[HN Gopher] An underrated idea: the priority view
___________________________________________________________________
An underrated idea: the priority view
Author : akbarnama
Score : 147 points
Date : 2021-12-08 11:37 UTC (2 days ago)
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| jolux wrote:
| Isn't this just Rawls's theory of justice? That the inequalities
| that exist in a society should be arranged to benefit the people
| who have it worst?
| dsizzle wrote:
| They do seem similar in that they attempt to address
| shortcomings in utilitarianism but Rawls seem to reject the
| utilitarian framework in favor of justice whereas this is more
| of a tweak.
| jolux wrote:
| Ah, yes. The utilitarian angle is important, Rawls is more of
| a deontologist.
| ucarion wrote:
| Section 3 of the linked Parfit article touches on the
| notion that Rawls's distinction is mostly one of framing,
| not of actual recommendations:
|
| "Third, Rawls regards Utilitarians as his main opponents.
| At the level of theory, he may be right. But the questions
| I have been discussing are, in practice, more important. If
| nature gave to some of us more resources, have we a moral
| claim to keep these resources, and the wealth they bring?
| If we happen to be born with greater talents, and in
| consequence produce more, have we a claim to greater
| rewards? In practical terms, Rawls's main opponents are
| those who answer Yes to such questions. Egalitarians and
| Utilitarians both answer No. Both agree that such
| inequalities are not justified. In this disagreement,
| Rawls, Mill, and Sidgwick are on the same side."
|
| That said, to your original point, Rawls does espouse
| maximizing for the least well-off ("maximin"). The
| "priority view" doesn't need to be so extreme. It can
| simply be biased toward improving the lot of the badly-off,
| rather than putting an absolute priority on the worst-off
| member of the population. They are definitely related, but
| it's muddled by Rawls's (somewhat inconsistent) rejection
| of a consequentialist framing.
| glitchc wrote:
| The article feels like a very wordy way of saying that it may be
| better to optimize the overall utility than individual utility.
| Social welfare captures this notion in economic theory and
| maximizing social welfare is often a cited motive for
| macroeconomic policies.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Like the "prisoner" example in the prisoner's dilemma, I feel
| this example adds a lot of baggage that makes things harder to
| understand or easier to misunderstand.
|
| If we boil it right down then would you give 11 points of utility
| to a random billionaire or 10 points to a random poor person.
|
| Most people would feel the 10 units would do more good, but I
| think by the terms of the setup, that's actually impossible since
| 11 is more than 10. But probably most people would give to the
| random poor person if we were talking about 100 dollars, not 100
| util points, which presumably translates to many more utils for
| the poor person.
|
| I think many people would also be "prioritarians" because they
| think it maximise utility but this example confuses matters as
| there's second order effects on other people's happiness to
| consider.
|
| I get the feeling people will answer the second question when
| asked the first, though they're quite distinct, one is easily
| graspable and the other very abstract.
|
| If you try to convert back from slightly more util points for the
| rich person to cash then it might translate into "would you give
| a poor person .0001 of a penny vs give a rich person 100 dollars"
| where the utility of each is closer and the choice seems kind of
| irrelevant because neither really benefits.
|
| Once you scale it to something that the poor person would notice,
| you'd need to give many millions to the billionaire, at which
| point the diminishing returns kick in and so you end up with
| something absurd like give a poor person 5 dollars, versus give
| Billionaire 5 trillion, at which point you'd be creating so much
| extra utility out of thin air that some of it is maybe going to
| spill over to others (or lead to the Billionaire becoming King of
| the World and/or God and then have negative effects).
|
| Which still doesn't really shed much light on things as you're
| now imagining how all that extra util wealth will impact others
| in a complex sequence of utility impacts and transfers.
| geysersam wrote:
| I think your analysis is correct for many people, myself
| included. Even though I know the premise of the thought
| experiment is that the gifted boy receives more utility, that
| is just too hard to believe to take seriously.
|
| Your billionaire example makes the situation more clean and
| less influenced by my inability to accept the facts of the
| situation. If choosing between giving Bezos $100 or some dude
| $0.00001 I would probably just give the $100.
|
| The even cleaner version of this problem is the utility monster
| mentioned in the article.
| andjd wrote:
| I realise that this is a thought experiment, so refuting the
| premise is besides the point, but . . . I feel the need to call
| out the casual assertion that
|
| > The suburbs has [net] benefits for your gifted son
|
| The zeitgeist has a knee-jerk belief that children are best
| raised in the suburbs, and I think it's important to assess that
| belief critically. Children can and do thrive in cities. To pick
| just one example children, especially teenagers, have a lot more
| agency and independence when they live in walkable neighborhoods
| with a robust public transit network. In the typical suburb,
| anything beyond playing with friends who live on the same street
| requires a parent to drive them around. This harms the utility of
| both the children and the parents.
| pugets wrote:
| America has also changed its opinion about whether children
| should travel around town alone. It used to be that children
| could ride their bikes around town, knock on doors, and find
| kids to play with, and it would be okay as long as you were
| back home by dinner.
|
| Parents today are worried about their kids being hit by cars,
| going lost, getting abducted by strangers, or simply having
| something happen to them that gets CPS involved. If something
| happens to my kid, then I'm the bad parent. Anecdotally, I saw
| this happen in my town when a 7-year-old girl was taken in her
| own front yard. Parents chimed in online to say, "The mother
| should go to jail" and "I always know where my kids are at all
| times."
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| I actually think the housing situation in America is very
| directly linked to the teenage mental health crisis. From my
| personal experience, when I was under 18, my entire life
| revolved around school (which was 90% lectured by teacher and
| 10% socializing) and taking the bus home (the nearest other
| home was door-to-door ten minutes away), then being alone at
| home. The only other transit options was a bizarre after-school
| bus which took until 7 to get home or getting a ride from my
| parents.
|
| In such an environment, it makes sense kids would feel isolated
| and alone. In my present life my work/home/play is much more
| balanced. I have multiple social areas in walking distance from
| my apartment, the activities during the 'working hours' is a
| mix of learning, meetings, and productive work. I know I'm a
| data point of one, but I can't imagine living in the suburbs
| and NOT being depressed.
| rileyphone wrote:
| I think this speaks to the failure of utilitarianism, at least
| in my mind - notions of "utility" are rooted in subjectivity
| and subject to chaotic forces in the future. Utilitarianism
| still remains useful as an ethical and executive framework, but
| one must be easily preempted by other ethical concerns as in
| the article, as well as aware of the inherent uncertainty in
| future outcomes.
| visarga wrote:
| Utility is subjective? We have instincts around what to
| consider useful or not. These instincts have been calibrated
| by evolution for survival. Survival is pretty objective,
| don't you agree?
| geysersam wrote:
| In spite of that, not everyone has the same instincts on
| what is useful or not. Therefore utility is subjective.
| Beyond survival there is much else to disagree about.
| dionidium wrote:
| Unfortunately "suburb" is an overloaded and ill-defined term
| that can mean anything from "pre-war streetcar suburbs laid out
| on a grid, with a main street, walkable amenities, and (at
| least here in the Northeast, if not everywhere) access to
| commuter rail" to "a modern cul-de-sac development attached to
| a high-speed arterial that's walkable to exactly nothing."
| mordymoop wrote:
| It is simply a mistake to use constructions such as "utility gain
| for the gifted son from living in the suburbs would be larger
| than the utility gain for the disabled son from living in the
| city". Utility is first-person relative to the decision-maker.
| _Your_ assessment of the utility of each outcome is dependent on
| _your_ subjective preferences relative to the options. You, the
| decision-maker, do not, and cannot, know the subjective utility
| values that your two sons would assess to their own outcomes.
|
| Subjective utilities are not fungible, you cannot ask Son A how
| utility he expects and then compare that number with the answer
| Son B gives you.
|
| Thus, if you prefer A to B, yet you somehow wrote down that the
| utility of B is higher than A, you just made a mistake somewhere.
| Utility is just a scalar valued encoding of subjective personal
| preference. If you are using it in some other way, e.g.
| pretending that you are accurately measuring the subjective
| utility of your sons (rather than your own subjective
| preferences) than you are going to get weird and usually useless
| answers.
|
| Some people do use utility in such a way that they assign numbers
| to other people's well-being, but doing this always leads to
| unresolveable paradoxes such as the Repugnant Conclusion, because
| it's just not how people think and decide, nor should it be.
| [deleted]
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| Maybe prioritarianism is similar to increasing average log-
| utility... A sort of social Kelly criterion [1].
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| The terminology chosen is terrible, "priority" in this context is
| self referential and doesn't mean anything. All those (equality,
| utility, ...) are strategies to define the priority in the face
| of scarcity or competing requirements, so to call one of them
| "priority" is nonsense. The author is basically saying that:
|
| - Equality strategy is to prioritize decreasing differences. (OK)
|
| - Utility strategy is prioritizing maximizing the sum total of a
| set utility function. (OK)
|
| - Priority strategy is prioritizing priority. (WTF!!!)
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > Priority strategy is prioritizing priority. (WTF!!!)
|
| From the article:
|
| "Parfit's answer is that we might value priority, which is
| prioritising the well-being of the worst off."
| sdrabing wrote:
| This is a tangent, but the "utility monster" scenario only makes
| sense if the utility gained from an activity remains the same
| with how many resources are put into it. This doesn't make sense
| with how people actually work, almost all goals or resources or
| pleasures have diminishing returns, or homeostasis. Do negative
| feedback loops exist in this philosophy? Perhaps I'm
| misunderstanding the point.
| steve_g wrote:
| This is an interesting way to think about why utilitarianism
| doesn't alway comport with our moral intuitions. But I was really
| hoping this article would be about a user interface for business
| applications.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| ...or a To Do list app with a priority view.
| numeromancer wrote:
| > "Imagine that the gifted boy has a total utility of 80,..."
|
| Argument discarded.
| notinty wrote:
| Lots of people are getting hung up on the measurement.
|
| The key word is "imagine" y'know.
| numeromancer wrote:
| Imagine that the Imagination Quotient is a number between 0
| and 1, with 0 being the inability to imagine even what you're
| looking at, and 1 representing the ability to imagine a real
| thing unseen in full detail. The Imagination Quotient
| required to imagine that someone's utility is 80 is would be
| an proper imaginary number.
| visarga wrote:
| Am I right to conclude that priority view applied to college
| admissions would mean favouring the worst students, because they
| have the largest marginal utility?
| [deleted]
| logicalmonster wrote:
| This might be a bit of an odd comment in this kind of thread, but
| when reading this article, the concept of the Priority View
| discussed here reminded me of an episode from the TV show Malcolm
| in the Middle.
|
| I definitely remember some of the plot details wrong, but I
| believe that one of the teachers hated Reese, a very dumb loser,
| and was purposely trying to fail him. So his brother Malcolm, a
| very gifted student, cheated on behalf of Reese to save him. They
| get caught, and the teacher presented Malcolm's mom with the
| choice of which child's future to save: either reporting Malcolm
| for cheating and possibly ruining the only one in the family with
| a bright future, or just failing Reese and letting a loser with
| no future get a head start on failing at life. She unhesitatingly
| said that she would sacrifice Malcolm to save Reese because
| Malcolm would land on his feet and be ok no matter the
| circumstance.
| sg47 wrote:
| Reese would have failed regardless. Not sure saving him in this
| instance would have made a difference. In fact, letting him
| fail early might have been better.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| This is surely a fairly _highly rated_ idea. At least where I
| live now and where I come from (at the time I lived there) it was
| regarded as more important to raise the standard of the poorest
| students than to raise the standard of the top performers for
| instance. At least when I was in primary school my teachers spent
| more time with those who found studying difficult than those of
| us for whom it came easy. It was made clear to me as a high
| achiever that help was always available but, as it was clear that
| I _could_ work on my own, that I was expected to do so.
|
| It also surely accords with the Marx's slogan:
|
| "From each according to his ability, to each according to his
| needs[1]"
|
| Perhaps this idea isn't so popular as it used to be.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...
| cousin_it wrote:
| It's interesting because neither helping the strongest
| students, nor helping the weakest, has any reason to be
| maximally beneficial to society. From pure utilitarian point of
| view, we should first help those students who would get the
| most benefit per hour of help. That probably means the middling
| ones who just need a hand to get them over a hurdle, not the
| checked-out ones and not the superstars.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > That probably means the middling ones who just need a hand
| to get them over a hurdle, not the checked-out ones and not
| the superstars.
|
| From my experience the middling ones are exactly the students
| who have the highest cost/benefit ratio. The checked out ones
| are the students who could have a small amount of attention
| to get them over a hurdle that's completely blocking them,
| which caused them to check out. Maybe you find out they are
| dyslexic. Or you find out they are not eating breakfast or
| lunch after a short conversation. Or you find out they're
| checked out because they're bullied. A small change here can
| yield a drastic improvement.
|
| The middling ones are usually performing at their highest
| cylinder and still not doing great, so it takes a lot of work
| to convince them to apply themselves even more.
|
| TLDR; it's easier to get a student from F to C than from C to
| A.
| onos wrote:
| That's a great, practical point. One anecdote about smart
| kids though: i knew a number of very smart boys growing up
| who got bored at school and checked out for that reason, and
| life didn't work out great for them - nor did society benefit
| from the very positive productivity they might have been
| capable of. I think they'd have done better with appropriate
| challenges.
| slx26 wrote:
| I always talked about ideas since I was a kid and got lots
| of applauses, but no one ever bothered to actually take my
| hand and try to explore with me. I didn't simply get bored,
| I ended up in complete social isolation. In my personal
| case, neglection actually runs deeper and beyond the
| educative system, but if you fail to "get people on board",
| any other metric will be irrelevant.
| eluusive wrote:
| This happened with both myself and my sister. Thankfully, I
| dropped out and started attending community college where I
| could proceed at my own pace. I don't think a lot of
| parents are aware of this option.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Priority can be mathematically stated as maximizing the minimum
| expected utility across a set of people's utility functions
| instead of maximizing the additive or average expected utility.
|
| It still suffers from the utility monster who can make trivial
| inconveniences as numerically terrible as the worst life
| imaginable for other people, dragging the world down to a merely
| comfortable level for everyone else, which may frustrate the
| desire to thrive and grow in those other people. It caps the
| effect at not letting anyone else be worse off, which seems
| desirable over alternatives. It potentially leaves a lot of good
| on the table to avoid the risk of a lot of harm.
|
| It sounds like a good initial optimization strategy until we
| figure out how to unify disparate agents' utility functions into
| a global optimization problem if that turns out to be possible.
| artfulhippo wrote:
| Supporters and resistors of the utilitarian framing of benefits
| of (sub)urbanity are both being over-simplistic.
|
| Of course we make decisions on balance of their expected
| outcomes. The problem is that we can't in general predict
| outcomes with certainty. So, intelligent decision making is not
| merely to pick the best expected outcome, but to factor in the
| range of all possible outcomes on a probabilistic basis.
|
| In this thought experiment, it seems that city-dwelling is highly
| probable to benefit the disabled kid, but we have less a priori
| certainty that suburb life is better for the accelerated learner
| (it may be better for him today, but it's plausible to think that
| it's long-term good for a smart kid to experience some amount of
| adversity in a tougher environment compared to a more comfortable
| sheltered suburban setting, or to learn by example that it's
| sometimes worth risking personal optimality to serve the needs of
| others).
|
| So yes, the notion that we should prioritize the needs of the
| bottom of social hierarchies is worth considering, but it's even
| more important to factor in uncertainty, to have no pretense of
| one's ability to predict the future.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| This seems like simply another version of utilitiarianism, but
| with a nonlinear utility function.
| flaviojuvenal wrote:
| And lack of knowledge about Prospect Theory.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| How does prospect theory apply to the scenario as proposed?
| derbOac wrote:
| I agree although you could turn it on its head and say it's
| also a good example of how utilitarianism loses its explanatory
| power because it can explain away anything just by changing the
| utilities.
|
| The problem with utility has always been in defining the
| utilities.
| onos wrote:
| It seems that the priority view may feel intuitive because
| humans fail to internalize that the diminishing returns are
| already baked into utility gained from some benefit and they
| are trying to insert it a second time.
| wpietri wrote:
| My main take-away from this is that political philosophy must not
| spend much time with actual data if this is the level of numeric
| discourse. The models they use for very complicated decisions
| like the one described seem just crashingly unsubtle from this.
| rackjack wrote:
| Isn't this related to proportionality? Giving somebody with only
| $1 another dollar increases their wealth by 100%. Giving somebody
| with $1 million another two dollars increases their wealth much
| less, proportionally.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _There is also a catch in the hypothetical - let's assume that
| the utility gain for the gifted son from living in the suburbs
| would be larger than the utility gain for the disabled son from
| living in the city. A pure utilitarian, then, must choose the
| suburbs. Nagel's view is this: if you say that you would live in
| the city for the sake of your disabled son, despite it being the
| case that moving to the city creates more utility in total, you
| are not a utilitarian (at least in all circumstances), but rather
| an egalitarian. You value the equality of the boys more than you
| do maximising the overall levels of well-being._
|
| The very idea that there is some measusable "utility" to compare
| in the two cases, independent from your moral values and
| sentiments, is inane.
|
| > _Let's introduce another scenario: Imagine that the gifted boy
| has a total utility of 80, and the disabled boy has a total
| utility of 40._
|
| What that "utility" unit would measure?
|
| Money they can make for you? Their pontential on their own? Their
| future contribution to society (in what terms? monetary?
| intellectual?)? Any other of 500 factors (perhaps combined)?
|
| What if you don't want to help build a society that neglects the
| needs of disabled people because of their lesser contribution,
| and thus your utility function - ie. your desired goal
| maximization includes helping the disabled son?
|
| In the examples, it is assumed that ulility == favoring gifted
| son, which means the utility function you'll use is taken for
| granted (and the whole thing is presented as only a matter of
| whether you value utility or not).
| tomrod wrote:
| Utility is a fundamental concept in decision theory. Arguing it
| cannot exist is the opposite extreme to arguing that homo
| economicus, with superhuman evaluative strategies and no gaps
| in rationality, exists.
|
| People can compare their current situations to relative
| improvement, and often those are transitive (though not
| always). So in most reasonable cases the mathematical axioms
| needed for utility to be defined exist in a reasonable way,
| allowing for comparison through a formalized utility function.
|
| One can certainly mathurbate themselves with utility, and many
| do, but ultimately utility is a discussion to simplify
| communication (instead of primitives) about why people make
| preditible choices. It extends pretty quickly to revealed
| preferences.
|
| Of course, asking where preferences come from in the first
| place is a third rail.
| mudita wrote:
| Yes, utility as a concept in decision theory is great, but
| it's not the same as the concept by the same name from
| utilitarianism. In my understanding, coldtea is doubting not
| decision theoretic utility functions, but utilities as they
| are used here.
|
| Most importantly a decision theoretic utility function is
| only defined up to any positive definite transformation.
| Inter-agent comparisons like "Imagine that the gifted boy has
| a total utility of 80, and the disabled boy has a total
| utility of 40" don't make any sense in terms of decision
| theoretic utility functions.
| emn13 wrote:
| Right, but if the essence of the question is by what function
| you measure utility, then the question as posed by the
| article is a moot point. utility, priority, equality -
| they're just slightly different cost functions for the
| utility. And it's not even the case that they're well-defined
| and clearly separated; some level of interpretation is going
| to be required regardless.
|
| For example, people routinely act as if money has a non-
| linear utility; we'll insure ourselves against stuff
| partially because being destitute is worse than the mere loss
| of money might suggest; i.e. each additional dollar is worth
| less.
|
| But exactly how you define those non-linear relationships,
| especially once you include stuff like happiness, health, and
| intend to aggregate over multiple individuals is clearly
| tricky, and it's not reasonable to expect any one simplified
| model to work well in all situations in reality. It's not
| even reasonable for that to be knowable or computable.
|
| So it's both perfectly reasonable to consider it ludicrous to
| label one such scenario as having "40" and "80" utility
| without having had the critical discussion of what that
| utility is measuring, while also conceding that the concept
| of utility is reasonable and... sometimes... enlightening.
| samhw wrote:
| Thanks, this was a really insightful comment (as someone
| who spent years of my life getting a graduate philosophy
| degree, before doing something more 'useful'). I think the
| concept of utility is clearly, uh, useful, and the reason
| that it's aversive to people is that they tend to bundle it
| up with a lot of the (sociologically, not logically)
| related views, which tend to be more problematic.
|
| Hedonic utilitarianism in particular turns a lot of people
| off, and partly for good reason. I'm deeply ambivalent
| about it, and I think the surrounding debates, and the
| assumed primacy of moral intuition in applied cases, are
| far harder and more open questions than most people reckon.
| _But_ I can still see how examples like utility monsters,
| or gang rape being morally superior to garden-variety rape
| because there are more people to enjoy it, might make
| people feel like it 's really on the wrong path.
| emn13 wrote:
| Those examples are hilariously egregious, yeah! It's
| slightly taboo in polite conversation to see increased
| utility there, yep. Thanks for the kind words, too.
| samhw wrote:
| No problem! And yeah, I had a moral philosophy professor
| who had endless examples like that, including that one.
| They were hilarious and so intuitively potent, I just
| wish I could remember more of them. He could spend a full
| 5-10 minutes in a lecture just retailing dozens of those
| ridiculous counter-examples. (It was especially funny
| because he was a very urbane old Oxonian professor -
| think Richard Dawkins for a pretty close analogue to his
| general mien - whom you wouldn't expect to start
| enthusiastically talking about gang rape.)
| philipkglass wrote:
| Philosophy professor John Holbo had a blog post about
| ridiculously whimsical scenarios in philosophy under the
| delightful title Occam's Phaser:
|
| https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/25/occams-phaser/
|
| There are good examples in the comments too, though I
| mostly recall it for getting into a heated argument with
| someone making utilitarian arguments for torture.
| samhw wrote:
| Interesting, thanks! My position on the whole 'using
| moral intuitions in applied cases to disprove fundamental
| moral theories' is basically what I said in this thread:
| https://twitter.com/samziz/status/1412198411579887622
|
| Incidentally I wouldn't agree with utilitarian arguments
| for torture, but not - necessarily - because I don't
| agree with utilitarianism. I think it's certainly
| possible to make higher-order or rule-utilitarian
| arguments against torture, within the parameters of
| utilitarianism.
| netcan wrote:
| I disagree. OP is correct. Utility is a rhetorical construct.
| Sometimes it works well for describing morality, decisions,
| etc. Sometimes it's crammed in.
|
| Using it to describe the two sons decisions is cramming it
| in.
| tomrod wrote:
| > Utility is a rhetorical construct
|
| It's a mathematical construct to show ranking of points in
| a topological space. With two simple axioms, comparability
| and transitivity, it is fairly well defined mathematically,
| though it typically enters the extrapolation zone at
| extremes.
| emn13 wrote:
| But if the definition is barely more fleshed out than
| "some cost function", then the difference between
| utility, priority and equality as discussed in the
| article collapse; they're all the same thing. Cost
| functions, aka: utility.
| tomrod wrote:
| Cost functions are typically the dual for utility
| maximization under cost constraints.
|
| You are correct in that they are usually mathematically
| equivalent.
| emn13 wrote:
| Yeah, I was struggling the find the best terminology for
| that, but given the ambiguity of the term "utility" in
| this context I though it better to avoid that ;-).
| mlac wrote:
| I've always heard utility in the context of a utility
| function. Basically:
|
| f(u) = Wx*x + ... + Wz*z, where x and z are variables that
| are impacted by decisions and constraints. Each variable is
| weighted for importance by the person / group using the
| utility function.
|
| So for a home buyer needing to get to a city, the utility
| of the house improves as the location to the city gets
| better, subject to the constraint that it's not in the
| river. A home buyer utility function might also weight
| cost, neighbors, amenities, square footage, local
| pollution, safety, and any other meaningful variable for
| the buyer.
|
| Turning this into a quantitative formula can be cramming it
| in and quite hand-wavy, but ultimately it's up to the
| person optimizing for their own utility to put in the
| variables and weights. These will be shifted by the
| person's moral code (e.g. A Jewish person may highly value
| living in the city's Eruv).
|
| On a political note, big government supporters believe the
| federal government can define a utility function for the
| country that is best for the greater good. People who
| believe in smaller federal government and governing at the
| local level believe the utility functions should be defined
| at the individual level if possible - subject to the
| constraints one does not infringe on others' rights. There
| are benefits to both sides (some things we can't achieve if
| everyone acts independently, some things create
| externalities, some things have too many edge cases and
| unintended consequences).
|
| I think the extreme of a shared utility function is
| communism, with an idea of central planning.
| tomrod wrote:
| If the math of utility is interesting to you, check out
| Hal Varian's microeconomics book (he is/was chief
| economist at Google) or the intro grad text for
| microeconometrics Mas-Collel, Winston, and Green.
|
| Utility theory's primitives are defined before the actual
| function.
|
| Social choice theory is covered in MWG -- arrow's
| impossibility theorem is absolutely fascinating!
|
| The field of mechanism design relies heavily on utility
| theory -- it's effectively the inverse of game theory,
| or, how to structure systems and incentives to get
| desired outcomes.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Utility can be intrepret in many ways. Look at the social
| sciences and how they see minorities, e.g. disabled people.
| From the social scientist's view, one "utility" of these
| people is that they stabilize societies because they trigger
| empathy, which would otherwise be largely missing in a
| society that only aims for optimization. I want to emphasize
| that I find it generally humilitating to talk about utility
| and humans in one and the same sentence.
| michael-ax wrote:
| think of it as a label for the process by which you decide
| to prioritize cleaning up different areas of your house --
| and utility becomes a rational and humanizing thing.
|
| using it to prioritize your relations forces you to grapple
| with subjective and irrational things such as personal
| prefs, aspirations etc. so.. also rational and humanizing.
|
| this leaves using it to mess with others without them
| participating in weight-setting (democracy as a weight
| discovery mechanism?), that's where it gets messy.
|
| i fail to see where any of the three facets above make it
| humiliating to see where 'by priority' the most relative
| improvement can be made. i mean, this is all just fine talk
| about something innate to nature, no?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Utility is a fundamental concept in decision theory.
| Arguing it cannot exist is the opposite extreme to arguing
| that homo economicus, with superhuman evaluative strategies
| and no gaps in rationality, exists._
|
| It's probably more like arguing that leprechauns don't exist.
|
| The burden of proof [for its existance] is on those making up
| those "fundamental concepts in decision theory". I won't be
| taking it for granted just because they came up with it.
|
| In any case, I'm not saying utility can't exist. I'm saying
| some universal utility can't exist, or if you wish: sorry,
| guys, you can't determine my utility function for me. I'll do
| it myself, thank you very much.
|
| > _So in most reasonable cases the mathematical axioms needed
| for utility to be defined exist in a reasonable way, allowing
| for comparison through a formalized utility function._
|
| If we could have a "formalized utility function" for "most
| reasonable cases" we'd hardly have different morals,
| political parties, and so on...
|
| It's mostly irrelevant (trivial) cases that have formalized
| utility functions. Everything else is political, that is up
| for debate based on interests, preferences, morals, and so on
| -- and especially based on idiosyncrasy.
|
| Even maximing one's life/health is not some constant. Many
| prefer to smoke, drink, eat, knowing fully well it might have
| them, because their utility function favors enjoyment over
| life span. Others might sacrifice their life for some cause
| or another.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _In any case, I 'm not saying utility can't exist. I'm
| saying some universal utility can't exist, or if you wish:
| sorry, guys, you can't determine my utility function for
| me. I'll do it myself, thank you very much._"
|
| The article does not posit a "universal utility function",
| nor does it require determining anyone's individual utility
| function. It merely requires that utility functions exist
| and that a comparison of the resulting utility is
| meaningful.
|
| " _If we could have a "formalized utility function" for
| "most reasonable cases" we'd hardly have different morals,
| political parties, and so on..._"
|
| Only if you have a universal utility function. Which you
| are the only one proposing.
| bluGill wrote:
| > you can't determine my utility function for me. I'll do
| it myself, thank you very much
|
| You have now stated that utility exists.
|
| At no place should any argument depend on some universal
| utility function that applies to everyone. The idea of a
| universal utility function is a useful simplification for
| some beginner classes, but quickly becomes useless for
| anything in the real world. In fact if there were a
| universal utility function(s?) economics wouldn't be hard
| to study, just a simple optimization problem that
| businesses would use.
|
| All that we need is for everyone to assign utility in some
| way. It doesn't matter if your function omits critical
| factors, applies the wrong weighting, or otherwise is a
| decision you come to regret. (note that this hindsight
| might be wrong because you don't really know what your
| regrets would be had you made the other decision) All that
| matters is at some point you weight all the factors you
| consider important and make a decision based on them. You
| can come up with a complex formula to put numbers to it, or
| just go with a "gut feeling" (in many cases others are
| involved - perhaps a spouse). Regardless you have made a
| utility function for your situation.
| nemetroid wrote:
| > You have now stated that utility exists.
|
| Only in the context of a single person. The argument
| presented in the article, as well as ideas like the
| "utility monster" are based on the idea that the utility
| scales of different persons are comparable.
|
| This is not the same thing as a universal utility
| function, but almost as outlandish.
| chii wrote:
| > utility scales of different persons are comparable.
|
| but a decision is only made by one person, so only that
| person's utility function matters. A different person,
| using their own utility function, would come to a
| different conclusion and make a different choice.
|
| So while there's no universal utility function, it
| doesn't matter as long as the decision maker's utility
| function exists (and it does, by tautological argument).
| In the article, the utility values of 80 and 40 for the
| boys are the outcome of the parent's utility function.
| The boys don't get a choice, and so their utility
| functions don't matter.
| mlyle wrote:
| > So while there's no universal utility function, it
| doesn't matter as long as the decision maker's utility
| function exists (and it does, by tautological argument).
| In the article, the utility values of 80 and 40 for the
| boys are the outcome of the parent's utility function.
|
| Yes, but ... the argument in the article presupposes
| fixed differences in utility when ascribing choices to
| priority, equality, and pure utilitarian views. Is it not
| easier to just say that the parent values improving the
| situation of the disabled boy more, and thus the utility
| of this improvement to the disabled boy's situation is
| higher in one parent's view but not the other?
|
| Nearly any parent will choose a massive benefit from son
| A's perspective at the cost of a tiny expense to son B
| (looks utilitarian!). Nearly any parent will prioritize a
| sibling who is less well off in some circumstances.
| Nearly any parent will give the two sons equal slices of
| cake when they value them equally. But is it not easier
| to ascribe different utilities to these different
| circumstances instead of different allocation functions?
| wpietri wrote:
| Is the concept of utility then anything other than
| tautological? If I understand what you're saying, it's
| roughly that, "A person chooses things, and since I
| imagine that their choice process can be caricatured as a
| linearized ranking system, a utility measure must exist
| for them".
|
| I'm not saying that's a necessarily false model. But it
| strikes me as such a crashingly unsubtle simplification
| that I'd want to see a ton of data demonstrating that's
| really how it works. As opposed to just being something
| that academics assume so they can write bold, confident
| papers with conclusions that they like.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Von-Neumann Morgenstern utility is mathematically
| precise; there is a real-numbered utility function such
| that maximizing utility is equivalent to choosing the
| correct lotteries according to an agent's preferences. So
| long as every decision one can have a preference about
| can be stated as a preference over expected outcomes
| (e.g. 50% chance of ice cream over 30% chance of cake, or
| related to the article: 90% child-one succeeds and 70%
| child-two succeeds v.s. 85% child-one succeeds and 74%
| child-two succeeds) then the utility function exists.
|
| Humans do not have utility functions. We have a lot of
| circular or contradictory preferences and other ancient
| machinery in our brains, and especially we do not reason
| about probabilities and expected outcomes accurately
| enough. We might be able to grow into having a utility
| function while still being happy about our preferences
| and without changing our humanity for the worse.
| nemetroid wrote:
| That's fair. The article uses phrasing like "the disabled
| boy has a total utility of 40", suggesting that the
| utility is an attribute of the boy, but I guess it would
| become wordy and repetitive to phrase it any other way.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > The argument presented in the article, as well as ideas
| like the "utility monster" are based on the idea that the
| utility scales of different persons are comparable.
|
| The article makes no implicit or explicit statement about
| how one defines a/the utility function, but I see no
| reason to believe the author thinks it's a universal
| function.
| nemetroid wrote:
| As indicated in the sentence directly following your
| quote.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > The burden of proof [for its existance] is on those
| making up those "fundamental concepts in decision theory".
| I won't be taking it for granted just because they came up
| with it.
|
| What? It's trivial. People want things. Things that satisfy
| wants have utility. You can just look this up. It's pretty
| basic to modern economics and philosophy.[1]
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility
| wpietri wrote:
| You call it trivial, but the second sentence says, "Its
| usage has evolved significantly over time"; both can't be
| true. And the criticism section makes some good points: h
| ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility#Discussion_and_criti
| ci...
|
| I also think there are a number of questionable
| assumptions behind it, and even your simple version of a
| supposedly trivial concept doesn't match the current
| official definition well.
|
| So to me this isn't so much an obvious fact about the
| world as a synthetic cornerstone to a worldview. Sort of
| like Peano's construction of the integers, or the way
| theists talk about the things that are "pretty basic" to
| their religion. Those things feel trivial to their
| adherents, of course. But the rest of us can find
| sweeping dismissals like yours as very offputting.
| samhw wrote:
| You're just defining satisfaction of wants as utility.
| "Things that satisfy wants have utility" is a statement
| of a definition, not a synthetic claim. There are plenty
| of measures of utility other than hedonic ones (or
| volitional ones, or whatever exactly your definition is
| specifying).
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yes, because that is what's meant by the word in this
| context.
| samhw wrote:
| I'm aware, but my point is that you're not making a
| synthetic claim - you're not proving the (axiological)
| meaningfulness of a concept. You're just saying "I use
| this word 'utility' to describe the satisfaction of
| wants".
|
| It doesn't really answer any of the questions that were
| posed, about how you can measure and compare the 'want-
| satisfying-ness' of different things. How do you measure
| the degree of want? How do you measure the degree to
| which a want is satisfied? How do you compare those
| across human beings?
|
| If by 'trivial' in your original comment you meant
| 'trivial' in the technical sense[0], then I'd agree with
| that. "I define 'utility' as 'satisfaction of wants'" is
| a statement that neither predicates nor proves anything
| of the world.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triviality_(mathematics)
| tomrod wrote:
| And yet, the theory of utility works well under extensions
| of bounded rationality, with full acknowledgement of time
| inconsistent preferences.
|
| Utimately utility is a simplifying model of human behavior.
|
| > we'd hardly have different morals, political parties, and
| so on.
|
| This touches on where preferences come from, which utility
| theory is mainly silent on.
| dudeman13 wrote:
| I don't think GP is arguing that utility doesn't exist. I
| believe the GP is arguing that the OP is making arguments as
| if utility weren't subjective.
|
| If you can attach a number to decisions, you can just do the
| math. The thing is, attaching a number to make a non meta
| argument about decision making can be bollocks since the
| actual utility can be -9999999 for me or 9999999 for you. An
| utility function is a function of the decision making agent
|
| See the "independent from your moral values and sentiments,
| is inane" bit
| geysersam wrote:
| If someone has a special preference for egalitarian outcomes,
| this should be included in their utility functions.
|
| Telling someone their utility values for each of the choices
| is equivalent to telling them their preference. Asking for
| their preference afterwards is pointless, they have already
| been told their preference.
| [deleted]
| JoBrad wrote:
| If the "utility score" was an overall rating for quality of
| life, it might change your view? Whether I assign a numerical
| or qualitative value is (arguably) arbitrary: as a parent, I'm
| still calculating which actions I should take based on some
| scoring mechanism.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _as a parent, I'm still calculating which actions I should
| take based on some scoring mechanism._
|
| The key is that you do it: it's not imposed upon you in the
| form of a normalized/universal scoring rule.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Which the article doesn't argue against. Instead, it
| _assumes for the sake of argument_ that you 've made a
| utility calculation whereby favoring the disabled son is
| the worse choice.
| netcan wrote:
| Inane, perhaps.
|
| I don't think these ideas can be separated from their time and
| place. Like most philosophical/intellectual movements, a lot of
| what they are is objections, dialogue and alternatives to
| previous ideas or competing ideas.
|
| To us, 2-300 years later, we don't necessarily _need_ a
| concrete basis for secular morality. We also don 't expect
| morality to be reducible to a simle principle like F=ma.
|
| To them, they were in a period where medieval theology was
| being replaced by secular philosophy and science. They expected
| morality to be solved like Newton and Galileo had solved
| problems in their domains. We don't expect this anymore.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > What that "utility" unit would measure?
|
| Well, that's up to you, is it not? Who else could determine
| what you value and to which degree?
| tzs wrote:
| When the article talks about utility in its examples, it is not
| talking about some universal objective utility that all would
| agree on. It is talking about the utility that the person
| making the decision assigns which will depend on their moral
| values and sentiments.
|
| > What if you don't want to help build a society that neglects
| the needs of disabled people because of their lesser
| contribution, and thus your utility function - ie. your desired
| goal maximization includes helping the disabled son?
|
| Then you'd have a case where utilitarianism and egalitarianism
| produce the same outcome which is great when you can achieve
| it, but not very useful in an article that is trying to talk
| about when utilitarianism and egalitarianism produce
| conflicting outcomes.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > In the examples, it is assumed that utility == favoring
| gifted son
|
| This is a misreading of the article, which assumes utility in
| helping either son. The point is that while a 'pure' or
| 'fundamental' utilitarianism would simply say one should choose
| the option that maximizes the total of this utility, the
| priority view says there may be rational reasons for using a
| weighted sum of the utilities, or include additional terms.
|
| This article should be seen in the context of moral philosophy,
| which (naively) might be thought of as an attempt to find a
| rational basis for ethics, but more realistically should
| probably be seen as probing the extent to which one can be
| rational about such matters.
|
| > The whole thing is presented as only a matter of whether you
| value utility or not.
|
| That is because it is a continuation of a discussion over the
| utility of utilitarianism that has been going on, in some form,
| since antiquity, and which picked up pace after Bentham
| formulated his Principle of Utility [1].
|
| There are quite often cases where one can have a somewhat
| objective utility function, and this comes up repeatedly in
| urban planning, as it is often the case that a project that is
| beneficial to the community as a whole often has a downside for
| some (usually those living near where the project will be
| sited.) A purely utilitarian view almost always favors putting
| the burden on those who have little left to lose, and the
| priority view says there can be a rational basis for choosing
| an alternative.
|
| Somewhat ironically, the priority view argues against what you
| seem to find objectionable in simple utilitarianism. Perhaps it
| is also worth pointing out that when utilitarianism was first
| proposed, it was rather radical; prior ethical notions were
| mostly about obeying your betters (on Earth and in Heaven.)
|
| [1]
| https://human.libretexts.org/Courses/Lumen_Learning/Book%3A_...
| [deleted]
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I have ambiguous feelings about that example, not sure if I'm
| just being woke. It does feel a bit stereotypical to use a
| disabled child as the first example of someone with lower
| utility. You wouldn't think of starting an example with a
| gifted son and a black son.
| vannevar wrote:
| I agree, i think it's far more likely that those favoring the
| disabled child are simply rejecting the artificial and abstract
| notion of utility described in the hypothetical, and going with
| their own experience. Which is that the real-world utility to
| the disabled child is in fact far higher. I don't think anyone
| could read that hypothetical (particularly in the age of the
| Internet) and believe that putting a gifted child in a city
| would be significantly harmful to them.
| michael-ax wrote:
| now you're touching on the limits of knowledge of those
| making choices and might be tempted to rate them. that's out
| of scope for the deciders at that level, the parents in that
| story. ... the point is that they know the situation best.
| and that utility lets them quantify the subjective to test-
| run the rationalizations going into their decisions.
|
| e.g. "maximising sum(log(utility))" like the comment on the
| article said. the only thing strange here is that philosophy
| deals with qualitative, not just quantitative domains. thus
| they tell these stories. :)
| vannevar wrote:
| True, but the parents in the story are imaginary---their
| decision-making is not being tested. Rather, it's the
| observer who is being tested. But the story is so contrary
| to experience that is does not do what the premise of the
| article suggests it does: distinguish observers that care
| more about equality than utility. Because the premise is
| flawed (ie, that this is a valid test), it tends to moot
| the rest of the article drawn from that premise.
| toast0 wrote:
| The city vs suburb is just a lazy shorthand to setup the
| hypothetical. If the issue is transportation time to a
| hospital, you could live in a suburb near a hospital.
|
| Some cities have excellent schools and some cities have awful
| schools and the same for suburbs.
|
| To make my own lazy shorthand, would you consider it
| significantly harmful if a gifted child is placed in a
| classroom where everyone else is behind grade level and the
| instruction is paced accordingly vs a classroom where
| instruction is paced at grade level or perhaps at an
| accelerated pace? If that's not enough, what if it's a
| rougher school where physical altercations are the norm.
|
| Sure, these days, there's the internet, the magical
| cornucopia of knowledge, but it can be hard to get the
| motivation to use it.
|
| All that said, my personal utility function measures a lot
| more utility for independence than for education and what
| not. If a better situation for the disable child may result
| in more independence for the disabled child, the gifted child
| is just going to have to make the best of a situation that's
| been decided for someone else's best interest.
| skipants wrote:
| It's just a theoretical value that philosopher's use to avoid
| the subjectivity of utility when making an argument. They are
| well aware it's subjective, but the subjectivity of utility is
| agreed upon and not of interest in these thought experiments.
|
| When someone says, "if I had a million dollars, I would take a
| trip around the world!" you don't chastise them for not having
| a million dollars. Well, unless you're my mother ;P
| steve76 wrote:
| > The very idea that there is some measusable "utility" to
| compare in the two cases, independent from your moral values
| and sentiments, is inane.
|
| There's philosophical charity, in the sense of your ability to
| put aside your judgments to listen and gain knowledge. That can
| be measured. Simply ask "You know this?" and count how many
| no's. There's some things we will never know that are very
| important, like dying or being created. From those you can get
| to real altruism. Caring for others is the natural state of
| humanity and makes humans strong, nice and beautiful.
| Selfishness is unnatural, weak, hateful, and ugly. Whatever
| created you cared about you and helped you, gave you the
| capacity for joy and happiness. Sooner than you think you will
| be abandoned by everything and those will be taken away and you
| will be in need. It's better for you to help others than just
| helping yourself. Personal sacrifice is not needed. It's not
| okay to be hurt or be a victim. Interior motives are
| irrelevant. It's better if everyone in the world is cured than
| just you while everyone else dies.
| whatshisface wrote:
| You can patch it back up by replacing utility with something
| specific, although at the cost of its mysterious air. Let's say
| that the smart kid will... cure cancer if he's in the suburbs,
| but become a drug kingpin if he grows up in the city.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Read like the parable of the lost sheep from the Bible:
|
| "What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of
| them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go
| after the one which is lost until he finds it?"
| hprotagonist wrote:
| "hey! no, you idiots: the least of these, god dammit!!" is the
| plaintive cry of all the prophets, about half the psalms, and a
| fair bit of the new testament.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "The suburbs has benefits for your gifted son - the levels of
| the crime in the city are fairly high, the cost of living is
| higher and so your home would be smaller, and so on."_
|
| What a strange argument. I realize it's more of a thought
| experiment, but the benefits of a city's cultural life are
| obviously greater for a gifted child than having more space at
| home.
|
| If you were a talented 15-year-old, would you prefer to live in
| Manhattan or a New Jersey suburb?
| mgraczyk wrote:
| This article gets at the basic idea of a subfield of economics
| called "welfare economics". The general problem is, how do you
| combine individual well-beings into an aggregate to make
| decisions that affect multiple people? We can also answer
| questions like "Given certain assumptions about bargaining
| outcomes (nash equilibria etc) what aggregation function will
| rational actors come to on their own?"
|
| This article presents a "priority view" as a contrasting moral
| view to "pure utilitarianism" and wonders why the view hasn't
| caught on outside of moral philosophy. The answer is that it has,
| and outside of philosophy we have models of aggregate utility
| that subsume both of the moral views in the article. This was a
| very active field from the 1930s-1970s, and now most of the
| interesting work here IMO is done in the cryptocurrency space
| (trying to find ways to prevent forks or incentivize participants
| to be pro-social).
|
| The two points of view described in this article are just two
| specific "social welfare functions" we could optimize for. There
| are many others.
|
| The "priority view" in this article is known as the "Kalai
| egalitarian bargaining solution" in economics and game theory, or
| the "Rawlsian" social welfare function (maximize the minimum
| individual utility):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_bargaining
|
| The "pure utilitarianism" view is not a bargaining solution, but
| it's known as the "Benthamite" social welfare function (maximize
| the sum of individual utilities).
| sprucevoid wrote:
| > The "priority view" in this article is known as the "Kalai
| egalitarian bargaining solution" in economics and game theory,
| or the "Rawlsian" social welfare function
|
| No, that is a common misunderstanding, especially
| understandable here since some of OP's formulations also
| conflate the two. If you're an econ person a good text that
| puts the prioritarian view in context is Matthew Adler's 2020
| Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction. I'd also recommend
| that book to anyone here who claimed e.g. "we can't compare
| across persons!" but who is open to reading a case against that
| claim.
| jpfed wrote:
| I'm curious about whether anyone has studied using the harmonic
| mean (or at least, the reciprocal of the sum of reciprocals) as
| a way of aggregating utilities. I haven't had time to research
| this, but the thought repeatedly occurs to me as I have kids
| that are gifted in a school district that is especially
| concerned with the gap in achievement between the highest and
| lowest performers. I can't shake the feeling that what they
| really should want is a measure that prioritizes helping the
| lowest performers but does not consider the performance of the
| highest performers to have literally negative value, and the
| harmonic mean fits that bill.
| k2xl wrote:
| I don't agree with the premise of applying numbers in these
| hypothetical trolly level like situations. Humans aren't numbers,
| and you could never calculate a utility value or predict with
| certainty what would happen if you make a choice to make these
| hypotheticals useful in my opinion.
|
| But playing along, while moving to the suburbs or city is a
| common decision to make for families, I would argue that the
| priority view is the same as utility. The priority raises the
| value/score itself.
|
| Let's say hypothetically you could go out to dinner to help talk
| a depressed friend out of suicide or you could go to a once in a
| lifetime meeting with an investor to pitch him on a startup idea
| about helping prevent suicides. Now i would argue the decision is
| a bit more murky. In one you have a probability of helping
| prevent one suicide in short term and in a other you have a
| probability of helping prevent multiple suicides in the long
| term.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| That is the whole point of moral philosophy, to try to both
| model how humans make moral decision and help us make better
| moral choices.
|
| To just wave away the work of hundreds of philosophers over
| hundreds of years with "it's murky" ... maybe philosophers
| already understand that.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I don't understand what's murky about your hypothetical as
| proposed. Go help the depressed friend. Even if you
| successfully pitched the startup to the investor the utility
| gained ultimately is indeterminate vs. the very immediate and
| real utility gained from a successful suicide (presumably
| permanent) prevented.
|
| Your example though is good to illustrate the fallacy of "end
| justifies the means" type thinking. When you suppose the
| outcome (talking to the investor leads to the startup being
| created which then presumably prevents suicides) for one
| scenario but not for the other the entire thing is meaningless.
|
| With these types of scenarios you can see the error by applying
| one scenario and overlaying it on the other:
|
| 1. Talk a friend out of a suicide who does (2)
|
| 2. Engage in a once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity for
| suicide prevention.
|
| Clearly 1 includes 2, so 2 is the answer. You might say that's
| not the scenario you posed, which is true, but I'd counter and
| say that's the issue with contrived examples to begin with.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| I wish very much that explainers of of this kind NOT center
| around exemplars on the individual level. In practice there is no
| applicability of political philosophy on the individual level,
| only absurdity.
|
| Where there is some value to this work is at scale policy. One's
| only hope for fairness, equity- any qualities of importance-
| depends on modeling and quantifying. All models are wrong but in
| these cases it is incumbent to try to make them as useful as
| possible.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| An ethics for society is pointless as society has neither
| subjectivity nor moral agency. You may as well draw up a system
| of ethics for the weather.
|
| All ethics is individual ethics, as individual subjectivity is
| the only subjectivity, and individual moral agency is the only
| moral agency.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| So call it an ethics for society's _leaders_. They do have
| moral agency, but we expect them to channel their individual
| subjectivity in a certain way.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I don't think it makes sense to partition society into
| leaders with moral responsibility, and followers without.
| It seems peculiar to think that what is good is shaped by
| external circumstance. Certainly if an action is good, it
| is good regardless of your lot in life.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| No one said followers have no moral responsibility.
|
| It's fine if it's one morality for everyone. It's just
| that as an individual with little power, the pursuit of
| that morality will involve very different actions than
| for individuals with a lot of power in relevant areas.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| If it is the same morality for everyone, then why bother
| categorizing people into how much power they have?
|
| If a person is just and poor, then Elon Musk dies in a
| freak self-driving car accident and it turns out this
| just person is the single estranged heir, surely they
| haven't suddenly become more or less just by this
| unexpected windfall...? Whatever was good before is still
| good after, and whatever was evil before is still evil
| after.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| You're being quite sloppy with categories. You've shifted
| from saying "if an action is good, it is good regardless
| of your lot in life" to talking about _people_ being more
| or less good, based on wealth. Nothing else in the
| conversation so far assumed a moral status in people;
| only in actions.
|
| Categorizing people by power follows from the fact that
| power enables actions unavailable to the powerless. I
| cannot meaningfully shift public opinion on climate
| change. Someone investing a billion dollars into cultural
| messaging probably could. The same ethics could apply to
| me and the billionaire: say, a rule of maximizing one's
| impact on the phenomenon most likely to negatively affect
| the most people. Now if you _assume_ (as you seem to)
| that utility isn 't part of the morality equation, then
| both I and the billionaire could each try our best and be
| equally good. But that's not an obviously true thing, and
| I think most people these days would assume that ends
| matter. In that light the billionaire can do more good
| than I can, and although the same ethical rule might
| apply to each of us, it's proportionally more relevant to
| the billionaire. So: an ethics for society's leaders.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > If it is the same morality for everyone, then why
| bother categorizing people into how much power they have?
|
| While (as you say) analytics tools such as the one under
| discussion aren't useful for assessing individuals, they
| are appropriate for assessing populations.
|
| When you asserted that only individuals have agency here,
| that was refuted with the example of leaders, who do have
| to make difficult choices about populations, and rely on
| tools such as this to do so.
|
| In no way was that about different moralities for
| different people. Just about who can use this tool in a
| useful way. If you read the thread you'll see it.
| eluusive wrote:
| OTOH, maybe politicians shouldn't be trying to meddle in the
| wellbeing of individuals beyond providing access to
| infrastructure and policing?
| GavinMcG wrote:
| How do we measure "should" or "shouldn't" there? Answering
| whether you're right or wrong requires looking at the
| alternatives and seeing whether political programs that go
| beyond infrastructure and policing create a better world.
|
| There are arguably answers from all over the world that they
| do: universal healthcare and education are obvious ones.
| tomrod wrote:
| There is room for more systemic improvement than that,
| surely. Or do you count education, social safety net, basic
| healthcare as infrastructure?
| paganel wrote:
| > Let's introduce another scenario: Imagine that the gifted boy
| has a total utility of 80, and the disabled boy has a total
| utility of 40.
|
| The thing is that day-to-day life doesn't provide those "scores"
| when it comes to humans and their interactions, life is not a
| video-game (even though we certainly do try our best at
| transforming it into that).
|
| Writing down that one could assign scores in such a scenario is
| normative, i.e. we take for granted that such scores are possible
| and, even more (that's what makes it normative, imo) we somehow
| impose on the reader the notion that he/she should regard this
| score-setting as a fact of life, as normal, at the limit that the
| reader herself should join the game of assigning scores to human
| actions.
| xg15 wrote:
| Yeah, fully agreed.
|
| I think trying to quantify such things can sometimes be useful
| as a tool of thinking, but you're always have to be extremely
| careful not to confuse the map with the territory.
|
| If you're making weird calculations with hypothetical utility
| values, you're making your argument on the map - and you always
| have to make sure it still makes sense when converted back to
| the territory.
|
| Numbers can also be used to make wildly unrealistic assumptions
| seem reasonable or hide additional circumstances that would be
| required for the argument to apply.
|
| E.g., if you mapped back the utility values from the OP to an
| actual situation, you'd have a gifted son who is somehow
| _absolutely thrilled_ to move to the suburbs and a disabled son
| who is mostly indifferent about whether he has to travel for
| several hours frequently or not.
|
| The only situation I can think of in which that behaviour seems
| remotely plausible is if they were already living in the
| suburbs and the decision is really about moving to the city
| (and losing their complete social circle) or staying where they
| are.
|
| If that were the case, the "low additional utility" of the
| disabled son would more likely be a conflict: The son might
| appreciate a lot not having to travel so far, on the other
| hand, he doesn't want to lose all his friends. So, in numbers,
| a high positive _and_ a high negative utility, which the theory
| assumes you can simply add up to get a total utility. But that
| assumption doesn 't seem to have merit to me.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| One way to reason about this: instead of the score being one
| person's numerical value it is instead the percentage of people
| who make a binary choice.
|
| Put another way, you can calculate... 1 rating
| between 0 to N
|
| by sampling... N ratings of 0 or 1
|
| So donuts-for-breakfast has a score of 5 not because it is
| quantifiably 5/100ths awful, but because only 1 in 20 people
| choose it.
| vincnetas wrote:
| I think this is inevitable when you try to abstract and
| systematise anything. You cant think about big and complex
| things will all details in mind. You abstract. Same way you
| don't see a person in front of you as collection of millions
| cels. You see it as an entity.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _You abstract._
|
| The danger is that you end up with a "perfectly spherical
| cow" that you base your arguments then on, and your
| abstraction-based results then have no bearing whatsover to
| the real world.
| vincnetas wrote:
| I'm not saying that you must follow your abstractions
| blindly. At the end you must always test your theory
| against reality and adjust if reality contradicts your
| assumptions.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Such scores are clearly possible. If you define a one-
| dimensional scale you can project everything onto it. Clearly
| you lose a lot of information in doing so, but if your scale is
| "overall utility" of some kind and that utility is the only
| thing you care about, then of course you can do it.
|
| In principle anyway - you can't _actually_ calculate someone 's
| utility. It's a thought experiment.
| xg15 wrote:
| But the one-dimensional scale also brings in a lot if
| implicit assumptions that you have to be aware of - e.g. that
| you can add or subtract individual utility values and the
| result will still be meaningful.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yes that's true. 10 personal chefs do not have 10 times the
| utility of 1 personal chef.
| ModernMech wrote:
| "Utility scores" and their close cousins "prior probability
| distributions" seem to me like a way for mathematically
| inclined brains to frame their decisions in "math" because
| anything else feels "irrational" and icky.
|
| To me, it seems like the assignment of priors and utilities
| scores is mostly arbitrary in these types of personal decision-
| making applications. How does one arrive at a score of 40 and
| 80? Does the magnitude of the difference mean anything? What's
| the range on utility?
|
| If these are just random numbers plucked from thin air then how
| is utility different from a feeling which you can plug into
| some equations? How does saying one thing has 80 vs 40 utility
| mean anything other than "I feel a little better about this
| than that"?
|
| And if utility is just a numerical representation of a feeling,
| how do the results of these equations produce anything that we
| can interpret?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| You can assign scores say in a health economics setting,
| where you're a public health system choosing the drugs to
| fund that will do the most good.
|
| Do you buy the drugs that keeps 70 year olds with X disease
| alive for 10 more years, or 20 year olds with Y disease alive
| for 2 more years?
|
| While it might be qualitative for individuals, it can become
| (more) quantitative for populations.
| pkdpic wrote:
| > Prioritarianism, or the priority view, is a view within ethics
| and political philosophy that holds that the goodness of an
| outcome is a function of overall well-being across all
| individuals with extra weight given to worse-off individuals.
| Prioritarianism resembles utilitarianism.
|
| From Wikipedia, just for context...
| eluusive wrote:
| Seems fine until you do this kind of stuff over "identity
| groups." This view taken beyond an individual level seems to be
| the cause of the current negative social situation.
| thirdplace_ wrote:
| My layman thoughts:
|
| The concept of utils as a common denominator for peoples value
| judgements or well-being is a dead-end. Economists use utils but
| that's only for working with ordinal preferences in math.
|
| I do think that ultimately, people are guided by consequences
| even when following strict principles. E.g. not negotiating with
| terrorists leads to better outcomes in the long run.
|
| Time is an essential component in these deliberations.
|
| Human action is decided by peoples' preferences. Preferences are
| a list of desired outcomes. They are ordinal. They are personal
| to each individual. Valuations can be thought of as moving up the
| list of desired outcomes. The most desired alternative has
| special names: goals and ends.
|
| Since preferences are ordinal they can't be summed. This gives
| rise to the concept of marginal utility and opportunity cost.
|
| Buying a pack of cigarettes is not irrational because preferences
| are subjective. Might regret it later though but that's simply
| you modifying your preferences.
|
| I would argue though that if you modify your preferences
| frequently, you are indeed an irrational person. E.g. buying a
| pack of cigarettes and always regretting it later.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > I would argue though that if you modify your preferences
| frequently, you are indeed an irrational person. E.g. buying a
| pack of cigarettes and always regretting it later.
|
| Would you say that someone who is constantly struggling with
| their body fitness versus what they would like the level to be
| be is irrational?
| thirdplace_ wrote:
| Yes that's my position.
|
| If you have a long-term goal of body-fitness but eat fast
| food each day then your long term goals are fluctuating
| wildly. Another possible description of this behaviour is
| high time-preference, which means your goals are more short-
| term rather than long-term.
|
| Maybe there is a better word for this behaviour than
| irrationality?
|
| We also are treading into difficult areas such as free will
| etc.
| safanycom wrote:
| Akrasia
| rjrodger wrote:
| Is this not equivalent to medical triage? Those who will die
| anyway, and those who will live anyway, get no immediate
| treatment (apart from morphine). Those who will not survive
| without treatment, get the resources.
|
| Thus: move to the city, as the gifted child will most likely do
| just fine in life. Have dinner with the depressed friend, because
| the happy friend will enjoy the concert anyway.
|
| Seems perfectly consistent with even simplistic utilitarianism.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Have dinner with the depressed friend [...] Seems perfectly
| consistent with even simplistic utilitarianism._
|
| Well, the problem is specifically stated as the concert having
| higher total utility.
| visarga wrote:
| Maybe the gifted teenager by getting priority early on would be
| able to better support his brother later in life. Parents
| aren't going to be around in old age.
| dotsam wrote:
| I have not read Parfit's paper, but in the article only the
| utilities of the gifted and disabled boys are considered and the
| utility of the parent is neglected. This gives a partial view,
| because the decision of a parent sensitive to utility will also
| need to account for the utility cost / benefit to themselves of
| the move (e.g. if they will decrease their own utility by feeling
| guilty about favouring one child's utility more than the other).
| rovingEngine wrote:
| For those looking for more support (or criticism) for this way of
| thinking, the reasoning behind the priority view is quite similar
| to John Rawls' arguments that people would adopt a maximin
| (making the least good outcome as good as possible) strategy when
| behind the "veil of ignorance" (imagining setting up a society in
| which you don't know how advantaged or disadvantaged you'll be).
| Here's more: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-
| position/
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| ITT, utilitarians discover diminishing marginal utility.
| randallsquared wrote:
| Surely that doesn't apply here, given the utility numbers we're
| assuming? Rather, it's presumed to be priced in already.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Rather, I think this is utilitarians struggling to "price in"
| an obvious observation about society and moral reasoning.
|
| Which is, of course, ridiculous, since there is no such thing
| as general utility, but this is utilitarians we are talking
| about, unfortunately.
| sprucevoid wrote:
| A general utility claim: One person suffering from the
| severest form of migraine is bad. Two persons suffering
| from the severest form of migraine is twice as bad. Here's
| another: one person suffering from the severest form of
| migraine is worse than one person experiencing a mild itch.
| howscrewedami wrote:
| I'm having issues understanding this:
|
| > let's assume that the utility gain for the gifted son from
| living in the suburbs would be larger than the utility gain for
| the disabled son from living in the city. A pure utilitarian,
| then, must choose the suburbs.
|
| Everything's okay so far. But then he says this:
|
| > Nagel's view is this: if you say that you would live in the
| city for the sake of your disabled son, despite it being the case
| that moving to the city creates more utility in total, you are
| not a utilitarian
|
| Didn't the author just say moving to the suburbs creates more
| utility in total?? And now he's saying moving to the city is what
| creates more utility?
| samglover97 wrote:
| Author here, thanks for catching that error.
| notinty wrote:
| Yeah I had to reread it a few times, it's just a mistake.
|
| Of course maybe the kid being more accessible to doctors might
| increase the doctors' utility, but that's not what he meant.
| [deleted]
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