Yes you are wrong.

Simply consider a diabetic and me; the utility of an external insulin supply to me is vanishingly small, yet its life or death to them.

Similarly, the graph of utility value vs amount of sugar will look very different for us.

I've used a diabetic because its an obvious and massive difference, but the cookie example applies too.

I like cookies, but my girlfriend likes them more. I dislike white chocolate cookies, and loves them. This is a common difference in utility.

Fair points, but not the unfairness Bentham was attacking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23192195

It's useful to understand a concept in the context innwhich it was formulated before attacking it. Bentham's notion was intended as egalitaria. This does not mean it's unflawed, however.

Right, but I assume insulin has the same utility regardless of which diabetic we're talking about?

And there are people who want to live in the woods without interacting with people, with 0 use of $100. And people who don't like cookies at all, etc, etc.

I view it more from a statistical point of view. Your model doesn't have to consider individual preferences (or needs) to increase utility (it would have to to literally maximize).

We can likely assume that out of 1000 people, 100 insulin pens would have more utility being distributed to the ~10% diabetics, rather than the same diabetic who "wants it more".

As a note, this is most expressly not my model.

In point of practicality - insulin does have differing utility for each diabetic.

A note I meant to put in the original comment is that utility is considered equally, not equal. So yes, if you have 100 insulin pens they distribute according to need.

The point of the original wikipedia article is it is normally always possible to construct a "utility monster" that would take the need to the extreme and suck away all the utility.

In the diabetic/insulinpen scenario this might be done by declaring the monster is a giant of epic proportions and failure to take all 100 pens means death, whereas for the others it 'only' means severe complications.

It should be noted the point at which insulin is next available alters the practicalities but not the gist; if people will die before more insulin is available, our monster should have more utility than those who die etc.

One way to frame the egalitarianism of utilitarianism is as a part of the equity vs equality debate; considering everyone equally but not as equals is fairer.

>And there are people who want to live in the woods without interacting with people, with 0 use of $100. And people who don't like cookies at all, etc,

Whether you're talking about utilitarianism or microeconomics, your utility function has to take those things into account.

If you use a statistical average model to distribute resources you'd end up with a very unhappy population.

Did you never do the experiment in school where you randomly distribute candy, calculate the class average utility score, then allow people to trade and calculate it again?

It's always much higher after trading. Trade creating value is one of the central tenets of economics, and it's based on the concept of utility heterogeneity.

We never did, no. But could you ever do that trading if one kid in class had 95% of all the candy from the off-set?

I was not advocating nor (intentionally) suggesting utilitarianism meant everything identical for everyone.

> But could you ever do that trading if one kid in class had 95% of all the candy from the off-set?

Hum... Yes. That's still in economics 101. Everybody will still be better off after the trade. Also, it's very likely (but still dependent of the candy distribution) that everybody will prefer to trade with that one kid instead of everybody else.

I don't know that much about diabetes, but I'm sure that there are people for whom insulin is more of an urgent need than the average diabetic. And if not diabetes, there's plenty of conditions where people have it in varying degrees of severity, where lack of treatment is life threatening for some and not a huge deal for others.

If you had, for example, 10 treatments for a disease, 10 severe cases, and 10 mild cases, I would assume that utilitarianism would posit that the 10 most severe cases should get it.

Insulin is an urgent need for any T1 diabetic. They could maybe make it a week depending on what they ate, but they could also be dead in a day. There isn't really such a thing as mild or severe Type 1, only well treated and poorly treated.

You could maybe say "insulin is an urgent need for a diabetic who just ate 3 cookies, but not as urgent for one who just ate a plate of vegetables". But both will need some amount of insulin within 24 hours.

Type 2 is a different story, and not all Type 2's need insulin.

But your flaw here is extrapolating this utility difference to its limit, that something like a cookie can become exponentially more valuable to someone versus their peers. The value of insulin is just that — life and death. But it certainly doesn’t equate to a million lives or deaths.

You are suffering a failure of creativity.

Suppose a psychedelic drug that is incredibly difficult to synthesize makes someone inhumanly good at problem solving, but only for a few minutes.

Further suppose one of the easiest ways to create this drug is to harvest human brains. They have to be extracted while the donor is still alive, though, as the delicate compounds coming from the brain become unusable rapidly after death.

According to utilitarianism, if that person uses their insane problem solving abilities to increase utility for others, and they're good enough at it with this drug, then we should throw the people who generate the least utility for others (e.g. the poor and disadvantaged, who usually have few resources to offer and little training or skill) into the brain ripper so that the remaining people can get the gains.

This example may seem absurd, but many others like it can be constructed. Spend a few minutes trying and you'll come up with some. This one took me thirty seconds, if that.

See "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin for the canonical illustration of this problem.

The reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism was, of course, Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Torture vs Dust Specks"[1]

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs...

Not so absurd: Do you prefer that old people can die of Covid-19 (a few are tortured) or that public life is locked down (millions are mildly inconvenienced)?

Although the purpose of the lockdowns isn't to prevent old people dying, per se. It's to buy time and prevent system collapse while the government builds out systems to track and quarantine individuals who may be infected.

The lockdown can be eased once we have a better option.

You could argue that there was plenty of time to build such systems before COVID-19 made it to your country, and you'd probably be right. You could also argue that maybe your government hasn't been on the ball with the second half of this story, and you might be right, but that's neither here nor there.

We should make the people who discovered the drug take it and use its effects to figure out a way to synthesize more of it without shredding living human brains. Then we can get to the business of other gains.

For the first run we should just ask for volunteers. No need to pre-optimize, maybe some of those poor and disadvantaged people will end up contributing more on NZT.

I was unclear - I meant to suggest that one specific individual gained these superpowers from the drug, while most people do not.

That said, playing back-and-forth to out-game the other side in hypotheticals is a never-ending game. I see little value in it.

These reductio ad absurdums aren't very absurd, because of this clause: "if that person uses their insane problem solving abilities to increase utility for others, and they're good enough at it". That's a big if, in order to offset the disutility of harvesting brains, but if that is the premise, the conclusion is unsurprising.

To many of us, it seems obvious that any moral system which can lead to these conclusions is not a complete moral system, in much the same sense that Newtonian physics is not a complete physics system.

I imagine that gulf of perception is what actually needs to be crossed somehow in the debate between hardcore utilitarians and those of us who are not.

> any moral system which can lead to these conclusions is not a complete moral system

But "these conclusions" are unobjectionable, because they include the premise "things are net better". Because "net better" is imprecisely defined, I can substitute as strong a condition as desired up to and including impossible conditions. Which means they can subsume non-utilitarian moralities (I believe non-utilitarians are just utilitarians with binary step functions for certain utilities).

I believe that "things are net better" is a profoundly wrong way to decide if something is moral, no matter how you define "things are net better."

Again, see "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas." I hope I would walk away, even at the price of slow starvation.

I believe I would, but it is hard to know what you will actually do in a truly awful situation before it arrives.

> I hope I would walk away, even at the price of slow starvation.

Because to you, Omelas is not net better. Which is perfectly understandable. But what basis do you have for rejecting Omelas, other than that you believe it to be worse?

My belief that there is an external standard of right and wrong that has little to do with utility, and that I know what that standard says about torturing people for your own gain.

It's not about utility, it's that it's wrong to hate and harm a few people. The "good" of the many does not have one iota of influence over the wrongness of that action.

To quote the book that defines so much of my moral code, "What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but loses his soul?"

Side note: describing my worldview with language from yours does not mean yours subsumes mine.

Utilitarianism does not prescribe a specific utility function. Happiness is only used as a toy example that quickly breaks down if scrutinized (otherwise everyone would be getting free morphine injections). Utility functions can and do vary between specimens. For one children can become rhetoric utility monsters (think of the children) and human lives can also become a utility monster (people often balk at putting price tags on lives saved). And consider how many animals we sacrifice in the name of human pleasure.

I think happiness would become too hard to define here, rather than breaking down. I don't believe free morphine injections would provide a lot of long term happiness, additionally it wouldn't be a sustainable way to live economically, leading to poverty-induced unhappiness.

Children do deserve more happiness, because they're more vulnerable and have a longer lifespan, investing in children makes sense for humanity, additionally a parent's well-being is often connected to their childrens' well being. Still, a child's logical utility demand is not _that_ much more to call them a monster, it's within limits.

Utilitarianism's problem is that it's hard to quantify, the logical basis seems pretty solid to me.

> Children do deserve more happiness, because they're more vulnerable

That does not sound like a utilitarian argument. Are you saying that more happiness should be allocated to children and that vulnerability entitles one to more happiness? Conversely, does that mean non-vulnerable people require less happiness?

> Still, a child's logical utility demand is not _that_ much more to call them a monster, it's within limits.

Well, logical demand is not the concern here but irrational "think of the children" thought-terminating cliches used to justify policy changes at the expense of others. The children are held up as purported utility monsters. I.e. they are rhetorically treated as if they were true utility monsters.

That was in fact the original idea, though generally pitched as equating utility preferences between social classes -- the utility of a nobel and commoner were considered equivalent, a radical idea at the time.

Clearly there are difficulties with the notion, and direct comparisons between. individuals' peferences or utility functions are at best difficult if not impossible to measure. But the matter of unequal treatment by social class was the specific error Bentham was attempting to correct.

This aspect of Bentham's philosophy is specifically mentioned in Nigel Warburton's A Little History of Philosophy (2011), chapter 21.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/little-history-of-philosophy/...