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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

Sacrificing other people for a supposed "greater good" is highly unlikely to be beneficial because it destroys trust in society. It's a major cost if everybody has to be constantly wary of utilitarians pushing them in front of trolleys, and if everybody will betray you as soon as their calculations say it's a good idea then capitalism can't function, and capitalism is the only effective economic system yet discovered. Even the murders for organ transplants variation of the trolley problem doesn't avoid this problem, because the mere fact that you observe people acting as though they are utilitarians is good evidence for them actually being utilitarians. Deontological ethics has a predictability that makes planning things much easier and it preserves the functionality of contracts in society, so the long term consequences could be better even by utilitarian standards.

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This seems like a straw man, but maybe this really is how some utilitarians think. My view is: if the cost in terms of trust lost is greater than the expected benefit of an action, then the utilitarian answer is not to do it. If the only way to prevent a "race to zero trust" is to make some bright line rules and enforce them universally, then that's the utilitarian answer. It's literally impossible for another ethical system to reliably provide greater total utility than utilitarianism, because utilitarianism is the rule that you do whatever leads to the greatest utility.

That's assuming that everybody calculates utility the same way, which is false. One obvious difference is how to value hypothetical people, which is why there's so much controversy about existential risk charities. Multiple competing utilitarian systems could easily be worse than none at all- eg. the health charities and the AI charities could both calculate the best option is to sabotage each other to avoid "wasting" resources, even if they both agree on expected results of their work. You end up with a prisoner's dilemma type situation. With deontology both "good" and "bad" people are protected by the rule of law, so you avoid that problem. Utilitarianism is ethical anarchy.

It's only literally impossible in an abstract mathematical world where the rule is somehow manifest as a law of nature.

In the real world, the rule can be nothing more than a belief that is applied by individuals in their decision making. One can easily see how this could lead to a wide range of perverse outcomes, primarily because the idea of a 'utility function' is not a real thing in the world and cannot be universally calculated.

So I think you are drawing a distinction between doing what you expect to lead to the greatest increase in utility, and doing what leads to the largest mathematical expectation increase in utility. You're right that the latter is not actually possible, and the former could possibly lead to worse outcomes than following the rules. But this is not a stable equilibrium.

1. If you discover that you're so bad at predicting the consequences of your actions that always following the rules would produce better outcomes, then the good utilitarian thing to do is to give up on your own judgement and follow the rules.

2. If you discover that people you convince to follow utilitarianism end up in situation #1, then the good utilitarian thing to do is to lie to people about your beliefs and convince them to just follow the rules.

Over what time frame?

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