Philosophy is interesting to me and I'm currently in a philosophy class and I keep having this thought so I wanted to get y'all's opinions:

Utilitarianism relies on perfect knowledge of what will/won't occur, which no human has! The trolley problem, which is the epitomized utilitarian example, has a million variants regarding the people on the tracks, and it always changes the answers. If I had perfect knowledge of everything then yes Utilitarianism is the best way to conduct oneself, but I don't and the millions of unintended and unpredictable consequences hold that dagger everytime you make a choice through this lens. And the way I've seen a utilitarian argument play out is always by treating everything in a vacuum, which the real world is not in. For instance the net-positive argument in favor of markets argues that if atleast one person in the exchange gets what they want and the otherside is neutral or happier, then the exchange is good, but what it does not consider is that when I buy a jar of salsa it stops one other family from having their taco tuesday, and while this example is benign it seems to epitomize many of the things I see appear in the Utilitarian argument, why are we determining how we conduct ourselves based on a calculation that is impossible to know the answer to?

Anyways, any reading that acknowledges this argument? Additionally, an idea on where I fall on the philosophical spectrum?

I read most of it for a video I was making the other day and... damn. Knowing how dedicating your life to all of this affected Mill (combined with depression?) hits so hard. Here's a quote from page 138 of my version:

“Suppose [...] that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

Also here's the link for the video if anyone is curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOFc8Glsiwc

Are these two principles/mechanism can be argued with each other?

One of the biggest dilemmas I face and continue to face when I think about utilitarianism is the issue of collective impact. For example, a vote, individually, a person's vote will have no utilitarian impact whatsoever. Such impact can only be seen when collective. But if the act of none of these people in itself has an impact, is the utility of the collective isolated in itself without direct correspondence to the individual, or is the impact divided equally among those who contributed to it? How objective would this approach be?

What do you think? Is there any differnece? I don't think so.

Just the above question. Every biological life tries to avoid pain and reduce pleasure. So why do we need to orient our society or even human race to reduce suffering when it is already the default status?

If an evil person was told that stopping 1,000 murders would justify committing one murder, it could potentially lead to fewer total murders.

Evil or morally weak individuals already know they should minimize harm but this knowledge does not motivate them.

This idea would have many dangerous side effects today, but under what circumstances would this be a reasonable strategy?

Consider a dystopian society, such as during slavery. People could purchase and kill a slave without any consequences. In such a context, would a similar moral trade-off to motivate evil people make sense?

Today we can torture and killing of animals without consequences. Under what circumstances might a utilitarian argue that if an evil morally weak person stops X instances of animal farming, they could farm an animal?

Edit:

To clarify I'm not suggesting utilitarians do evil to create good. I'm asking what should utilitarians tell currently evil/weak people to do if we know they won't be motivated to become virtuous any time soon.

For those that would oppose someone freeing 1,000 slaves as compensation before enslaving 1 person what should be the utilitarian limits?

Would you oppose someone freeing 1 million slaves as compensation for littering 1 item? Freeing 10 million slaves as compensation to enslave 1 person?

Or should people never encourage anyone to make such an arbitrary exchange?

The minimum standard of morality in terms of utility would be to do nothing, resulting in a net utility change of zero. [edit There is a minimum level because utilitarians in real life don't maximize utility at every opportunity. There is an accepted level where people are immoral even though they could choose to not be]

If doing nothing [edit: or whatever level the average utilitarian accepts] is morally accepted, performing one negative action offset by two positive actions should also be permissible, as it results in a net increase in utility.

Animal advocacy through digital media is estimated to save ~3.7 animals per $1. Therefore if one were to donate $3 each time they eat an animal, there would be more total utility which should also be morally acceptable.

This would also work with humans to be consistent. 10 murders is worse than one person committing murder then stopping 10 murders. There should be consequences for murder. But, while in prison, such a person could reflect that they increased total utility.

There should be an option for people who are convinced of veganism but too weak to not eat animals

Do you agree with this argument? Are there any gaps or flaws?

P1: Utilitarianism seeks to maximize overall well-being and minimize suffering.

P2: To accurately and efficiently maximize well-being and minimize suffering, we must consider the capacities of beings to experience well-being and suffering.

P3: Beings with greater psychological complexity have a higher capacity for experiencing both suffering and well-being, as their complexity enables them to experience these states in more intense and multifaceted ways. Therefore, the magnitude of their suffering or well-being is greater compared to less complex beings.

C1: Maximizing well-being and minimizing suffering in an efficient and accurate manner inherently favors beings with greater psychological complexity, since more well-being and suffering is at stake when something affects them.

P4: Humans are the most psychologically complex beings on Earth, with the highest capacity to experience complex well-being and suffering.

C2: Therefore, maximizing well-being under utilitarianism inherently focuses on or prioritizes humans, as they have the greatest capacity for well-being and suffering.

P5: A system that inherently prioritizes humans can be considered anthropocentric.

C3: Therefore, utilitarianism, when aiming for optimal efficiency in maximizing well-being and minimizing suffering, is inherently anthropocentric because it prioritizes humans due to their greater capacity for well-being and suffering.

Flaws found:

1. Utilitarianism is not inherently anthropocentric because its focus on well-being adapts based on the beings with the greatest capacity for suffering and well-being, which could extend beyond humans if new information arises. It just appears anthropocentric on our current understanding and practical realities.

What would it mean for utilitarianism to be the objectively correct moral system? Why would you think so/not think so? What arguments are there in favor of your position?

I was hoping a utilitarian could help me with this. I recall reading Mills' Utilitarianism and finding a passage where he talked about how utilitarianism helped him deal with death, stating that it is easier to deal with death when you care about the wellbeing of those who outlive him. Or something similar to that. I may be misremembering, but I found immense comfort in that thought, and I'd love to find the quote again. I've tried using AI to find it, but am still drawing a blank.

Do others find comfort in this thought?

So you would pull the lever in the trolley problem and save 4 people? Perfect. Now let me ask another question - would you kill a guy and harvest his organs to save 5 people? They all need a vital organ, are in critical condition and there aren't any available. Do you kill him?

Be born into an Aristocratic, 1747 family

Excel in all classes, clearing showing great genius, going as far as reading a book on English history as a toddler and studying Latin at 3, and play the violin pristinely by 7, supported by the University College London and multiple academics

Graduate with a law degree, having been admitted at 12

Be given special legal privileges because of your sheer skill

Criticize British law, American revolutionary ideology, and multiple other systems and ideas with quoteworthy "catchphrases" like "Demon of Chicane" or "nonsense on stilts," a trend continuing on into your later life

Move to Russia and work in prisons to reduce mortality

Become outspoken on multiple issues of philosophy, become famous, have relationships with multiple women

Champion welfare, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression and individual and economic freedoms, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the "decriminalization of homosexual acts," the abolition of slavery, capital punishment, and physical punishment including for children, strong animal rights, and the reduction of appeals to god in philosophy in the 17 and 18 hundreds

Set the course for utilitarian philosophy for hundreds of years, being progressive centuries beyond your days

Die happily

Refuse to elaborate

Get a reddit greentext story

Regular actions like eating or wearing clothes or using a cell phone or driving have so many (mostly) unintended negative consequences, from pollution to worker exploitation to damaging chemicals, so it seems impossible to create more good than bad with almost any action. Often it seems to me that the action with the best outcome is to do nothing at all. Is it possible to still act in a way that creates more good than bad?

Most of my idea is in the title. Utilitarian philosophers should come together to create a political entity advocating for things like animals rights, progressivism, socialism, and other things associated with people like Bentham.

I dunno, just some form of organization would be nice.

natural being anything non-human, disease, starvation, killed by another animal etc..

Please focus first on the question itself before you comment on the implication of the question!

Suppose that, in exchange for making yourself miserable, you could make your descendants as happy as possible. Your descendants will be offered the same deal should you take it, and so forth for their descendants. If any generation refuses, the deal stops with them.

Suppose that you will indeed have descendants so that the question is non-trivial.

Would you accept the deal? Why or why not?

I'm sure someone thought of this, but let's say you have an action that is deemed never justifiable, in this instance, punching a baby. Everyone can agree that punching a baby is always bad, but what if you were in a saw-like scenario where you either punch a baby or three babies get super-punched, under utilitarian moral Philosophy, it would be more justifiable to punch the baby (as it results in less babies getting punched, and no babies getting "super" punched). This implies that any action that is deemed unjustifiable can then be justifiable if it is in a direct effort to prevent more of that action, meaning that in utilitarian moral philosophy, there is theoretically (as this saw-like scenario is obviously far fetched) never a truly "unjustifiable" action (as you could then justify it by saying it prevents more of that action). Is my baby-punching paradox stupid? Is this a well-known concept and is there any retort?

I've been a utilitarian for a while but all my knowledge on it comes from, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, YouTube debates.

Now that you're done writing a justifiably angry comment, where can I start learning about Utilitarianism as someone who's never read any ethical philosophy outside of my college ethics class 8 years ago? Trying to reignite the love for philosophy I had in school

And if we accept that life in wild is worth living for the animal, eating said animal should then be more ethical than eating a plant-based meal since by eating animals we make new animal lives because of the increased demand.

If however, we don't think life in the wild is worth living (for any given species), we come to some weird conclusions. Are we then morally obligated to drive this species to extinction since they are a net-harm to themselves?

I'm too tired to remake it to it's former "greatness" but I lost a lil' sketch mocking deontology through satire that was along the lines of:

"Hey, I like hotdogs! That means I should make a complicated system of rules and regulations so everyone eats hotdogs. Wow, those utilitarian fellas are sure biased against other people's perspectives."

Just opening this up for discussion if any of my post made sense.

I'm a utilitarian. The way I see it, especially in small scale daily life settings, most of the time, the best approach is to act in such a way to create the most amount of comfort/happiness/health/safety and the least amount of suffering.

I don't believe in God nor am I spiritual, and as much as authenticity and honesty are important values to me, what if a situation offers a path where lying is the option of least suffering? The way I see things, telling the truth in certain situations I've encountered wouldn't have developed anything positive beyond promoting the abstract concept of authenticity.

It is often said that ignorance is bliss. What do you think about that in relation to a utilitarian philosophy?

I know some people just don't feel well lying and that may be reason enough as it's a form of suffering (though it may be less suffering than telling the truth in the big picture), but for someone who doesn't mind, even though it may seem wrong at first glance, concretely and logically, what are your arguments for and against lying?

https://www.senigaglia.com/do-i-violate-the-utilitarian-standard-by-loving-my-children/

In the essay above, I explore whether parents are obligated by the utilitarian standard to disregard the needs of their children in order to more fully maximize the happiness of the community. If so, then utilitarianism is bogus as a practical, ethical theory. If not, then what is left of the watered-down standard?

Basically, the argument is composed of the following statements:

1. There are several studies stating that architetural beauty influences our happiness and mental (perhaps even physical) well-being.
2. Architetural beauty is, overall, objective rather than subjective in a sense, considering our biology and evolutionary tendencies lead to a lot of similarities in things most tend to define as "beautiful".
3. Traditional architecture has most of the features that we can safely say it's beautiful and in accordance to our biological tendencies (symmetry and ornamentation, for example), while modernist architeture doesn't.
4. If traditional architecture is objectively more beautiful, and beauty leads to increased happiness and well-being, thus, we should revive traditional architecture as a means to increase society's utility.

There are also a couple other arguments related to sustainability for example, and it's all based around multiple studies. I would say the only good counterpoint to that ideia would be the building cost issue, but there's also a dutch study that implies that traditional architecture is no costlier than modernist architeture, with the difference that people are willing to pay a premium for traditional architecture, proving once more that people really prefer it when compared to today's modernist architeture.

At the same time, one could argue that brutalist architeture is certainly cheaper, and that's probably true, but the thing is, we CAN afford it, America is a very wealthy nation, we only have a housing crisis because of a market failure caused by the fact that housing is treated as an investment rather than a consumer product (something that could be easily solved with a land value tax, but that's a talk for another day.), but even under this current circumstance most people aren't homeless, we don't need to turn every house into a commie block to make sure most people have shelter, and the government could very well use a tiny bit of the TRILLIONS of dollars it gets every year to build pretty yet affordable state-owned houses to those who are in a bad financial situation, this would tackle the affordability issue while also increasing everyone's well-being at the same time, leading to higher utility.

My question for those who use affordability-related arguments is: why can't we treat architetural beauty as another investment our society needs to make to increase our overall happiness? People use their valuable resources in non-essential things to increase their own utility all the time (EX: Makeup, pretty clothing, games, streaming subscriptions, etc...), thus, why can't we, at a collective level, invest some of our resources in a thing that is scientifically proven to influence everyone's mood and well-being significantly, even if it's supposedly "non-essential", specially considering that, even without government intervention, traditional architecture can very well be cheap and affordable? (remember, the dutch study said that modernist architeture and traditional architecture cost about the same amount, so we wouldn't be investing much more resources by switching from modernist to traditional, nor would the cost increase by a significant margin, there would only be a noticeable increase when it comes to switching from brutalist to traditional, but that's something the government could help with.)

So, supposing the amount of buildings doesn't change, there are 5 scenarios:

1. If every building was brutalist, everyone would be able to afford a house because of sharply lower rents, but our mood and well-being would be largely affected.
2. If every building was modernist, our mood and well-being would be affected the same way it is today, only with a slightly higher homelessness rate because there wouldn't be extremely cheap brutalist residential buildings anymore.
3. If every building was traditional, our mood and well-being would be significantly better, and the effect on the homelessness rate would be about the same as the second scenario.
4. If most buildings used modernist architeture, but enough buildings used brutalist architeture, there would be no homelessness, while our mood and well-being would be slightly affected.
5. If most buildings used traditional architecture, but enough buildings used brutalist architeture, there would be no homelessness as well, and our mood and well-being would still noticeably increase, considering that basically the only ones that would live in brutalist neighborhoods would be those that are either homeless or extremely poor, and these people aren't the majority.

The best scenario for utility is the fifth one, because even though most people would pay higher rents in this scenario when compared to the first one, we can argue that this is a necessary investment for the betterment of our mood and well-being, the first scenario is too austere for something that has such a consistent influence on our happiness.

However, the TRULY best scenario would be one where either every building was traditional but the amount of buildings increased significantly (leading to lower rents because of supply and demand) or where the government had a great public housing program (with the state-owned houses using cheap traditional architecture), these scenarios would both create a scenario 3 without the homelessness part, which would be the perfect option for increased utility.

Now, how could we achieve a perfect scenario 3? Well, my proposal is composed of four steps:

1. The government should establish a national architecture council, which wouldn't composed solely of traditional architects, but also of engineers (to ensure feasibility), economists/accountants (to ensure affordability) and neurobiologists (to define the most basic concepts of what's "beautiful" from a evolutionary standpoint), all of which, together, would lay down some BASIC architectural standards for a building to be considered acceptable when it comes to beauty, like symmetry for example, so that the real state market can know what they need to do after we apply the following steps.
2. The government should temporarily subsidize traditional architecture, as to incentivize the real state market to renovate their modernist buildings into beautiful ones, this is a short-term and transitory solution, considering we can very well just let the market use it's own resources after traditional architecture becomes commonplace.
3. The government then should impose an "Aesthetic tax", any building that goes against what the national architecture council defined would subject the owner to new or increased taxes (for example, the Aesthetic tax could be a land value tax, which could get progressively higher each year), it's basically a Pigouvian tax to compensate for the negative externalities caused by ugly architecture. I know we could just set the national architecture council standards as laws and just prohibit anyone from violating them, however, we would need to forcefully bulldoze entire neighborhoods to achieve this objective, which wouldn't be very utilitarian I might say, thus, for transitory reasons, we need to punish these negative externalities with taxes instead of regulations, however, after traditional architecture becomes commonplace, this style of punishment would become useless, which means to say that this Aesthetic tax is only for the short and medium term.
4. The architetural standards should eventually turn into regulations, this is for the long term, once every (or at least 99%) building became beautiful (when I say "beautiful" I don't mean necessarily the prettiest thing in the world btw, just something decent to look at everyday and that is in accordance to our biological tendencies), we could throw away our transitory solutions (subsidies and aesthetic tax).

So, in conclusion, architetural beauty increases utility, when it comes to housing, the best option is one where buildings are beautiful AND affordable at the same time, which, contrary to what a lot may think, it is, in fact, possible, we don't need to turn every city into a brutalist hellhole to ensure everyone has acess to housing. Besides, brutalism may use less resources, but this comes at the cost of our mood and well-being, and, in a society as rich as ours, we don't need to be so radically austere, specially considering that, as I said earlier, we use our valuable resources in many other areas that aren't necessarily essential, but help us feel better and be happier. So, what are your thoughts?

《Btw, here's a couple sources of my earlier statements:

Aesthetic City (Youtuber)

• https://youtu.be/C9pg2j2oGy0?si=HVJJzf50TewUWK58
• https://youtu.be/j0rH5ZiKV2U?si=45iG6ndF4b8UmXbW

Architetural Uprising (Organization)

• https://www.architecturaluprising.com/studies/
• https://www.architecturaluprising.com/debate/10-most-common-arguments-of-modernists-and-why-they-dont-hold-up/
• https://www.architecturaluprising.com/studies/why-ugly-architecture-is-bad-for-your-health/

https://www.architecturaluprising.com/debate/6-reasons-why-todays-architecture-is-unsustainable/

Statistic comes from " The nature of women's rape fantasies: an analysis of prevalence, frequency, and contents " by Jenny Bivona and Joseph Critelli published in the Journal of Sex Research