Thanks for the reply! I think the question that’s relevant to me is something like
a) would teaching (or following) utilitarianism on the margin be more beneficial than teaching Kantianism or some other non-utilitarian ethical system?
or
b) would teaching (or following) utilitarianism on the margin be more beneficial than not teaching (systematized) ethics at all?
I think Mao’s example is hardly evidence against a), and if anything is straightforwardly evidence for it. I think it is weak evidence against b), but overall quite weak. I think plenty of horrendous actions were committed by people without deep training in (systematized) ethics. Genghis Khan comes to mind for example.
When I think about ways utilitarianism can be self-effacing, two obvious mechanisms comes to mind:
We may be bad at forecasting the future consequences of our actions, and cause lots of harm ex post due to genuine miscalculation, motivated reasoning, or bad luck.
Evidence for this: If we see many examples of dictators who studied Bentham and Mill diligently but (mis)applied their ethics and did horrendous things, for example by dropping a minus sign in a utility calculation somewhere, then this is evidence in favor of greater epistemic humility about our predictive power and our ability to predictably cause positive outcomes.
Utilitarian reasoning may create moral licensing/”create cover” for selfish actors to do horrendous actions in the name of good.
Evidence for this: If we see many examples of dictators who call themselves utilitarians, Benthamites, etc, and do many evil actions in the name of utilitarianism, then this will be evidence to me that utilitarianism-in-practice has horrifying consequences even if in the abstract “true” utilitarians may be immune to these issues.
(I think this is what you were getting at with the “no true Scotsman” argument?)
But in fact while both mechanisms are abstractly reasonable, in practice I don’t observe much of either (whereas there are clear and compelling harms of competing philosophers, or at least false Scotsman following philosophers, like Nietzsche, Marx, Kant etc). So overall I think it’s a stretch to believe that utilitarianism is abstractly reasonable but the evidence is against utilitarianism judged on utilitarianism’s own merits.
Thanks for the reply! I think the question that’s relevant to me is something like
or
I think Mao’s example is hardly evidence against a), and if anything is straightforwardly evidence for it. I think it is weak evidence against b), but overall quite weak. I think plenty of horrendous actions were committed by people without deep training in (systematized) ethics. Genghis Khan comes to mind for example.
When I think about ways utilitarianism can be self-effacing, two obvious mechanisms comes to mind:
We may be bad at forecasting the future consequences of our actions, and cause lots of harm ex post due to genuine miscalculation, motivated reasoning, or bad luck.
Evidence for this: If we see many examples of dictators who studied Bentham and Mill diligently but (mis)applied their ethics and did horrendous things, for example by dropping a minus sign in a utility calculation somewhere, then this is evidence in favor of greater epistemic humility about our predictive power and our ability to predictably cause positive outcomes.
Utilitarian reasoning may create moral licensing/”create cover” for selfish actors to do horrendous actions in the name of good.
Evidence for this: If we see many examples of dictators who call themselves utilitarians, Benthamites, etc, and do many evil actions in the name of utilitarianism, then this will be evidence to me that utilitarianism-in-practice has horrifying consequences even if in the abstract “true” utilitarians may be immune to these issues.
(I think this is what you were getting at with the “no true Scotsman” argument?)
But in fact while both mechanisms are abstractly reasonable, in practice I don’t observe much of either (whereas there are clear and compelling harms of competing philosophers, or at least false Scotsman following philosophers, like Nietzsche, Marx, Kant etc). So overall I think it’s a stretch to believe that utilitarianism is abstractly reasonable but the evidence is against utilitarianism judged on utilitarianism’s own merits.
Quick update: I do consider SBF’s fraud to straightforwardly be evidence for both 1) and 2), even if by itself far from overwhelming evidence.