a form of utilitarianism?