> It’s somewhat unclear if it means utility in the sense of a function that maps preference relations to real numbers, or utility in axiological sense.
there’s only one notion of utility. if your utilities for x,y, and z are 0,3,5 respectively, then you’d find a 60% chance of the 5 option equally preferable to the guarantee of y, and so on.
> preferences are changed by the political process.
well, no. your estimate of how much a given policy will benefit you, that is changed by the political process. the actual utilities aren’t.
> The second is that people have stable preferences for terrible things like capital punishment.
no. people have utilities that relate to things like “being murdered walking down a dark alley”. the preferences they form for policies like capital punishment are estimates of how well off they’ll be under a given legal policy regime. in reality, most people would prefer a world where capital punishment is illegal. but they erroneously think capital punishment is good becaus ethey don’t understand how ineffective it is, and how they themselves could end up being unjustly killed via capital punishment.
you need to update your mental model with the disparity between actual utility from policy, versus the assume utilities that form your espoused political preferences.
that disparity between actual and assumed preferences was already accounted for by “ignorance factors” in the bayesian regret calculations, fyi.
There isn’t only one notion of utility—utility in decision theory is different to utility in ethics. Utility in decision theory can indeed be derived from choices over lotteries and is incomparable between individuals (without further assumptions) and is equivalent under positive affine transformation because it’s just representing choices.
Utility in moral philosophy refers to value and typically refers to the value of experiences (as opposed to other conceptions of the good like satisfaction of preferences), is comparable between individuals without further assumptions and isn’t equivalent under positive affine transformation.
An individual’s utility (on either of the definitions) may or may not be changed by the political process.
Consider a new far-right party entering the political sphere. They successfully changed political conversations to be more anti-immigration and have lots of focus on immigrant men committing sexual violence.
A voter exposed to these new political conversations has their choice behaviour changed because they now feel more angry towards immigrants and want to hurt them, rather than because they think that more restrictive immigration policies would make them personally safer, for instance.
This same voter also has utility—in the moral philosophy sense—changed by the new political conversation. Now they feel sadistic pleasure when they hear about immigrants being deported on the news, leading to better subjective experiences when they see immigrants being deported.
I strongly reject the claim that we should imagine voters as exclusively deciding how to vote in terms of the personal benefits they derive in expectation from policies. I think people support capital punishment mostly because it fits with their inbuilt sense of justice rather than because they think it benefits them.
We could (probably) represent this voter as being an expected utility maximiser where they have positive utility from capital punishment, in the decision theory sense. This is a different claim from the claim that a voter expects their subjective experiences to be more positively valenced when there’s capital punishment.
I’m afraid I can’t comment on what ignorance factors do or do not account for under Bayesian regret without rereading the paper, but it’s of course possible that they do account for that disparity between actual and assumed preferences.
> It’s somewhat unclear if it means utility in the sense of a function that maps preference relations to real numbers, or utility in axiological sense.
there’s only one notion of utility. if your utilities for x,y, and z are 0,3,5 respectively, then you’d find a 60% chance of the 5 option equally preferable to the guarantee of y, and so on.
> preferences are changed by the political process.
well, no. your estimate of how much a given policy will benefit you, that is changed by the political process. the actual utilities aren’t.
> The second is that people have stable preferences for terrible things like capital punishment.
no. people have utilities that relate to things like “being murdered walking down a dark alley”. the preferences they form for policies like capital punishment are estimates of how well off they’ll be under a given legal policy regime. in reality, most people would prefer a world where capital punishment is illegal. but they erroneously think capital punishment is good becaus ethey don’t understand how ineffective it is, and how they themselves could end up being unjustly killed via capital punishment.
you need to update your mental model with the disparity between actual utility from policy, versus the assume utilities that form your espoused political preferences.
that disparity between actual and assumed preferences was already accounted for by “ignorance factors” in the bayesian regret calculations, fyi.
There isn’t only one notion of utility—utility in decision theory is different to utility in ethics. Utility in decision theory can indeed be derived from choices over lotteries and is incomparable between individuals (without further assumptions) and is equivalent under positive affine transformation because it’s just representing choices.
Utility in moral philosophy refers to value and typically refers to the value of experiences (as opposed to other conceptions of the good like satisfaction of preferences), is comparable between individuals without further assumptions and isn’t equivalent under positive affine transformation.
An individual’s utility (on either of the definitions) may or may not be changed by the political process.
Consider a new far-right party entering the political sphere. They successfully changed political conversations to be more anti-immigration and have lots of focus on immigrant men committing sexual violence.
A voter exposed to these new political conversations has their choice behaviour changed because they now feel more angry towards immigrants and want to hurt them, rather than because they think that more restrictive immigration policies would make them personally safer, for instance.
This same voter also has utility—in the moral philosophy sense—changed by the new political conversation. Now they feel sadistic pleasure when they hear about immigrants being deported on the news, leading to better subjective experiences when they see immigrants being deported.
I strongly reject the claim that we should imagine voters as exclusively deciding how to vote in terms of the personal benefits they derive in expectation from policies. I think people support capital punishment mostly because it fits with their inbuilt sense of justice rather than because they think it benefits them.
We could (probably) represent this voter as being an expected utility maximiser where they have positive utility from capital punishment, in the decision theory sense. This is a different claim from the claim that a voter expects their subjective experiences to be more positively valenced when there’s capital punishment.
I’m afraid I can’t comment on what ignorance factors do or do not account for under Bayesian regret without rereading the paper, but it’s of course possible that they do account for that disparity between actual and assumed preferences.