Brilliant post. Thanks for writing it. I just want to add to what you said about ethics. It seems that evaluating whether an action / event is good or bad itself presupposes an ethical theory.[1] Hence I think a lot of the claims that are being made can be described as either (a) this event shows vividly how strongly utilitarianism can conflict with ‘common-sense morality’ (or our intuitions)[2] or (b) trying to follow[3] utilitarianism tends to lead to outcomes which are bad by the lights of utilitarianism (or perhaps some other theory). The first of these seems not particularly interesting to me, as suggested in your post, and the second is a separate point entirely—but is nonetheless often being presented as a criticism of utilitarianism.
By which I mean ‘act in accordance’ with, but it’s worth noting that this is pretty underdetermined. For instance, doing EV calculations is not the only way to act in accordance with utilitarianism.
Brilliant post. Thanks for writing it. I just want to add to what you said about ethics. It seems that evaluating whether an action / event is good or bad itself presupposes an ethical theory.[1] Hence I think a lot of the claims that are being made can be described as either (a) this event shows vividly how strongly utilitarianism can conflict with ‘common-sense morality’ (or our intuitions)[2] or (b) trying to follow[3] utilitarianism tends to lead to outcomes which are bad by the lights of utilitarianism (or perhaps some other theory). The first of these seems not particularly interesting to me, as suggested in your post, and the second is a separate point entirely—but is nonetheless often being presented as a criticism of utilitarianism.
Someone else made this point before me in another post but I can’t find their comment.
But note that this applies mostly to naive act utilitarianism.
By which I mean ‘act in accordance’ with, but it’s worth noting that this is pretty underdetermined. For instance, doing EV calculations is not the only way to act in accordance with utilitarianism.