Thanks for the post. There are some writings out of the Center for Reducing Suffering that may interest you. They tend to take a negative utilitarian view of things, which has some interesting implications, in particular for the repugnant conclusion(s).
I’ve been trying to come up with my own version of utilitarianism that I believe takes better account of the effects of rights and self-esteem/personal responsibility. In doing so, it’s become more and more apparent to me that our consciences are not naturally classic utilitarian in nature, and this is likely from whence some apparent disagreements between utilitarian implications and our moral intuitions (as from our consciences) arise. I’m planning on writing something up soon on how we might go about quantifying our consciences so that they could be used in a quantitative decision making process (as by an AI) rather than trying to make a full utilitarian framework into a decision making framework for an AI. This has some similarities to what is often suggested by Richard Chappell, i.e., that we follow heuristics (in this case, our consciences) when making decisions rather than some “utilitarian calculus.”
Good luck with your plans for quantifying our consciences so that they could be used in a quantitative decision making process , thou I’m afraid that anything close to that is going to be very hard until we somehow solve the “easy problem” of consciousness, (and not sure even if then..).
Thanks for the post. There are some writings out of the Center for Reducing Suffering that may interest you. They tend to take a negative utilitarian view of things, which has some interesting implications, in particular for the repugnant conclusion(s).
I’ve been trying to come up with my own version of utilitarianism that I believe takes better account of the effects of rights and self-esteem/personal responsibility. In doing so, it’s become more and more apparent to me that our consciences are not naturally classic utilitarian in nature, and this is likely from whence some apparent disagreements between utilitarian implications and our moral intuitions (as from our consciences) arise. I’m planning on writing something up soon on how we might go about quantifying our consciences so that they could be used in a quantitative decision making process (as by an AI) rather than trying to make a full utilitarian framework into a decision making framework for an AI. This has some similarities to what is often suggested by Richard Chappell, i.e., that we follow heuristics (in this case, our consciences) when making decisions rather than some “utilitarian calculus.”
Thank you very much Sean for your response, specially I found Minimalist extended very repugnant conclusions are the least repugnant interesting, thou I feel that still kind of misses the broader point (or bite the wrong bullet) about how you can’t really do “arithmetics with phenomenology” to begin with, in this way in which I think Parfit makes apparent in Overpopulation and The Quality of Life.
Good luck with your plans for quantifying our consciences so that they could be used in a quantitative decision making process , thou I’m afraid that anything close to that is going to be very hard until we somehow solve the “easy problem” of consciousness, (and not sure even if then..).