I have two views in the vicinity. First, there’s a general issue that human moral practice generally isn’t just axiology, but also includes a number of elements that are built around interacting with other people with different axiologies, e.g. different ideologies coexisting in a liberal society, different partially selfish people or family groups coexisting fairly while preferring different outcomes. Most flavors of utilitarianism ignore those elements, and ceteris paribus would, given untrammeled power, call for outcomes that would be ruinous for ~all currently existing beings, and in particular existing societies. That could be classical hedonistic utilitarianism diverting the means of subsistence from all living things as we know them to fuel more hedonium, negative-leaning views wanting to be rid of all living things with any prospects for having or causing pain or dissatisfaction, or playing double-or-nothing with the universe until it is destroyed with probability 1.
So most people have reason to oppose any form of utilitarianism getting absolute power (and many utilitarianisms would have reason to self-efface into something less scary and dangerous and prone to using power in such ways that would have a better chance of realizing more of what it values by less endangering other concerns). I touch on this in an article with Elliott Thornley.
I have an additional objection to hedonic-only views in particular, in that they don’t even take as inputs many of people’s concerns, and so more easily wind up hostile to particular individuals supposedly for those individuals’ sake. E.g. I would prefer to retain my memories and personal identity, knowledge and autonomy, rather than be coerced into forced administration of pleasure drugs. I also would like to achieve various things in the world in reality, and would prefer that to an experience machine. A normative scheme that doesn’t even take those concerns as inputs is fairly definitely going to run roughshod over them, even if some theories that take them as inputs might do so too.
(You may be aware of these already, but I figured they were worth sharing if not, and for the benefit of other readers.)
Some “preference-affecting views” do much better on these counts and can still be interpreted as basically utilitarian (although perhaps not based on “axiology” per se, depending on how that’s characterized). In particular:
Object versions of preference views, as defended in Rabinowicz & Österberg, 1996 and van Weeldon, 2019. These views are concerned with achieving the objects of preferences/desires, essentially taking on everyone’s preferences/desires like moral views weighed against one another. They are not (necessarily) concerned with having satisfied preferences/desires per se, or just having more favourable attitudes (like hedonism and other experientialist views), or even objective/stance-independent measures of “value” across outcomes.[1]
The narrow and hard asymmetric view of Thomas, 2019 (for binary choices), applied to preferences/desires instead of whole persons or whole person welfare. In binary choices, if we add a group of preferences/desires and assume no other preference/desire is affected, this asymmetry is indifferent to the addition of the group if their expected total value (summing the value in favourable and disfavourable attitudes) is non-negative, but recommends against it if their expected total value is negative. It is also indifferent between adding one favourable attitude and another even more favourable attitude. Wide views, which treat contingent counterparts as if they’re necessary, lead to replacement.
Dasgupta’s view, or other modifications of the above views in a similar direction, for more than two options to choose from, applied to preferences instead of whole persons or whole person welfare. This can avoid repugnance and replacement in three option cases, as discussed here. (I’m working on other extensions to choices between more than two options.)
I think, perhaps by far, the least alienating (paternalistic?) moral views are preference-affecting “consequentialist” views, without any baked-in deontological constraints/presumptions, although they can adopt some deontological presumptions from the actual preferences of people with deontological intuitions. For example, many people don’t care (much) more about being killed by another human over dying by natural causes (all else equal), so it would be alienating to treat their murder as (much) worse or worth avoiding (much) more than their death by natural causes on their behalf. But some people do care a lot about such differences, so we can be proportionately sensitive to those differences on their behalf, too. That being said, many preferences can’t be assigned weights or values on the same scale in a way that seems intuitively justified to me, essentially the same problem as intertheoretic comparisons across very different moral views.
I’m working on some pieces outlining and defending preference-affecting views in more detail.
To the satisfaction and the object interpretations of the preference-based conception of value correspond, we believe, two different ways of viewing utilitarianism: the spectator and the participant models. According to the former, the utilitarian attitude is embodied in an impartial benevolent spectator, who evaluates the situation objectively and from the ‘outside’. An ordinary person can approximate this attitude by detaching himself from his personal engagement in the situation. (Note, however, that, unlike the well-known meta-ethical ideal observer theory, the spectator model expounds a substantive axiological view rather than a theory about the meaning of value terms.) The participant model, on the other hand, puts forward as a utilitarian ideal an attitude of emotional participation in other people’s projects: the situation is to be viewed from ‘within’, not just from my own perspective, but also from the others’ points of view. The participant model assumes that, instead of distancing myself from my particular position in the world, I identify with other subjects: what it recommends is not a detached objectivity but a universalized subjectivity.
Object vs attitude vs satisfaction/combination versions of preference/desire views are also discussed in Bykvist, 2022 and Lin, 2022, and there’s some other related discussion by Rawls (1982, pdf, p.181) and Arneson (2006, pdf).
I have two views in the vicinity. First, there’s a general issue that human moral practice generally isn’t just axiology, but also includes a number of elements that are built around interacting with other people with different axiologies, e.g. different ideologies coexisting in a liberal society, different partially selfish people or family groups coexisting fairly while preferring different outcomes. Most flavors of utilitarianism ignore those elements, and ceteris paribus would, given untrammeled power, call for outcomes that would be ruinous for ~all currently existing beings, and in particular existing societies. That could be classical hedonistic utilitarianism diverting the means of subsistence from all living things as we know them to fuel more hedonium, negative-leaning views wanting to be rid of all living things with any prospects for having or causing pain or dissatisfaction, or playing double-or-nothing with the universe until it is destroyed with probability 1.
So most people have reason to oppose any form of utilitarianism getting absolute power (and many utilitarianisms would have reason to self-efface into something less scary and dangerous and prone to using power in such ways that would have a better chance of realizing more of what it values by less endangering other concerns). I touch on this in an article with Elliott Thornley.
I have an additional objection to hedonic-only views in particular, in that they don’t even take as inputs many of people’s concerns, and so more easily wind up hostile to particular individuals supposedly for those individuals’ sake. E.g. I would prefer to retain my memories and personal identity, knowledge and autonomy, rather than be coerced into forced administration of pleasure drugs. I also would like to achieve various things in the world in reality, and would prefer that to an experience machine. A normative scheme that doesn’t even take those concerns as inputs is fairly definitely going to run roughshod over them, even if some theories that take them as inputs might do so too.
(You may be aware of these already, but I figured they were worth sharing if not, and for the benefit of other readers.)
Some “preference-affecting views” do much better on these counts and can still be interpreted as basically utilitarian (although perhaps not based on “axiology” per se, depending on how that’s characterized). In particular:
Object versions of preference views, as defended in Rabinowicz & Österberg, 1996 and van Weeldon, 2019. These views are concerned with achieving the objects of preferences/desires, essentially taking on everyone’s preferences/desires like moral views weighed against one another. They are not (necessarily) concerned with having satisfied preferences/desires per se, or just having more favourable attitudes (like hedonism and other experientialist views), or even objective/stance-independent measures of “value” across outcomes.[1]
The narrow and hard asymmetric view of Thomas, 2019 (for binary choices), applied to preferences/desires instead of whole persons or whole person welfare. In binary choices, if we add a group of preferences/desires and assume no other preference/desire is affected, this asymmetry is indifferent to the addition of the group if their expected total value (summing the value in favourable and disfavourable attitudes) is non-negative, but recommends against it if their expected total value is negative. It is also indifferent between adding one favourable attitude and another even more favourable attitude. Wide views, which treat contingent counterparts as if they’re necessary, lead to replacement.
Actualism, applied to preferences instead of whole persons or whole person welfare (Hare, 2007, Bykvist, 2007, St. Jules, 2019, Cohen, 2020, Spencer, 2021, for binary choices).
Dasgupta’s view, or other modifications of the above views in a similar direction, for more than two options to choose from, applied to preferences instead of whole persons or whole person welfare. This can avoid repugnance and replacement in three option cases, as discussed here. (I’m working on other extensions to choices between more than two options.)
I think, perhaps by far, the least alienating (paternalistic?) moral views are preference-affecting “consequentialist” views, without any baked-in deontological constraints/presumptions, although they can adopt some deontological presumptions from the actual preferences of people with deontological intuitions. For example, many people don’t care (much) more about being killed by another human over dying by natural causes (all else equal), so it would be alienating to treat their murder as (much) worse or worth avoiding (much) more than their death by natural causes on their behalf. But some people do care a lot about such differences, so we can be proportionately sensitive to those differences on their behalf, too. That being said, many preferences can’t be assigned weights or values on the same scale in a way that seems intuitively justified to me, essentially the same problem as intertheoretic comparisons across very different moral views.
I’m working on some pieces outlining and defending preference-affecting views in more detail.
Rabinowicz & Österberg, 1996:
Object vs attitude vs satisfaction/combination versions of preference/desire views are also discussed in Bykvist, 2022 and Lin, 2022, and there’s some other related discussion by Rawls (1982, pdf, p.181) and Arneson (2006, pdf).