Utilitarianism

joefromchicago wrote:

David: As I understand it, for the utilitarian pleasure should always be maximized and pain should always be minimized. If that is correct, then can we conclude that pleasure is always good and pain is always bad?

I don't want to speak for all utilitarians, but I would say both statements are almost right. If you mean by pleasure and pain just the experiencing of pleasure and pain, then I would agree, but I would replace 'good' and 'bad' with 'weighs towards good' and 'weighs towards bad', as it is the overall consequences we are concerned with (tending horribly towards infinity, but that's another point).

The pleasure weighs towards good in-and-of-itself, but we should consider other consequences; it might result in future pain, or pain for others, for example. The pain weighs towards bad in-and-of-itself, but we should consider other consequences; it might result in a more painful experience being avoided.

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thethinkfactory wrote:

...should be mandatory reading for ethics classes who quickly brush virtue ethics under the rug as outdated and quaint.

Perhaps we should debate the pros and cons of consequentialism and virtue ethics. This may be the crux of the debate.

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Yes, I have a problem with pure consequentalist ethic. As I have argued in another thread, a cause will provide effect, which would in turn provide its own effect, ad infinitum. There is no final sum of whether good has been done or not, because if the Universe is eternal, we could not judge whether there is more good done as a result of our actions or not.

Think about this situation:
A butterfly flaps its wings, due to the butterfly effect, a hurricane forms in the Atlantic, moved to the US and caused a lot of damage. Was the butterfly acting morally? If intention is negligent, and only what happened matter, then the butterfly would indeed be immoral according to pure consequentalists.

I think that both intention and the result of the action (preferably the direct result negleging the infinite effects it might originally set into effect) should be considered in juding what is ethical or not.

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Cyracuz wrote:

Happiness was defined as a feeling that is better than no feeling. ALL feeling is better than no feeling. If not, who would hold hate in their hearts?

I agree that my suggest definition of happiness "a feeling that is better than no feeling" is wrong, as it is in fact a definition of a pleasurable feeling, not of happiness (see earlier post).

However, I do not agree that all feeling is better than no feeling. Many people who are in constant physical or emotional pain, who think that there is no chance of their situation changing, decide that no feeling is better than the feelings they are experiencing, they commit suicide, or ask for euthanasia.

As for hate, feeling hateful can be pleasurable. It just tends to have other, less pleasurable, consequences...

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Pleasure is a very general term.

I think peaceful feeling is the feeling that is better than no feeling. Honestly, I need to study neuropsychology first.

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Ray wrote:

Yes, I have a problem with pure consequentalist ethic. As I have argued in another thread, a cause will provide effect, which would in turn provide its own effect, ad infinitum. There is no final sum of whether good has been done or not, because if the Universe is eternal, we could not judge whether there is more good done as a result of our actions or not.

Think about this situation:
A butterfly flaps its wings, due to the butterfly effect, a hurricane forms in the Atlantic, moved to the US and caused a lot of damage. Was the butterfly acting morally? If intention is negligent, and only what happened matter, then the butterfly would indeed be immoral according to pure consequentalists.

I think that both intention and the result of the action (preferably the direct result negleging the infinite effects it might originally set into effect) should be considered in juding what is ethical or not.

I am inclined to agree with you, Ray.

However, I am not sure what you mean by 'pure consequentialism'. My (limited) understanding of consequentialism was that it is a system for determining whether an action is 'good' or 'bad', not a system for determining whether a person is being good or bad.

We make this distinction all the time. Going back to my doctor analogue, if a doctor injected a patient with a medicine, which he thought (based on all the information he had available to him) would save the patient's life, and it turned out that the injection killed the patient, who would have otherwise lived, we would probably say that the action of injecting the patient with the medicine was a bad action, but not that the Doctor was being bad.

Assuming that a consequentialist way of determining the goodness or badness of an action is right, I could then go on to consider how I could determine whether a person is being good or bad. It is a separate question. I would agree with Ray that intent is a factor, as is effort in assessing consequences. If anyone wishes to discuss ways of assessing the goodness or badness of a person in a consequentialist system, I would be happy to set up another thread to do this.

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What I meant by "pure" was "strict". Sorry about the confusion.

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Ray wrote:

Pleasure is a very general term.

I think peaceful feeling is the feeling that is better than no feeling. Honestly, I need to study neuropsychology first.

I agree, I also find that peaceful feeling is better than no feeling. Presumably, exactly what is pleasurable for a person is unique to them. One man's peacefulness might be another man's boredom...

The point is that everyone can distinguish between what is pleasurable and what is painful for them, and it is this that utilitarianism takes into account.

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djbt, to say that happiness is a feeling that is better than no feeling is not wrong. It is true after all. Smile

But it does not separate the feeling of happiness from all the other feelings one can experience, so the definition is not much use in this case.

I see you have included physical pain to the list, and I'm not sure I agree. Physical pain is sensation while I had the impression we were talking feelings as in emotions. People can be driven to madness by pain, and in madness do all kinds of strange things.

But overall, a person who is in love, -and feel free to ask anybody, this person would rather have the feeling of hate in her heart than no feeling when love vacates the premisis along with the cheating boyfriend. No, I maintain my stand, that all feeling is better than no feeling.

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The point is that everyone can distinguish between what is pleasurable and what is painful for them, and it is this that utilitarianism takes into account

Can everyone do that? In the long run too? Sometimes poison tatses like the sweetest fruits, and the traps you walk into aren't the ones you are aware of. I agree that you can divide your experiences into pleasurable and painful, but when it comes to the future none of us have any idea what will bring pleasure to it. We have hopes about it, and I'm not even sure that is always a good thing...

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We are misunderstanding each other, I should have defined my terms, sorry.

I do not mean 'emotion' by 'feeling'. I mean an instant of experience. We are constantly feeling - that is experiencing. When I eat chocolate, I feel (experience) pleasurable feelings (instants of experience), although I may be simultaneously feeling painful feelings, I might be cold for example. When I am stabbed with a pin, I feel painful feelings, although I may be simultaneously feeling pleasurable feelings (I might be, um, eating chocolate).

Despite the great mixture of feelings I feel at any one time, I would say that all feelings are either pleasurable or painful, to varying degrees. Imagine a scale from black to white. Every point on the scale is either lighter or darker than the grey in the middle (expect, of course, the infinitely small grey in the middle...).

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Cyracuz wrote:

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The point is that everyone can distinguish between what is pleasurable and what is painful for them, and it is this that utilitarianism takes into account

Can everyone do that? In the long run too? Sometimes poison tatses like the sweetest fruits, and the traps you walk into aren't the ones you are aware of. I agree that you can divide your experiences into pleasurable and painful, but when it comes to the future none of us have any idea what will bring pleasure to it. We have hopes about it, and I'm not even sure that is always a good thing...

I agree, but this is a separate point. Utilitarianism is concerned with the pleasurableness/painfulness of an experience when it is experienced, whether that is now or in the future. Utilitarianism would somehow balance the pleasurable-ness of the sweet-tasting poison with the future painful-ness of being poisoned. Depending on other factors, it would probably conclude that it would be wrong to drink the poison.

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Ok, I think I understand now. But according to the definition you offer it is even more evident that all feeling is better than no feeling. No feeling would have to be death, a state in wich you do not experience anything.

I agree that feelings are either painful or pleasurable if that is the scale you chose to use for it. But it is a consideration wich is most often done in retrospect.

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Cyracuz wrote:

Ok, I think I understand now. But according to the definition you offer it is even more evident that all feeling is better than no feeling. No feeling would have to be death, a state in wich you do not experience anything.

You are correct, no feeling would be death. Death seems to be, in the position I outlined, almost amoral (to the person who dies, at least). But isn't death less bad than constant pain? And isn't death worse than some pleasure in life? Life brings with it the possibility of both pleasure and pain, so it is both good and bad!

Cyracuz wrote:

I agree that feelings are either painful or pleasurable if that is the scale you chose to use for it. But it is a consideration wich is most often done in retrospect.

It seems to me that pleasure and pain are never experienced, or differentiated, in retrospect, always in the present, in the instant that they are experienced.

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I see it this way: Life is the process of dying. If life is good, how can death not be? They are inseparably linked.

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It seems to me that pleasure and pain are never experienced, or differentiated, in retrospect, always in the present, in the instant that they are experienced.

I am of a different opinion. Think about children who run about until they fall and injure themselves. I've seen it many times. The kid gets up, a small trickle of blood running down his hand unnoticed and continues playing. The mother panics and runs to the kid, who becomes aware of the blood and suddenly is in pain.

A friend of mine once started bleeding from the head after a small accident. (He bumped his head on the way out of a car) He felt fine, but when he removed his cap two hours later and saw that he had bled a little, his head started aching and he became weak.

So, we do not always know we're in the shyt before we're through.

Once long ago, out of boredom, we did a stunt with a public bathroom. The deal was to see who could stay inside for the longest without vomiting. (It was a particularly natsy bathroom). What we found out was that we could stay in there basically as long as we wanted. The problem came when we got fresh air. That's when it's hard not to vomit, not while you're in the stench, but afterwards. Don't know why.

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I don't think we are quite talking about the same thing when we say 'pain'. It seems to me that in all the examples above, the pain is experienced 'live', it couldn't be any other way! Even if the injury that causes the pain happens earlier, the actual feeling of pain happens in the moment.

To take your example, and simplify to illustrate - the boy feels a little pain (physical pain) when he first injures himself, but it's outweighed by pleasure (excitement) so he doesn't really notice it. The mothers sees the injury, and experiences pain (fear, panic). The boy sees his mother's panic, and the pleasure (excitement) disappears, and new pain (fear, panic) is added to the old pain (the physical pain) and the boy gets upset.

Similarly, in the headache example, bit of a truism, but the man only feels the pain of the headache when he has the headache - the fact that it was caused earlier isn't important, the pain is live.

Does that clear up this disagreement?

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No, because the only thing that has changed is the man knowing about the wound. The headache came with awareness of the injury and not with the injury itself, so it was not live. But it was live in the sense that the man experienced anything at all.

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I disagree with Cyracuz on this statement:

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I see it this way: Life is the process of dying. If life is good, how can death not be? They are inseparably linked.

Just because there is an end to our life, it does not equate to life as being the process of death. The process of drinking is not the process of thirst. Life is the process of living.

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I am of a different opinion. Think about children who run about until they fall and injure themselves. I've seen it many times. The kid gets up, a small trickle of blood running down his hand unnoticed and continues playing. The mother panics and runs to the kid, who becomes aware of the blood and suddenly is in pain.

Sometimes it takes a bit of time for the chemicals to gather and send signal to your brain. I played basketball and fell over once. My knee was bleeding though I did not know it then. I felt a bit of tingling uneasiness but nothing too painful only annoying at that time, but as time went by, it got worse.

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Cyracuz wrote:

No, because the only thing that has changed is the man knowing about the wound. The headache came with awareness of the injury and not with the injury itself, so it was not live. But it was live in the sense that the man experienced anything at all.

That the pain is "live in the sense that the man experienced anything at all" is, I think, all we need to establish for a discussion of utilitatarianism, as it is pain and pleasure in this sense that are considered important.

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Ray wrote:

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The process of drinking is not the process of thirst.

So you are saying that there is no connection between thirst and water?

A racecar driver who has to go two hundred laps, he is heading for the finishline no matter if he's got one or 199 laps to go.

If we were to visit a hospital, and I were to point out an old man with tubes sticking out of him and a machine doing most of the breathing, I am pretty sure you would agree that he's dying.

But if I showed you a new born child and said the same thing you would probably disagree. But isn't the child on the same path as the old man. You cannot guarantee many things, but one thing is certain. One day that child will be where the old man is.

So I maintain that life is the process of dying. Our inherent sense of harmony and goodness comes from our mortality.

djbt, I understand what you mean by "live" now. But does utilitarianism take into account that many people don't know what they find pleasurable and painful? Of course some know to some extent, but we are remarkably ignorant on the subject most of us.

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So you are saying that there is no connection between thirst and water?

Not what I'm saying at all. Drinking and thirst are two different things. One drinks to get rid of thirst, that is why one drinks.

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A racecar driver who has to go two hundred laps, he is heading for the finishline no matter if he's got one or 199 laps to go.

Yes because that is the whole purpose of the race. So you're saying that our purpose is to die? Contradictory isn't it?

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If we were to visit a hospital, and I were to point out an old man with tubes sticking out of him and a machine doing most of the breathing, I am pretty sure you would agree that he's dying.

Yes, he is dying because his body is in the process of dying.

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But if I showed you a new born child and said the same thing you would probably disagree. But isn't the child on the same path as the old man. You cannot guarantee many things, but one thing is certain. One day that child will be where the old man is.

I know what you mean, but that does not equate the process of living to the process of dying. I emphasize the difference between two different parts of the life cycle. Whereas a newborn baby is growing, an old man sick and his body decaying is dying.

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So I maintain that life is the process of dying. Our inherent sense of harmony and goodness comes from our mortality.

And I maintain that life is the process of living up to a natural point of time. I think it's a less depressing and more accurate description of life.

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Utilitarianism

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