Utilitarian Questions - Page 3

tofucake

Hyrule19183 Posts

May 27 2011 14:20 GMT

#41

On May 27 2011 13:27 palanq wrote:
imo theories of ethics are mostly attempts to make an irrational, inconsistent, and culturally variable set of preferences over outcomes seem a little more consistent.

my preferences are to flip the switch, not push the fat dude onto the tracks, not harvest organs of the young innocent person, but kill the condemned criminal, but I won't pretend to be able to justify them.

tofu: can you explain your graph a bit?

Of course!

[image loading]

Here we have Good vs People, although I admit it's a bit difficult to discern. Also since it's made in mspaint there's no real scale. Also I forgot a part. Here's what it should have been:
[image loading]

The green line is the "net good", so as you can see, doing a shitton of good for 1 person has the same netgood as doing a little bit of good for lots of people.

ymir233

United States8275 Posts

May 27 2011 14:46 GMT

#42

Or you could go out the easy way and say "Util is ridiculously vague because nobody can foresee all possible consequences and trying to maximize happiness based off arbitrary amounts of information is the same as flipping a coin in most cases".

And then say "use Deontology. I can now say anything."

palanq

United States761 Posts

May 30 2011 04:16 GMT

#43

On May 27 2011 23:20 tofucake wrote:

Show nested quote +

Of course!

[image loading]

The green line is the "net good", so as you can see, doing a shitton of good for 1 person has the same netgood as doing a little bit of good for lots of people.

you're terrible at explaining lmao

I was looking for the explanation that total good is measured by (amount of good per person)*(# of people), and that the blue line denotes all points of equal total good, and that there are several such lines of equal-total-goodness. as you've presented it the graph makes no fucking sense to anyone who hasn't taken a microeconomics class. also you're just making the graph unnecessarily complicated with the green line. but what I really wanted to know is what you're trying to show with the grey area

VIB

Brazil3567 Posts

May 30 2011 05:11 GMT

#44

On May 30 2011 13:16 palanq wrote:
but what I really wanted to know is what you're trying to show with the grey area

I think the gray area is what utilitarianism cannot explain. His complexity vs rules graph makes it more clear. If I understand it right, putting both graphs together would be something like this:

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