I very much enjoyed this, and you made some important and plausible arguments. If I get some time, I would like to respond in more detail. For now, I concede that the point about purgatory was excessively rhetorical. I would add however that my intuition tells me that 100 flourishing people (100/100) are better than 1000 people who barely want to remain alive (5.1/100). On the other hand, I don't know that adding up utility across people makes metaphysical sense, though it is probably useful--perhaps indispensable--for public policy.
Let us compare here on the one hand the most common understanding, gifted with very limited intellectual capacities with on the other hand a highly intellectual understanding which is capable of foreseeing lots of possible consequences of his actions (maybe he’s a scholar in ethics). When they are both presented with a moral issue in which they have to decide which action is the morally right thing to do, the only difference between the two will be that the first has less oversight of all the possible consequences of his action. The second will have more oversight of possible consequences of his action but the moral principle that determines their will in taking action is exactly the same in both cases. Moreover while the scholar might have the impression that he’s better capable of foreseeing more consequences and thus capable of a better moral decision, he must admit he can’t foresee all the consequences of his action as time will progress and in the end his action is as potentially disastrous (or even more disastrous) for human kind as the action of the common man.
When looking at human history it could even be said that most of mankind’s self inflicted disasters are caused by those who had the impression to foresee the most consequence of their actions and acted accordingly to an idea they thought was possible to complete with certainty in this world.
This of course doesn’t mean that we should not consider the consequences of our action, on the contrary. We ought to do so each in our own capacity but it is obvious that the more we foresee possible consequences, the more indeed we see a potential increase in possibly good outcome, but at the same time a potential increase in possible bad outcome and also an increase in uncertainty of outcome.
I never heard of anything close to empty bullet (and I don't think it's easily communicated analogy), but the tendency to make examples that ignore all circumstances and build a critique (or support) of utilitarianism is prevalent at least among more casual debates.
It always annoyed me to no end. Congrats on not falling into that trap.
>I think the “repugnant conclusion” is not nearly as repugnant as it sounds.
The magic is done by just disagreeing with utilitarianism and calling one of the entailments "repugnant." Not adopting a view because you don't like it is fine - but analytic moral philosophy dresses up this disagreement and tries to intellectualize it with a charade of pseudoarguments and rhetorical maneuvers to make the disagreement seem more substantive than it really is.
This is again rhetorical posturing - "Don't disagree or you're against *our* intuitons" where the reference class "our" is left underspecified. It's not clear to me that any psychological science even considers "intuitions" a workable theoretical construct, so we're left with an appeal to an underspecified group of people's inscrutable psychological states on a topic most people probably never consider outside of analytic philosophical moral discourse.
>>In this case, the consistent act utilitarian would have to conclude that the crime should be concealed and that punishment, if administered at all, should remain secret.
>This is another empty bullet.
This is just an entailment of utilitarianism, so merely stating that the reason utlitarianism is wrong is because utilitarianism is wrong is question begging. The person you're citing has failed to offer any independent justification for why utilitarianism is wrong.
> Conceding that an elephant might not fall if released from the top of a skyscraper, might seem like quite a bullet to bite
Appeals to biting the bullet are also frequently purely rhetorical in nature. You are biting a bullet if your theoretical account fails to account for some sort of evidence, and you agree it fails to account for that sort of evidence. Massless objects failing to fall to the Earth is not an example of this on e.g. Newtonian mechanics - because it is predicted by the theory. It's not a bullet to bite, and believers in Newtonian mechanics shouldn't grant that it's a bullet to bite purely because other people reject the theory and without independent motivation claim the theory is wrong. It's only a bullet to bite if Newtonian mechanics gives conflicting or incomplete predictions in the massless object case and the practitioners of Newtonian mechanics think that the scope of Newtonian mechanics or other available theories encompass the situation. Otherwise it's just people who disagree with the theory restating the disagreement with rhetorical phrases like "biting the bullet" and practitioners mistakenly ceding ground where there is none for their opponents to take.
>It’s certainly intuitive that it’s good to punish people who do bad things,
These are both empirical claims about what people think (or maybe about what other people think other people think) battling each other without any empirical evidence cited. Claiming punishing people who do bad is common sense functions purely rhetorically, even if all parties present agree with that framing.
I very much enjoyed this, and you made some important and plausible arguments. If I get some time, I would like to respond in more detail. For now, I concede that the point about purgatory was excessively rhetorical. I would add however that my intuition tells me that 100 flourishing people (100/100) are better than 1000 people who barely want to remain alive (5.1/100). On the other hand, I don't know that adding up utility across people makes metaphysical sense, though it is probably useful--perhaps indispensable--for public policy.
Bo
Let us compare here on the one hand the most common understanding, gifted with very limited intellectual capacities with on the other hand a highly intellectual understanding which is capable of foreseeing lots of possible consequences of his actions (maybe he’s a scholar in ethics). When they are both presented with a moral issue in which they have to decide which action is the morally right thing to do, the only difference between the two will be that the first has less oversight of all the possible consequences of his action. The second will have more oversight of possible consequences of his action but the moral principle that determines their will in taking action is exactly the same in both cases. Moreover while the scholar might have the impression that he’s better capable of foreseeing more consequences and thus capable of a better moral decision, he must admit he can’t foresee all the consequences of his action as time will progress and in the end his action is as potentially disastrous (or even more disastrous) for human kind as the action of the common man.
When looking at human history it could even be said that most of mankind’s self inflicted disasters are caused by those who had the impression to foresee the most consequence of their actions and acted accordingly to an idea they thought was possible to complete with certainty in this world.
This of course doesn’t mean that we should not consider the consequences of our action, on the contrary. We ought to do so each in our own capacity but it is obvious that the more we foresee possible consequences, the more indeed we see a potential increase in possibly good outcome, but at the same time a potential increase in possible bad outcome and also an increase in uncertainty of outcome.
I never heard of anything close to empty bullet (and I don't think it's easily communicated analogy), but the tendency to make examples that ignore all circumstances and build a critique (or support) of utilitarianism is prevalent at least among more casual debates.
It always annoyed me to no end. Congrats on not falling into that trap.
>I think the “repugnant conclusion” is not nearly as repugnant as it sounds.
The magic is done by just disagreeing with utilitarianism and calling one of the entailments "repugnant." Not adopting a view because you don't like it is fine - but analytic moral philosophy dresses up this disagreement and tries to intellectualize it with a charade of pseudoarguments and rhetorical maneuvers to make the disagreement seem more substantive than it really is.
>captured by our intuition
This is again rhetorical posturing - "Don't disagree or you're against *our* intuitons" where the reference class "our" is left underspecified. It's not clear to me that any psychological science even considers "intuitions" a workable theoretical construct, so we're left with an appeal to an underspecified group of people's inscrutable psychological states on a topic most people probably never consider outside of analytic philosophical moral discourse.
>>In this case, the consistent act utilitarian would have to conclude that the crime should be concealed and that punishment, if administered at all, should remain secret.
>This is another empty bullet.
This is just an entailment of utilitarianism, so merely stating that the reason utlitarianism is wrong is because utilitarianism is wrong is question begging. The person you're citing has failed to offer any independent justification for why utilitarianism is wrong.
> Conceding that an elephant might not fall if released from the top of a skyscraper, might seem like quite a bullet to bite
Appeals to biting the bullet are also frequently purely rhetorical in nature. You are biting a bullet if your theoretical account fails to account for some sort of evidence, and you agree it fails to account for that sort of evidence. Massless objects failing to fall to the Earth is not an example of this on e.g. Newtonian mechanics - because it is predicted by the theory. It's not a bullet to bite, and believers in Newtonian mechanics shouldn't grant that it's a bullet to bite purely because other people reject the theory and without independent motivation claim the theory is wrong. It's only a bullet to bite if Newtonian mechanics gives conflicting or incomplete predictions in the massless object case and the practitioners of Newtonian mechanics think that the scope of Newtonian mechanics or other available theories encompass the situation. Otherwise it's just people who disagree with the theory restating the disagreement with rhetorical phrases like "biting the bullet" and practitioners mistakenly ceding ground where there is none for their opponents to take.
>>But common sense suggests otherwise.
>It’s certainly intuitive that it’s good to punish people who do bad things,
These are both empirical claims about what people think (or maybe about what other people think other people think) battling each other without any empirical evidence cited. Claiming punishing people who do bad is common sense functions purely rhetorically, even if all parties present agree with that framing.