I think this subject is very important and underrated, so I’m glad you wrote the post, and you raised some points that I wasn’t aware of, and I would like to see people write more posts like this one. The post didn’t do as much for me as it could have because I found two of its three main arguments hard to understand:
For your first argument (“Unbounded utility functions are irrational”), the post spends several paragraphs setting up a specific function that I could have easily constructed myself (for me it’s pretty obvious that there exist finite utility functions with infinite EV), and then ends by saying utilitarianism “lead[s] to violations of generalizations of the Independence axiom and the Sure-Thing Principle”, which I take to be the central argument, but I don’t know what the Sure-Thing Principle is. I think I know what Independence is, but I don’t know what you mean by “generalizations of Independence”. So it feels like I still have no idea what your actual argument is.
I had no difficulty following your money pump argument.
For the third argument, the post claims that some axioms rule out expectational total utilitarianism, but the axioms aren’t defined and I don’t know what they mean, and I don’t know how they rule out expectational total utilitarianism. (I tried to look at the cited paper, but it’s not publicly available and it doesn’t look like it’s on Sci-Hub either.)
I can see how naming them without defining them would throw people off. In my view, it’s acting seemingly irrationally, like getting money pumped, getting Dutch booked or paying to avoid information, that matters, not satisfying Independence or the STP. If you don’t care about this apparently irrational behaviour, then you wouldn’t really have any independent reason to accept Independence or the STP, except maybe that they seem directly intuitive. If I introduced them, that could throw other people off or otherwise take up much more space in an already long post to explain with concrete examples. But footnotes probably would have been good.
Good to hear!
Which argument do you mean? I defined and motivated the axioms for the two impossibility theorems with SD and Impartiality I cite, but I did that after stating the theorems, in the Anti-utilitarian theorems section. (Maybe I should have linked the section in the summary and outline?)
I think this subject is very important and underrated, so I’m glad you wrote the post, and you raised some points that I wasn’t aware of, and I would like to see people write more posts like this one. The post didn’t do as much for me as it could have because I found two of its three main arguments hard to understand:
For your first argument (“Unbounded utility functions are irrational”), the post spends several paragraphs setting up a specific function that I could have easily constructed myself (for me it’s pretty obvious that there exist finite utility functions with infinite EV), and then ends by saying utilitarianism “lead[s] to violations of generalizations of the Independence axiom and the Sure-Thing Principle”, which I take to be the central argument, but I don’t know what the Sure-Thing Principle is. I think I know what Independence is, but I don’t know what you mean by “generalizations of Independence”. So it feels like I still have no idea what your actual argument is.
I had no difficulty following your money pump argument.
For the third argument, the post claims that some axioms rule out expectational total utilitarianism, but the axioms aren’t defined and I don’t know what they mean, and I don’t know how they rule out expectational total utilitarianism. (I tried to look at the cited paper, but it’s not publicly available and it doesn’t look like it’s on Sci-Hub either.)
Thanks, this is helpful!
To respond to the points:
I can see how naming them without defining them would throw people off. In my view, it’s acting seemingly irrationally, like getting money pumped, getting Dutch booked or paying to avoid information, that matters, not satisfying Independence or the STP. If you don’t care about this apparently irrational behaviour, then you wouldn’t really have any independent reason to accept Independence or the STP, except maybe that they seem directly intuitive. If I introduced them, that could throw other people off or otherwise take up much more space in an already long post to explain with concrete examples. But footnotes probably would have been good.
Good to hear!
Which argument do you mean? I defined and motivated the axioms for the two impossibility theorems with SD and Impartiality I cite, but I did that after stating the theorems, in the Anti-utilitarian theorems section. (Maybe I should have linked the section in the summary and outline?)