Dostoyevsky:pic.twitter.com/7sU5Ekwnf9
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Reminds me of two lines I think about often. One, from the Talmud, runs loosely: “One who saves a single life saves the world entire”. & Dag Hammarskjoeld: “It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses”
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. @wzeller42 comments that this refutes utilitarianism. I don't think that's quite right. But pondering the truth in these - really trying to understand them well - does pose some nice tests for utilitarianism.
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Perhaps the rub is that it's not possible to be a good utilitarian without living up to DH's (etc) criterion. At which point you are no longer fully utilitarian.
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There is a related point, which is that I will rarely trust data-driven studies by people who aren't intimately familiar with anecdote in an area. The latter seems to be an (often forgotten but) essential precondition for doing good data-driven work.
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@DavidDeutschOxf, moral theories like utilitarianism don't provide objectives to maximize, but tools to assess solutions to moral problems. Plus, moral knowledge is as rich as scientific knowledge. There's no more one final theory of morality than of physics.Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Utilitarianians maximize utility. If that’s the goal, then the child is sacrificed. The abhorrence of this is a refutation for most of us.
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One could argue that moral reasoning starts with intuition and then progresses to justification. Without the gut reaction to certain things (like the suffering of an innocent), much of what we do cannot be understood.
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I'm curious about how you can defend pure utilitarianism (utility maximization irrespective of means to achieve such) in light of these types of thought experiments. Maybe "pure utilitarianism" is simply a straw man, and all reasonable utilitarians have some "rules"?
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