Fair enough. I tried to explain that they were different in the comment section of another post, but was meet with downvotes and whole walls of text trying to argue with me. So I’ve largely given up trying to make those distinctions clear on this forum. It’s too tiresome
I believe the ‘walls of text’ that Adrian is referring to are mine. I’d just like to clarify that I was not trying to collapse the distinction between a decision procedure and the rightness criterion of utilitarianism. I was merely arguing that the concept of expected value can be used both to decide what action should be taken (at least in certain circumstances)[1] and whether an action is / was morally right (arguably in all circumstances) - indeed, this is a popular formulation of utilitarianism. I was also trying to point out that whether an action is good, ex ante, is not necessarily identical to whether the consequences of that action are good, ex post. If anyone wants more detail you can view my comments here.
One reaction when reading this is that you might be kind of eliding the difference between utilitarianism per se and expected value decision analysis.
Fair enough. I tried to explain that they were different in the comment section of another post, but was meet with downvotes and whole walls of text trying to argue with me. So I’ve largely given up trying to make those distinctions clear on this forum. It’s too tiresome
I believe the ‘walls of text’ that Adrian is referring to are mine. I’d just like to clarify that I was not trying to collapse the distinction between a decision procedure and the rightness criterion of utilitarianism. I was merely arguing that the concept of expected value can be used both to decide what action should be taken (at least in certain circumstances)[1] and whether an action is / was morally right (arguably in all circumstances) - indeed, this is a popular formulation of utilitarianism. I was also trying to point out that whether an action is good, ex ante, is not necessarily identical to whether the consequences of that action are good, ex post. If anyone wants more detail you can view my comments here.
Although usually other decision procedures, like following general rules, are more advisable, even if one maintains the same rightness criterion.