Are most counterfactuals false? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-KPLRqics2Qg.html For the cluelessness argument, see James Lenman, "Consequentialism and cluelessness"
People can follow through it like logistics. There is interference to actions being reliable, so you do need some situationality and predictions of possible interference events relative to their likeliness. And, most people have the surplus of their cognitive energies stolen from their other pressures obligations duties and the like. So its easier to be clueless more than ever sure. But, there are facts of the matter, but, they are not what people tend to think they are, because it requires like a meta-cognition. Like applying micro, to the macro types of logic. But also consider the utility of creating some theory might be to sell a book, rather than to help people. Then people might even reference your stuff for years and years. With, nothing changing.
If the morally right thing to do is to maximize happiness, then the consequence is clear: we should devote all our resources to breeding and petting Labrador retrievers, because those things are happy AF.
@@KaneBwith this sentence you have officially declared to breed and own Guinea pigs in large quantities because they are just anxious miniature capybaras. I hope your future life as a Guinea pig shepherd will prove a fruitful one until we can replace humanity with the Guinea pig hive mind.
@@KaneB If it means you can make the capybaras happier than you can make Labradors, go for it. But in my experience, Labradors aren't really picky about whether you're a dog person. Of course, we don't know. No one has bred for really happy capybaras. And maybe we shouldn't stop there. For the resources it takes to support one Labrador, we could maintain thousands if not millions of fruit flies. So if each fruit fly were 1/1000th as happy as each Labrador, that would be the way to go. It seems unlikely, but how would we know?
To really be efficient about this, we should find the happiest creatures of the smallest possible size. Elephants might be happy, but we can't support that many of them. Once we have discovered the animal with the greatest happiness/size ratio, we'll dedicate all our resources to breeding those.
@dennisekiller Haha, little did you know I just so happend to be biding my time until the opportunity arose for me to foray the role of person pisser!
Since the uncertainty runs equally in both directions, they just cancel each other out, meaning the best action just goes back to being the option with the best proximate effects.
In his article on the cluelessness objection, Lenman does address this. He argues that this implicitly assumes an indifference principle with respect to probability assignments that we have good reason to reject.
I much appreciated that discussion; thank you. As a determinist, I find it hard to avoid a moral realism (at least reference to the Human species) that is founded on consequences. There clearly are problems of assessment of consequences and how to define the moral attributes. Although I favour well-being over happiness/unhappiness, I can see that at some point whatever the attribute, it does seem to rely on a basal intuition, but nonetheless a human intuition that is part of the human condition. Bentham proposed a list of factors (or conditions) for his felicific calculus: intensity, duration, certainty/uncertainty, propinquity (closeness/remoteness) fecundity, purity and extent. Although this may provide factors to consider, how these factors are weighed against each other is not clear. I think you are right to suggest that the calculus even if a theoretical real concept, is impossible to achieve for the same reason that determinism can never imply certainty about the future. The feedback loop of knowing that knowing that .... etc. is always a factor that will never be resolved for the future. The assessment from the causal chain of consequences only works in retrospect. In practice J.S. Mill was right, despite theoretical inconsistencies, to propose rule utilitarianism as a pragmatic (not infallible) guide. The issue of inherent (rather than apparent) randomness is fascinating and would indeed imply that not being able to know whether button A or button B would save or extinguish you is a reality; it is only known after then event. This would be another reason why determinism (including moral judgement) can only be work retrospectively. This does not specifically deny the reality, but it does impose conditions for access to realities.
It really sounds like an epistemic problem. If we can actually make more happiness in the world, then we will. If we can’t because we have no information, we can try, but probably will be less effective. Consequentialist stuff still works regardless of our info, just the effectiveness is affected
Brilliant objections/problems I've never heard raised before. I identify loosely as a utilitarian. I see the theory similar to Newtonian physics. I can use it to get desirable results but I don't believe it as truth. Utilitarianism is theoretically problematic as is consequentialism, and as undermined by skepticism as any moral theory.
I think that your point about people often making the assumption that correct moral theories must give prescriptions is very interesting. I used to subscribe to the idea that “everything is good” (the idea being that all things are ultimately a part of the grand unfolding story of the universe and can’t really be justifiably separated into “goods” and “bads,” and that this grand universe is beautiful and even suffering and horror are beautiful), and it would always piss off my friends when we would discuss it because they would say “how can this even be a moral theory, it gives no recommendations on how to act and according to it all actions and events and consequences are equally 100% morally correct,” and to me this objection didn’t make any sense, it was a model of reality and a theory of morality, who cares if it isn’t practically actionable I just care if it describes reality. (I have since become just a boring run of the mill moral anti-realist and don’t believe that goofy moral theory anymore, but it’s still interesting to consider lol)
Yeah, if we go for moral realism, then it seems like taking action-guidance as a condition of adequacy on moral theories would get things backwards. The moral facts are what they are, independently of whether we are able to glean from them practical rules for guiding our behaviour. As far as I can see, nothing guarantees that the world be such that we are able to apply the true moral norms in this way. If it turns out that we don't know what the right action is, or even that there is no action that is right, well, perhaps that's bad, but then lots of things in the world are bad. For a moral realist, surely the right approach here is to work out what the moral facts are, and then let the chips fall where they may with respect to action-guidance.
That is what I believe and I agree with you that it doesn't really constitute a moral theory. I disagree that makes it incompatible with a morality. It's just that a morality then refers to something else besides a condition of the universe. It could even be the case that utilitarianism is correct: We ought maximize happiness- Even though happiness is not a quality of the universe, especially the parts of it without conscious beings. There are plenty of things that fall under that perspective, like the majority of our laws of physics. They operate from the frame of reference of objects in the universe, and not from the frame of reference of the whole of the universe.
@@KaneBThere's no such thing as moral facts. You have no objective standard of measurement of what is moral and what isn't. It's all subjective feelings and arbritrary reasoning.
also we are basing all moral actions on the assumption that it's a direct cause and effect and not a chaotic system in disguise and that we are fooled to make all those decisions thinking they were the right and moral ones but instead something entirely different, chaos systems is prevalent in nature and given how complex human behaviours are, it's not unreasonable to suspect that human behaviours are chaotic as well to certain level
The most powerful objection to utilitarianism I've ever read was Stanislaw Lem's _Experimenta Felicitologica._ It's near impossible to sum up the argument in a RU-vid comment section because I believe it kind of needs the format of a sci-fi story to work, but you can probably find it online, so I recommend looking it up and reading through it. It's a really entertaining read. Notably, Lem turns the uncooperative world argument on its head by having his story take place in manufactured worlds that are fiercely cooperative with the utilitarian protagonist's attempts. The problem is just that the protagonist has a really bad grasp of what happiness even is - and that his wish to "maximize" it _as such_ only stems from this cluelessnes.
There are too many unknowns just in the immediate case of a trolly problem in which you can either save five people or one person at the flip of a switch. What if the five people tied to the track were all chronically alone and miserable and had actually voluntarily tied themselves to the track in a kind of bizarre suicide pact, and the one person tied to the track was a generally happy person with a lot of loved ones who would experience a great deal of happiness at the death of this person? Saving the five would actually add to the sum total of human misery in such a case. Making the sum total of a psychological state--happiness or preference satisfaction--the test of whether an act is moral or immoral seems to make the morality of any action only knowable in retrospect. The same action we intuitively regard as virtuous, say running into a burning building to save a child, might be moral or immoral depending on whether the person rescued grows up to be a life saving doctor or an axe murderer. A moral theory that only tells us what actions are moral in retrospect seems like a poor guide for moral action.
I know you said that you were going to assume that the cluelessness objection is correct, but it seems worth pointing out that utilitarianism is often presented as a probabilistic theory: you should take the action that maximizes total expected utility. In that case you don't need to know for certain what the long-term consequences of your actions are to take the correct moral actions. Yes, it's possible that the guy you killed would have cured cancer, but he could also have become a genocidal dictator. The errors cancel out.
I decided to go for the simpler presentation of the cluelessness objection in this video, because as you note I'm just assuming that it's correct that we're clueless, but in his article, Lenman argues that the same problem arises if we frame things in terms of expected utility. Briefly, he argues that (a) the claim that the "errors cancel out" is going to rely on an indifference principle that we have independent reasons to reject because it leads to paradoxes and (b) whatever the "visible" consequences of any two actions, these will be overwhelmed by the enormity of the "invisible" consequences: i.e. the reason given by the visible consequences is infinitesimally weaker than the reason given by the invisible consequences. So even a slight relative difference in the invisible consequences would end up overwhelmingly favouring one action, and we have no grounds for assuming total equality. That's the basic argument as I recall it.
@@KaneB I don't really see how errors canceling out depend on an indifference principle, at least if we understand the error of a random variable to be the actual value minus the expected value. The expected value of the error is always zero, no matter the distribution. It's true that in a world with "butterfly effects", the long-term consequences overwhelm the short-run consequences, but I think the utilitarian should bite that bullet. You don't know anything about these consequences, so you can't do much about them. But you can and should use the knowledge that you do have.
@@philbelanger2 The article is "Consequentialism and cluelessness" if you're interested in his reasoning. >> You don't know anything about these consequences, so you can't do much about them. But you can and should use the knowledge that you do have. This just seems like it's ignoring the objection, rather than responding to it.
@@KaneB I don't know about the indifference principle that you mentioned, but I do feel confident about the "cancelling out" of of invisible consequences. Suppose we're playing a game where you want to get as high a score as possible. I roll two fair, six-sided dice - one red and one green - but keep the results hidden from you. I give you a choice for your score, you can either have the number on the green dice, or two + the number on the red dice. You make your choice and then I tell you the score. Before you choose, you cannot say with certainty that taking the red dice is the better option. What if it rolls a 1 and the green dice rolls a 6? And often, you can't even say with certainty after the fact. But surely you can say that taking the red dice is probably the better option? Would you honestly be ambivalent about the choice? Now in this case, the unknowns don't dwarf the knowns. The known quantities are between 0 and 2 and the unknown are between 1 and 6 - those numbers are all quite close to each other. But does anything change if the difference is more stark? What if we keep the bonuses of 0 and 2, but the dice have twenty sides? A hundred? A million? The amount by which the red dice is the smarter decision might change, but the fact that it is the smarter decision does not.
@@likewhatijustsaid In the case of dice rolls, we know that for each die, there are six possible outcomes, and that the probability of each outcome is 1 in 6. With respect to consequences of our actions, Lenman argues that we have no idea how to partition the possibility space or what probability to assign to the possibilities. So yes, *if* the situation were analogous the dice, then the cluelessness argument wouldn't work. But Lenman argues that it's not relevantly analogous.
I don't understand how this question even makes sense, because you have to basically ignore Ockham and treat morality as a Platonic Form to even form the idea that we're ignorant about it. Morality is not an object we can study and become enlightened about, and giant swathes of ethical reasoning mistakenly treat it as if it is. Morality is just a convenience for getting along with other humans. It's not an objective thing one can study...we made it up. I'd prefer if folks stop treating it as a Platonic Form, because it's that sort of treatment that leads to all these hard headed disagreements. Treating it as an agreement among humans for getting along means there's far more room for making an agreement that works for all of us.
Well then, that's how the question makes sense. Be a moral realist. Deny that morality is merely something that we construct in order to make our own lives more convenient.
@@KaneB But it's...not lol. Like, I get the exercise of taking a point of view you don't agree with and playing with it, and maybe you're just interested in the intellectual play of doing so. I can understand that. But to me, almost everyone already treats morality like a Platonic Form (so it's tired and worn out from just an intellectual play perspective), and they're very serious about it, which leads to actual undesirable consequences. And it's simply untrue. It's far more interesting to explore the consequences of treating morality from a nominalist or conceptualist framework, because the typical realist critiques of treating morality from these frameworks are so poor they're borderline dishonest.
I think the issue of your so called """platonic form""" is inherent in all "meta-level" philosophical positions. Because you can believe in any metaphysical positions (e.g. mereological nihilism vs emergentism) or any metaethical position (non-cognitivism vs error-theory vs subjectivism etc.) but none of them would entail an actionable information. You can formulate a ""platonic"" abstract question like "Is this piece of pencil graphite real? Or just its carbon atoms?", even though your actual motivation came from a bunch of other questions like "can you hold the graphite? can you use it to write? can you burn it? can you turn it into a diamond?" Explorations of ethical theories (not metaethics) feels like an introspective process. It helps you explicitly state your goals, values, and their order of priority, and it forces you to be consistent. It's kinda funny in a dark way that even though the trolley problem seems very hypothetical, it's an actual lived reality in some parts of my country where pedestrians often disregard the railway gate. Reports of people getting stuck midway and being hit by the train are not unheard of. So you really do need a standard operating procedure for train operators and guards when they encounter such scenarios: when to help? when to stay away? when to slow down? when to keep going?
2:40 the chance that the one guy will develop the cure for cancer is still 5 times smaller than the chance that one of the five guys saved will develop the cure for cancer. That's always been my issue with moral cluelessness. If you can't calculate specific outcomes, then the answer is to use expected outcomes, not to *not use outcomes*. Like, I can think of ways to argue that you shouldn't use outcome-based moral reasoning at all, but this isn't one of them.
The people forwarding the cluelessness objection do actually account for this. (Which is not to say that they're successful. Just that the cluelessness objection doesn't rest on the obvious error of ignoring expected value.) For instance, Lenman argues that this way of interpreting the probabilities assumes an indifference principle that we have independent reason to reject, because it leads to problems such as Bertrand's paradox. I don't talk about expected outcomes here because it would have complicated the video and I was only interested in what follows if we are in fact clueless in the relevant sense.
@@KaneB Yeah, that makes sense. Btw, appreciate that you brought up two level utilitarianism. While I'm not a utilitarian myself, I do feel like Richard Hare made something at least close to functional there.
We should just strive to be virtuous. Virtue makes human beings robust in the face of consequences, especially to inevitable negative consequences, and can even proactively create positive consequences. Virtue fosters happiness, not meaningless utilitarian calculus.
It may be the case that you care about your welfare, but in the case where it's ontologicaly impossible to improve your welfare I don't think you can say it's a moral fact that you ought improve your welfare. That's sort of the reverse of your general problem of Cluelessness. Isn't it even worse for the general utilitarian? If we don't know whether it's possible to maximize utility, or even worse we do know it is impossible, where are we getting the notion we ought maximize utility? I have to agree with Kant on this one that it makes no sense to have a morality we can't do and can't know.
A lot of people endorse the principle that if you ought to do X, then you can do X. If that's right, then yeah, it wouldn't make sense to say that we ought to maximise happiness, given the impossibility of maximising happiness. But we might deny the "ought implies can" principle. Or we might just frame utilitarianism in terms of states that are better or worse rather than in terms of moral obligations. It seems totally reasonable to say that it would be better if Verity did X, even if Verity is not capable of doing X -- e.g. it would be better if Verity brought about world peace, though no individual has the power to do that. So: it would be best to maximise happiness... But sadly, we can't do that, either because we're clueless or because, of the actions that are in our power, there's no fact which action would have such an outcome.
There's more than reason I prefer a moral view that does something similar to the inverse square law, that is, it prioritizes (to a degree) people and outcomes by how close they are to me at the moment of choice. This corresponds to the fact that my information about the world follows a similar rule. Also, I only have a finite amount of emotions to invest in my goals, and it also reflects this point. Also, evolutionary, that is how my emotional investment works anyway.
I wish more people really thought out arguments for how partiality should work in morality and practice. I don’t think people or sentient beings farther away from me have any less value or deservingness of consideration but I do think in most context you’re more able to care for people close to you effeicently than far away
Hey Kane, glad to see you looking so well. I was just wondering what your take (if you have one) on phenomenology is? Do you know any good beginner material for it, or critiques to the effect of why you shouldn't bother (accessible for a beginner)? I had to read some in my masters and it was just this weird acid-overload word salad to me - and after a few hours with it; i'd glimpse these little realisations or understandings of what they meant before they popped off into the ether - really dreamlike, ykow when you get a milisecond of dream jammed into your conscious and it poofs away and you cant get it back no matter how hard you try. Or i find a passage I like, then come back to it in the afternoon and its gone back to acid-word-salad again... sometimes what i think it says is so pedestrian its kind of insulting to put pen to paper over it; let alone adorn it in super fancy words. Maybe i bonked on my head in my sleep in the last couple years or; what is this mundane or oracular stuff? Sorry to ask but could you heart the comment if u reply so I get a notification plz. Cheers man
I'm not the best person to ask about this. When I read phenomenology at uni, I had pretty much the same reaction as you. Additionally, I thought that there were persuasive arguments for the untrustworthiness of introspection, and this seemed to me to almost totally undermine the phenomenological project, and when I raised this objection to people more sympathetic to phenomenology, I wasn't satisfied with their answers. So I wasn't motivated to read much more of it. As a result, I have no recommendations for reading material. With that said, I loved Matthew Ratcliffe's book "Rethinking Commonsense Psychology", which took a partly phenomenological approach to critique standard views of folk psychology in philosophy of mind. Even there, though, it's not so much that I agreed with his conclusions, but more that he presented a plausible alternative theory to what's currently accepted. (There's nothing wrong with using a phenomenological approach to develop alternative models, but what's interesting are the alternative models, not the approach used to discover the models.)
@@hydrogeniodide8436 Check out Eric Schwitzgebel's book "Perplexities of Consciousness". The whole thing is well worth reading, but I think in particular the points made in chapters 2 and 7 raise serious challenges for phenomenology as I understand it.
About counterfactuals, I think the problem is just that usually, the question is just asked inaccurately, and that's why there are multiple different answers with equal factual accuracy. "A world where Hitler won WWII" could mean a number of different initial conditions. If I instead asked, "what would happen if a copy of my chair materialized in the middle of the air", then it would be accurate to say that the chair would then fall down to the earth, and the negation of that statement would not be true. What comes after that also is a matter of fact, but just not something we can know for certain ourselves.
This is essentially my main objection to the primary antinatalist argument. If we're supposed to be responsible for all the "negative" outcomes resulting from a new person being born, we should also have in account that some decentant of ours, if not the child itself, may vastly improve or entirely "save" millions. It's beyond reason.
You should consider calculating the precise timing to throw the switch and change the direction of the train and just as the train enters the switch gear you throw the switch back again; with the hope of derailing the train. The train skids to a stop on its side. With much screeching and sparks, the train comes to a halt, only slightly injuring the engineer, while killing no one. Why settle for a less than effective option when your intelligence and presence allows for a far more favorable conclusion. In the event that the derailment itself "goes off the rails" and seven lives are taken by the unpredictable debris shower as the train disintegrates into shards and sheets. At least you went out in a remarkable attemp to maximize the future happiness for all those directly involved. That's a legacy you can be proud of, in lieu of being remembered as the one that arbitrarily picked one from a menu of equally bad choices.... whoa, that was a lot🤷♀️🤦♀️ 💎🕊🙋♀️
You are presented with: hit human A or humans B. Hit train C is ignored from existing. Dont wake up that morning the accident happened is also not accounted for D. While D is avoiding making a choice, the persuasiveness of not even acknowledging that the vehicle can be used, not just (B/A), presents the issue: If everything you are given is a social dilemma, then every choice is a social choice. I heard brand new brake discs cost a small fortune.
To put it very simply, (all) people are born right-wingers (they'll sympathize with their genes/offspring and successful/beautiful/intelligent people, that's who'll they try to save on the trolley). Some people (few) gain spirituality/empathy (when they're young. I'll call them left-wingers, for simplicity) and this many times can overcome their right-wing nature. On the trolley they will try to save good/kind/spiritual people (people who "host the human spirit", and thus which would do good deeds in society). But like I said, our nature is right-wing, while the left is a more recent/artificial development, and it won't always override our nature. In fact, if it did, it would "finish" a person's genes (no bias for oneself / own genes, no social success, no reproduction - end of gene-line). So the left is the "unstable"-unknown factor. which is why you can't have your desired "complete" formula from theory to action. And all this being said, the utilitarian morality as you describe it (the amount of "blind" happiness is the deciding factor) has no real support in humans. No one is prone to simply saving "happiness" without looking at the people. Now about morality. How much you calculate into the future is up to intelligence, not morality. Morality takes into account how much you see / can calculate at the time. Keep in mind that this is the left-wing morality (that we usually call morality). You'll notice right-wingers randomly tapping into the right-wing morality: which is the competitional morality. (Like it's immoral in sports to lose points out of pity for the opponent, likewise they judge in real life (even though sport is a game that people play for fun and willingly, unlike real capitalist life): it becomes immoral to help someone since that defeats the whole competition purpose (and thus that person is undeservedly promoted).
Maybe if I don't save the child, that happens to prevent WW3. Buy maybe it's if I do save the child that I prevent WW3. The epistemic probabilities are the same so it just cancels out when you compare the expected values of the two courses of action: 0 death + a chance of a WW3 is trivially better than 1 death + the same chance of WW3. The chance of WW3 ends up being irrelevant if I can't predict how my action influences it. Only the predictable outcome weighs in the calculation.
Is there anything interesting to say about the application of Godelian incompleteness to ethics? I don't know enough about the philosophy to explain myself very well, but it seems like ethics which assign binary permissible/impermissible values to actions, or those which try to calculate the utilities of actions, would either be incomplete or inconsistent in the same way mathematical systems must be.
This seems to me like a theoretical problem originating based on objective utilitatrianism, which is largely irrelevant for subjective utilitarianism, which operates from the human point of view. We (1) have concepts such as good and bad, and we (2) are limited in our ability to perceive the disance consequences of our actions. From this follows that we ought to act in ways which maximize the well being/happiness of first humans, and second, other sentient creatures to the best of our knowlede and ability. This seems to be applicabe for us regardless of wether there may or may not exist words where determinism is not in effect or where no concepts of good and bad exist. The fact that we live in a world which has been "uncooperative with morality" for the vast majority of it's existence in time, and still is such outside of the human sphere of cognition. We are moral creatures and our world is deterministic enough for us to be able to reliably predict the outcomes of our actions to a certain extent. Within this framwork, there are no issues with utilitarianism.
Engage with your emotions, take more time to process information by walking in nature, use Obsidian or summarise the material for added retention. Engage with material you find, well engaging.
If you told me “I’m finding myself full, should I stop eating?” the answer would uncontroversially be yeah.. Aristotle says all men desire by nature to know; I think he’s on to something. Take a “break” to digest and exercise other faculties and I bet you will get hungry again !!
Thing is that our actions are determined by what has happened in the past plus genetics. Though it may appear that we are making decisions based on some happiness formula is only one part of a long chain of things that went before, our parents, friends. Similar situations in the past and mst of these things are not even part of our consciousness. The little man inside my head is an iusion. Just my opinion I think.
If you have the money to by prescription glasses it might be argued you (hypothetical you/person) should not do so and opt for simple magnification glasses and send that money to a person who needs low vision treatment like glaucoma (in a underdeveloped country) which will cause them to go blind even though this entails a low standard of vision and an increased risk for you to have a fall and accident if driving a vehicle because the other person will definitely be worse off then you in a year whereas this is not certain for you. This is an argument from developing international relations grassroots style over national utilitarian concerns that maximises benefits for others by being a maximally functional agent oneself at all points of the human life within a nation state. So this assumes citizens have a clue on where their financial capital ought to bias and there is only a binary option as in its for my nation state or not my nation state. The utilitarian in an international relations realist paradigm must choose prescription glasses where as the international relations idealist theorists ought to choose the cheaper magnification glasses in order to aid a developing nation state and so enhance international cooperation and the global order.
Moin bro. The mind is clueless and thats it. He is asking all this What if questions. If you life a moral you do not need any mind games......What you need to know is that Maya is cause and effect in space and time. Everything you do and think causes effects.
If you take utilitarianism for an axiom, you can of course hold on to it, no matter how absurd the consequences (a bit ironic for a consequentialist, but who cares?) But all these bullets the utilitarian has to bite in your telling turn utilitarianism itself pointless. It becomes an unfalsifiable "truism" that in practice does not commit anybody to anything. The whole idea of morality becomes irrelevant. And at that point, I'd say let the utilitarians waste their own time on idle discussions. I have better things to do.
We could instead frame this as an objection to moral realism. It's hard to see how a realist could have any guarantee that the world would not turn out to be morally uncooperative. The question of what the moral facts are is presumably prior to the question of whether we are capable of applying the moral norms.
@@KaneB The idea that there are (unknowable) "moral facts" is so absurd that you have to be an analytic philosopher to seriously entertain it. Everybody else thinks ought implies can, so if we can't possibly know the "moral facts", it cannot be the case that we ought to follow them.
I think there are some problems with your reasoning in this video. Surely it must be a problem for a normative theory that you cannot find any guidelines on how to act according to the theory? I agree that if utilitarianism is true, it only is a practical problem and not a meta ethical problem regarding our possibility to know the consequences of our actions. But a normative theory is supposed to be able to tell us on how to act. In what sense would it otherwise be normative? How do we create norms to follow when we do not know what those norms would look like. And in the example with a world that does not have happiness (or what ever term you prefer) it must surely be a faulty theory. If what is right is to maximise something that does not exist, what does right even mean in that context. It feels like the base for the utilitarian assumption is the fact that creatures who can feel pleasure and pain (once again we can switch out the terms) exists. And that they do care about that. Who would be bothered with a theory about maximising the number of round squares in the universe? If you understand what I mean. As a side note I would like to thank you for making excellent content overall. I greatly enjoy your videos and sometimes use them as a starting point my own philosophical studies and investigations. I wish you the best.
The train question is kinda funny for me it's easy five persons life worth more than one Unless I know him then I will choose him because I have duty of protection of him it's really doesn't take me more then a sec to choose
@@mindlander it does matter if you know the person then saving him is a duty because u have a responsibility to his safety like says it's ur kid ur kid loss will impact u and him it's just a human nature
@@aymenboussouar1880that doesn’t answer the question. You could know also all the other 5. The calculus is based on intrinsic value of the people, which as far as you know have all the same right to life.
The "ease" of the question is based on a commonplace moral intuition of preferring less deaths that people generally have. But this doesn't really solve the problem one way or the other.
