Comment by frig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frig | Hacker News Reader

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I'd stick with the serious point; it's not unique to politics and bureaucracies, though: just about anything can be justified by appealing to increasing shareholder value:

- paying generously above market rates? argue it is a morale-booster that leads to happier employees -> higher productivity -> higher profits -> higher shareholder value

- paying perilously below-market rates? argue the obvious cost-cutting line -> fatter margins -> higher profits -> higher shareholder value

...and the same with any other appeal to some vague metric of utility.

My serious point is that if you are arguing against "utilitarianism" (at that hoary level of abstraction) by saying:

- here's an example where 'utilitarianism' yields bad outcomes

...you're self-defeating, b/c your sole argument contra 'utilitarianism' hinges on a utilitarian-inspired argument (that the fact that one course of action yields better actions than another => taking the better course).

All you've accomplished is shown that you, too, seem to be a utilitarian, and all you're doing is pointing out a need to be careful in how you choose your utility metric. This doesn't make a convincing case against utilitarianism-the-abstraction and opens your specific 'corner case' to examination, which likely will not fare well if you pick a silly 'corner case' to try.

I don't want to continue this thread indefinitely, but you misunderstand the example. The redhead analogy is not demonstrating a result of lower social utility. It is demonstrating a clearly unjust and immoral result to the individuals involved.

Here's a serious example:

As it so happens, statistical research demonstrates that increased gun ownership generally reduces incidences of home invasion and violent crime. But if you believe fundamentally in the right of peaceful individuals to defend themselves, their families, and to own firearms, then this is just a happy coincidence. The right of peaceful people to generally do as they please is more important than the impact on some vague notion of social utility.

Your redheads example is either terrible or disingenuous or you're just innumerate; you're comparing 10k traffic accidents / annum with redheads, of whom there's several millions.

If you're going to try and have an honest debate you ought to pick an example that's not so laughable on its face; it's too hard for me to "forget" the actual sizes of the groups in question even when I try to assume they're comparable.

I pretty much give up on you; the sequence here is:

- some dude points out "if you could show that forcibly staying within the speedlimit => many more lives saved due to fewer accidents than are lost due to inability to speed to the hospital, it might be justified to hard-code the speed limit"

- rather than debate on the actual merits of the specific point in question, you pop over to trying to argue that on general principles the road to hell is paved with utilitarianism

- to make your case you invent a contrived example that's so far off as to be close to intellectual dishonesty

- you give up on your example and revert to just saying what it was supposed to accomplish -- showing that acting on utilitarian-calculus 'lives vs. lives' has revolting implications for the individuals on the wrong side of a decision -- while missing the point: utilitarianism is a tool for choosing between shitty alternatives, and that going the other way (picking the other alternative) has revolting implications for the individuals on the wrong side, too...which is why this is hard

Generally the best you can do is pray you're never finding yourself in a position where any of your decisions will inevitably have shitty consequences for other people; part of the general cussedness of life is that you can really only escape such positions -- or at least your awareness of being within one -- by shirking responsibility, adopting willful blindness, limiting the scope of your options, or becoming a jerk.

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