Planning a series: discounting utility

I think I disagree with your interpretation on every one of these points!

1: If you're assuming the reason Bob enjoys his crimes is because he's lowering the utility of his victims, you need to make that assumption much more explicit. If Bob only committed his crimes because it makes him feel good, but doesn't feel better knowing that the victim is unhappy because he has committed them, then he's only in the same position as anyone else who wants something that's good for emself but hurts another person. For example, if I want a coat made of panda-bear fur, then this upsets panda-lovers and (if we allow animals to have utility) pandas, but it doesn't allow anyone to disregard my desire - it just means that I might not get it satisfied if the panda-lovers turn out to have more clout.

Even if Bob explicitly enjoys lowering utility, I still find it sketchy to dismiss his desire as an axiom of the system. In a counterfactual world where all desires are completely fixed and non-self-modifiable, Bob's desires should be taken into account (and probably rejected when it turns out they hurt other people more than they help him). In a world more like our own, where desires become more common and intense if there's a possibility of fulfilling them, these desires should be dismissed for game theoretic reasons to discourage any more such desires from ever forming, not just disregarded.

1.5: I can't tell whether you're just acknowledging the existence of punishment, or something different. Yes, we should punish child molesters as a game theoretic action to discourage child molestation in the future. And this punishment has to involve negative utility. But punishment should be specific and limited. If the child molester has already gone to jail, then ey gets the same weight in our calculations as anyone else. And if we do punish em, we do it not because we're using a system that says we can disregard eir utility on general principle, but because a greater good (discouraging future child molestation) overrides it.

2: Here I would say the villagers don't have a preference against the girl living, they have a preference against witchcraft. We take all of their preferences into account, but because drowning the girl doesn't reduce witchcraft, their preferences have no bearing on whether we save the girl or not. So since there's massive disutility (death) and minimal utility (they get small utility from not having to waste time worrying about witchcraft, but they don't get what they were hoping for which is less witchcraft occuring), it's a net loss and we save the girl. In the ritual dunking case, there's no disutility, and the utility is that they stop worrying about witchcraft, so it's a net gain and we let them do it.

(this makes more sense if we assign numbers: say having less witchcraft is +50, killing a girl is -25, not having to worry about witchcraft so much is +5, and ritually dunking is -1. These assignments make more sense if you imagine asking the villagers "If this girl wasn't a witch, would you want her to continue living?" - their answer is the appropriate preference)

I don't think it's ever okay to literally discount utility. I think it's often okay to let one source of utility counterbalance and override another source of utility, and that sometimes that first source may be a game theoretic precommitment to ignore someone's utility, but you don't stick ignoring someone's utility into the theory directly.

1.5

We don't need to discount child molesters' utilities to punish them. Punishing a child molester deters others from molesting children and acausally deters those who have already chosen whether or not to molest children. Since this good outweighs the negative utility of the punishment, punishing them is the right thing to do.

The child kinda likes chocolate ice cream; vanilla is his favorite flavor, but chocolate's OK. The adult [child molester] absolutely, totally loves chocolate ice cream; it's his favorite food in the world. I, personally, give the kid the ice cream, and I think so does well over 90% of the general population.

I give the ice cream to the child because otherwise my actions will be seen by society as an endorsement of child molestation, which will make more people molest children and which will lower my status. If no one else ever knows about my actions, I would give it to the adult because not being given ice cream by strangers is not an effective deterrent. However, in real life, I would probably never be certain enough of this, so I would always actually give it to the child.

I feel like you will object to this on the grounds that I am ignoring my intuition that the child molester deserves to be punished, which provides more reason to punish than just the considerations I have discussed and massively tips the scales toward punishment. However, not everyone shares this intuition (see here, here). They've done studies where they measure people's moral intuitions and detect differences. When I hear people justifying punishment for its own sake rather than as a deterrent or rehabilitative mechanism, I feel like I am living in the 1800s and hearing arguments for slavery. (Of course, this too is an intuition.) In the US south, "well over 90% of the general population" had an 'intuition' that slaves are subhuman and that their utility should be discounted. I don't know how to tell which intuitions are really components of our utility function and which will be destroyed by moral progress but I know that I do not have this particular intuition and I have no reason to support any decision procedure that takes punishment as fundamental rather than derived from deterrence.

One solution is to say our intuitions are wrong - this isn't quite right (i.e. a morality can't be "wrong") unless our intuitions are internally inconsistent, which I do not think is the problem.

I think that is the fundamental problem with non-utilitarianism. Take the trolley problem, for instance. Out intuitions are that the death of one person is preferable to the deaths of 5, but out intuitions also say we shouldn't deliberately kill someone. Our intuitions about morality conflict all the time, so we have to decide which intuition is more important.

I'm a little confused. Is this post trying to describe someone's existing morality or define a new morality for someone to follow?