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Ian Terrell's avatar

I think my gripe with utilitarianism is the same I have with applying the concept of the reward function from reinforcement learning to human beings:

Any reasonable function for utility or reward that matches human experience is so complex as to be unknowable. It may be useful as a reduction to provide guidance in thinking, but any function that is described and substitutes for the “real” or “ideal” utility/reward is necessarily limited and correspondingly “wrong.”

I think your point is that the critiques are actually critiquing a limited, substitute utility function, and then applying that to the concept of utilitarianism in general.

From another point of view though, it seems valid to say, well fine, but if you can’t ever know the complexities of what utility really is, why bother at all? You’re back to where your article ends up: following heuristics and calling it utility. But that’s also a limited and wrong definition!

My answer is to sit in the uncertainty. Think problems through from multiple frameworks, knowing none of them is likely right, but all may have something to tell me.

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Doug1943's avatar

Your argument is closely related to the 'ticking time bomb' question: a terrorist has placed a nuclear weapon in the middle of New York City; it's due to go off in an hour, killing millions; if you torture him, he'll tell you where it is and you can de-fuse it. Should you do so?

If you say 'yes', you may find the same problem being posed with less-than-a-nuclear weapon, and less than millions as victims, on a sliding scale right down to a captured kidnapper who will not reveal where his victim is tied up, unless he is tortured. (And 'torture' can be slid along the scale too, from electrodes on the private parts, to twisting an arm.) And from death for the innocent victim, we can posit just extended extreme discomfort for the victim, who will eventually be found anyway. So ... when is torture justified?

I have always thought that the answer to this question is ... not to answer. In the case of the hidden atom bomb, there is obviously only one sane answer (according to me).

But if you make that answer 'public', you have provided intellectual justification for the police giving the third-degree to a teenage shoplifter. You have established that torture may, in principle, be justified. (And, as the punchline to an old joke goes, 'Now we're just quibbling about the price.')

So ... refuse to answer. A concrete instance of the wise saying that 'there are things which are said, and not done. And there are things which are done, and not said.'

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