Whenever I hear someone (usually Will Macaskill) say: “If utilitarianism is correct...” I don’t hear it as a coherent sentence. I don’t think there is a fundamental ethical truth that utilitarianism is trying to get at. I’d still happily call myself a utilitarian, as I believe it’s the best, most coherent way of thinking about ethics- I even ‘bite the bullet’ of the repugnant conclusion. But utilitarianism doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that can be ‘true’ or ‘false’.
But I feel I agree with the ‘realist’ side of this paper more than the ‘anti-realist’. When I’m ‘doing’ ethics, I’d rather do it well and consistently. I tend to slightly disagree with Scott Alexander in that post.
But ethics, especially utilitarianism, is so demanding that you need a way to ‘get out of it’ - I do that by just ‘not doing ethics’ - I would be a ‘better person’ if I did ethics more consistently, but I just don’t—I also spend most of my time not even considering utilitarian ethics. I should but don’t need to be ethical. I’m bound by utilitarian ethics in a similar way that I’m bound by my own bodily desires, politeness norms, family ties, occasional propensity to turn into a dire wolf etc.
But I don’t think it works in the Scott Alexander/ lizard/ utopia case. If there’s a time to take ethics deadly seriously, it’s when you’ve got a zillion potentially net-positive lizard lives on the scales!
Some random thoughts:
Whenever I hear someone (usually Will Macaskill) say: “If utilitarianism is correct...” I don’t hear it as a coherent sentence. I don’t think there is a fundamental ethical truth that utilitarianism is trying to get at. I’d still happily call myself a utilitarian, as I believe it’s the best, most coherent way of thinking about ethics- I even ‘bite the bullet’ of the repugnant conclusion. But utilitarianism doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that can be ‘true’ or ‘false’.
But I feel I agree with the ‘realist’ side of this paper more than the ‘anti-realist’. When I’m ‘doing’ ethics, I’d rather do it well and consistently. I tend to slightly disagree with Scott Alexander in that post.
But ethics, especially utilitarianism, is so demanding that you need a way to ‘get out of it’ - I do that by just ‘not doing ethics’ - I would be a ‘better person’ if I did ethics more consistently, but I just don’t—I also spend most of my time not even considering utilitarian ethics. I should but don’t need to be ethical. I’m bound by utilitarian ethics in a similar way that I’m bound by my own bodily desires, politeness norms, family ties, occasional propensity to turn into a dire wolf etc.
But I don’t think it works in the Scott Alexander/ lizard/ utopia case. If there’s a time to take ethics deadly seriously, it’s when you’ve got a zillion potentially net-positive lizard lives on the scales!