Talk:Preference utilitarianism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is within the scope of the Philosophy WikiProject, which collaborates on articles related to philosophy and the history of ideas. Please read the instructions and standards for writing and maintaining philosophy articles. To participate, you can edit this article or visit the project page for more details. | |
| Stub | This article has been rated as stub-Class on the Project's quality scale. (If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.) |
|
I feel there is a problem with the clarity of this article. It's difficult to understand what "Preference Utilitarianism" is, even if one is familiar with Utilitarianism, because Preference Utilitarianism is defined here in terms of something called "Preference satisfaction," which is never defined, nor is there a separate article on it.
Further comments/criticism are appreciated. --Zaorish 13:09, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] An obvious objection
My worry about preference utilitarianism is that it makes it too easy to do good simply by changing preferences. According to the view, the best thing in the world would be a "lower your expectations" gas released on everyone. It would change your preferences so that you think the status quo is the state you most want. But it should be obvious that in a messed-up world (with slavery, genocide, sexism, etc.) actual reform would be a better thing than simply giving everyone this gas. Yet the gas release will come much closer to creating a world in which all preferences are satisfied.
[edit] Objection to the obvious objection
"But it should be obvious that in a messed-up world (with slavery, genocide, sexism, etc.) actual reform would be a better thing than simply giving everyone this gas."
First of all, this objection is not preference utilitarianism specific: it can be applied just as well to classic utilitarianism.
Second of all, if people would really prefer to be gassed into enjoying slavery, then it is not obvious that doing such a gassing would be ethically wrong.
[edit] Third of all, Wikipedia is not a chatroom.
Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not User:Zaorish
There is no problem with posting an objection to a view in the discussion section of the article about the view. It's a very serious objection to which there is no satisfactory reply in the literature. The reply given above is inadequate. The point was that it's possible to make someone prefer suffering to pleasure, or in some intuitive sense, a bad consequence to a good one. So this is where preference utilitarianism diverges from a more standard utilitarianism. The question is, what's better: a world of suffering, populated with "broken" people who prefer to suffer because they think they deserve no better, or a world with happy people who, because they keep striving to improve it, don't have their preferences satisfied? If the answer is the latter, as I think it is, preference utilitarianism can't really get off the ground. So yeah, I suggest this be mentioned in the objections section.
- Talk pages are for the discussion of article improvement, and not the topic itself. Take those types of discussions to private forums. --Wafulz 03:11, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
