LogFAQs > #973806246

After the first few pages I actually wanted to stay still because the discussion was so terrible, but then it got even worse so I can't stay still anymore.

Now what triggered me most:

This is an objective framework called utilitarianism.

Duh, I can't think of any ethical framework that isn't objective, but that doesn't mean that ethics or morale are objective.

What is ethics? Ethics in general is just about to find out what is good and what is bad. It's about how we can define good, and we can define better, and how we define bad and worse too.

Spoiler: There are multiple definitions, and many of them are contraticting each other. Most famous example here is Deontology (The action must be good in itself) vs. Teleology (The goal and the result must be good).

Please be aware that these concepts don't even define good or bad at all. They only say if an action has to be messured by the result, or not.

Now let us asume that killing is bad (that should be easy). Let us also asume that killing Putin would change the situation in Russia for the better (so we assume that the situation doesn't escalate for the worse).

Would killing Putin be good or bad?
Deontology and Teleology both have their answer set in stone, and are pure opposites. For them, the answer is 100% objective in the end. If you follow pure Deontology, killing people is objectivly bad, even if it's Putin, and if you are a Teleologist, you will say that it's objectivly good, because the result is good.

But of course, in the ethical sense, we only get more questions: How bad is "killing is bad" and how good is "Russia becomes better"? What if we are mistaken, and the succesor of Putin is even worse? How do we measure the risks in the result? What about the risks in the action?

Ethics tries to deal with all of these questions, and gives the people a shitton of rules and tools and concepts to try to define some stuff.
Some of these rules are even objectivly true. Like, actions which can be reversed are always better than actions which can't be undone if they turned out bad. That's mostly the case for binary checkboxes. "Can be undone" is simple and doesn't have to be quantified at all.

The problem is that "how much better is "can be undone"" is subjective again, and you can't call every action bad, just because it's not possible to undo them.

Now, the concept of Utilitarianism is simple. Good is, what creates the greatest happiness for most people, and the smallest unhappiness for the fewest people.

That's the concept and... that's it.
Everything that follows it is again 100% subjective.

It doesn't define happiness, unhappiness, benefit or whatever at all, we have to define this on our own.

What is better? A little happiness for many or big happiness for a few?

Is big happiness for many, with some unhappiness for the few, better than a little happiness for many, without anyone becoming unhappy?

Utilitarianism has no answer to that, because you can't quantify or measure happiness at all. Good job, we are back to subjectivity.

Even if you are 100% able to objectivly greate a score system and messure it, you still have to face many problems:

If we have action A, giving people -20 happiness and giving others +120 happiness, is this truly better than an action B that gives +90 happiness without anyone suffer for it?

What if take 100 points of happiness from some people, and give all 100 points to other. Would this be truely a a neutral action, neither good or evil?

What if we just take everything away from a single person, so only one has to suffer -10000 points, but a million other people get a benefit of +0.1? That would be ten times more happiness than suffering, so it must be good, right?

Utilitarianism is just another tool, another scale, that is supposed to be helpful to define better or worse, but isn't able to define good or bad at all.

It baffles me how someone is able to know about the core princible of Utilitarianism, but doesn't even think about the issues of pure Utilitarianism.

As with most ethical concepts Utilitarianism is useless in it's purest form, because it ignores some pretty important other concepts like justice.

That's why morality is subjective to it's core.
It's easy to call a single action good or bad in a vacuum, with no strings attached. It's easy to find the best solution if you only look at it from a specific point of view.

The problem is that reality isn't a ethical trick question, and you don't argue against a single definition of good or evil, you argue with a mix of dozens of them.