Re:Utility monster
by jjk166 on Friday May 15, 2020 @11:22AM
(#23193210)
Why should we not feed the utility monster?
Consider a population of mostly healthy people but one person has a rare cancer. There is a small supply of drugs that treat that cancer. The vast majority of the population would derive little utility from being allocated this drug (there is some small chance that they may get the same cancer in the future, so having it available does have value, just not much) whereas the person who has that cancer derives a much larger amount of utility from the resource. The cancer patient is in this case a utility monster and giving it cancer medicine is feeding the utility monster.
Consider even further the case where most of the population is middle class but some fraction is living in absolute poverty. A single dollar provides little utility to the middle class people but a tremendous amount of utility to the extremely poor. Taxing the population some small amount and allocating it to the poor individuals would not only be feeding a utility monster but it would be directly decreasing the utility of everyone else to do so.
Let's consider a third scenario: a researcher is trying to cure some terminal disease but requires test subjects who may die as various possible drugs are tried. The utility gain from curing a disease once and for all would be immense compared to the life of one or even a few individuals. Carrying out this research is again feeding a utility monster, and in this case literally sending people to their deaths to do so.
While people might disagree on how we'd go about feeding these monsters in practice, society has widely accepted at least in principle giving medicine to the sick, providing welfare to poor, and taking calculated risks in the name of progress.
The utility monster only sounds appealing as an ad absurdum argument because the existence of such a utility monster presupposes such an absurd situation. One can easily imagine that a utility monster which derives more utility from every resource than the whole of humanity combined could exist, but actually imagining such a monster is much harder. It feels wrong to support sacrificing the whole of humanity to one being because I can not truly comprehend a situation where one being could derive enough utility to justify such a sacrifice. But in this hypothetical scenario where the sacrifice actually was justified, I would by definition be able to imagine it, and thus I would apply the same logic I do to the utility monsters which I can imagine, and there is no reason to believe I would reach a different conclusion. Thus I would support feeding the utility monster if I were ever in such a scenario.
Consider a population of mostly healthy people but one person has a rare cancer. There is a small supply of drugs that treat that cancer. The vast majority of the population would derive little utility from being allocated this drug (there is some small chance that they may get the same cancer in the future, so having it available does have value, just not much) whereas the person who has that cancer derives a much larger amount of utility from the resource. The cancer patient is in this case a utility monster and giving it cancer medicine is feeding the utility monster.
Consider even further the case where most of the population is middle class but some fraction is living in absolute poverty. A single dollar provides little utility to the middle class people but a tremendous amount of utility to the extremely poor. Taxing the population some small amount and allocating it to the poor individuals would not only be feeding a utility monster but it would be directly decreasing the utility of everyone else to do so.
Let's consider a third scenario: a researcher is trying to cure some terminal disease but requires test subjects who may die as various possible drugs are tried. The utility gain from curing a disease once and for all would be immense compared to the life of one or even a few individuals. Carrying out this research is again feeding a utility monster, and in this case literally sending people to their deaths to do so.
While people might disagree on how we'd go about feeding these monsters in practice, society has widely accepted at least in principle giving medicine to the sick, providing welfare to poor, and taking calculated risks in the name of progress.
The utility monster only sounds appealing as an ad absurdum argument because the existence of such a utility monster presupposes such an absurd situation. One can easily imagine that a utility monster which derives more utility from every resource than the whole of humanity combined could exist, but actually imagining such a monster is much harder. It feels wrong to support sacrificing the whole of humanity to one being because I can not truly comprehend a situation where one being could derive enough utility to justify such a sacrifice. But in this hypothetical scenario where the sacrifice actually was justified, I would by definition be able to imagine it, and thus I would apply the same logic I do to the utility monsters which I can imagine, and there is no reason to believe I would reach a different conclusion. Thus I would support feeding the utility monster if I were ever in such a scenario.