Deluxe Utilitarianism

post by Tristan H (Kythe) · 2022-10-18T18:08:42.868Z · ? · GW · 0 comments

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On Tuesday October 18th I'll be running a meetup on more deluxe takes of utilitarianism! The often-taught version of utilitarianism which says that you should act towards the greatest good for the greatest number, has a number of sticking points that often turns people away from it. I contend that there's a more deluxe moral-non-realist version of utilitarianism that gets at the benefits while elegantly handling many of the downsides!

This will be a combination presentation discussion where I'll introduce various ideas and we'll talk about each:

• How to fuse deontology and utilitarianism:
  • Through the benefits of predictable cooperation and the effects of people predicting you. Why good utilitarians shouldn't harvest organs in hospitals to save 8 lives for 1.
  • By taking into account the fallibility of human reasoning. Why it's a good idea to basically never murder or steal even if surface-level utilitarian reasoning says you should.
• Incorporating selfishness into utilitarianism, moral non-realism, being self-consistent and caring about altruism on a personal level alongside selfish wants.
• Recovering the benefits of moral realist utilitarianism via the idea of coordinating around shared values. How people can agree and work together on altruistic ventures even if there's no objective morality.
• Utilitarianism as a model to aspire to, in order to reason about and decide on good policies, rather than something humans can practically implement all the time.

Hope to see you there!

=== WHEN+WHERE ===

7:00pm Tuesday, July 19th

New location in NoHo (Join the mailing list at https://groups.google.com/g/overcomingbiasnyc and say you came from LessWrong to access the post with the address)

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