Re:In Switzerland, it's now illegal to boil a live lobster
by firethief on Saturday February 17, 2018 @08:46PM
(#16403935)
Adding happiness to the model solves some of its problems (suffering+happiness model doesn't advocate nuclear annihilation), but I don't see how suffering-vs-happiness utilitarianism reaches the conclusion that infanticide is wrong. It seems like we need to consider more than happiness vectors for infanticide not to be okay.
Re:In Switzerland, it's now illegal to boil a live lobster
by theoh on Sunday February 18, 2018 @10:31AM
(#16406463)
Well, the prohibition of infanticide is a norm that presumably derives from a perception that killing babies harms the person who does it or others with a relationship to the child (possibly in a very indirect, diffuse way). It is perceived as going against the natural order of things, I guess. Utilitarian ethics does flirt with accepting infanticide in many cases, which is something a lot of people undoubtedly find repugant. Like this story:
"On his faculty page, Mr. Singer argues: “Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to its parents."
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/16/peter-singer-...
There is obviously not going to be a simple happiness score at each moment of life—it should at least be a vector of scores. Would make sense to integrate over time, but then there's the spectre of a "happiness maximizer" (like a paperclip maximizer) that might produce undesirable outcomes, whether it's average or aggregate happiness you consider. Ethics is difficult to formalize.