Why We Read · 2:10am Aug 16th, 2013
[Summary: Substantive works of fiction are "the only places where there was some civic, public hope of coming to grips with the ethical, philosophical, and sociopolitical dimensions of life that were elsewhere treated so simplistically".]
Fiddlebottoms pointed me toward an interesting, if bloated, article by Jonathan Franzen from 1996, “Perchance to Dream”. Here’s an excerpt about why people read, according to a sociologist (with sentences boldfaced by me):
Shirley Brice Heath is a former MacArthur Fellow, a linguistic anthropologist, and a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford; she’s a stylish, twiggy, white-haired lady with no discernible tolerance for small talk. Throughout the Eighties, Heath haunted what she calls “enforced transition zones”--places where people are held captive without recourse to television or other comforting pursuits. She rode public transportation in twenty-seven different cities. She lurked in airports.... She took her notebook into bookstores and seaside resorts. Whenever she saw people reading or buying “substantive works of fiction” (meaning, roughly, trade-paperback fiction), she asked for a few minutes of their time. She visited summer writers conferences and creative-writing programs to grill ephebes. She interviewed novelists. Three years ago she interviewed me, and last summer I had lunch with her in Palo Alto.
[But she doesn’t seem to have published anything about any of this. - BH]
To the extent that novelists think about audience at all, we like to imagine a “general audience”--a large, eclectic pool of decently educated people who can be induced, by strong enough reviews or aggressive enough marketing, to treat themselves to a good, serious book. ...
Heath’s … research effectively demolishes the myth of the general audience. For a person to sustain an interest in literature, she told me, two things have to be in place. First, … one or both of the parents must have been reading serious books and must have encouraged the child to do the same. On the East Coast, Heath found a strong element of class in this. Parents in the privileged classes encourage reading out of a sense of what Louis Auchincloss calls “entitlement”: just as the civilized person ought to be able to appreciate caviar and a good Burgundy, she ought to be able to enjoy Henry James. Class matters less in other parts of the country, especially in the Protestant Midwest, where literature is seen as a way to exercise the mind. ...
According to Heath, young readers also need to find a person with whom they can share their interest. ...
I told her I didn’t remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child, except aloud to me.
Without missing a beat Heath replied: “Yes, but there’s a second kind of reader. There’s the social isolate--the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. … What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can’t share with the people around you--because it’s imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read.“
…For Heath, a defining feature of “substantive works of fiction” is unpredictability. She arrived at this definition after discovering that most of the hundreds of serious readers she interviewed have had to deal, one way or another, with personal unpredictability. Therapists and ministers who counsel troubled people tend to read the hard stuff. So do people whose lives have not followed the course they were expected to: merchant-caste Koreans who don’t become merchants, ghetto kids who go to college, men from conservative families who lead openly gay lives, and women whose lives have turned out to be radically different from their mothers’. This last group is particularly large. There are, today, millions of American women whose lives do not resemble the lives they might have projected from their mothers’, and all of them, in Heath’s model, are potentially susceptible to substantive fiction.[6]
In her interviews, Heath uncovered a “wide unanimity” among serious readers that literature “‘makes me a better person.’”She hastened to assure me that, rather than straightening them out in a self-help way, “reading serious literature impinges on the embedded circumstances in people’s lives in such a way that they have to deal with them. And, in so dealing, they come to see themselves as deeper and more capable of handling their inability to have a totally predictable life.” Again and again, readers told Heath the same thing: “Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive--my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ‘Substance’ is more than ‘this weighty book.’ Reading that book gives me substance.” ...
With near unanimity, Heath’s respondents described substantive works of fiction as “the only places where there was some civic, public hope of coming to grips with the ethical, philosophical, and sociopolitical dimensions of life that were elsewhere treated so simplistically. From Agamemnon forward, for example, we’ve been having to deal with the conflict between loyalty to one’s family and loyalty to the state. And strong works of fiction are what refuse to give easy answers to the conflict, to paint things as black and white, good guys versus bad guys. They’re everything that pop psychology is not.”
“And religions themselves are substantive works of fiction,” I said.
She nodded. “This is precisely what readers are saying: that reading good fiction is like reading a particularly rich section of a religious text. What religion and good fiction have in common is that the answers aren’t there, there isn’t closure. The language of literary works gives forth something different with each reading. But unpredictability doesn’t mean total relativism. Instead it highlights the persistence with which writers keep coming back to fundamental problems. Your family versus your country, your wife versus your girlfriend.”
The first section seems implausible or just trite. It sounds like all she’s saying is that some people read for social reasons, and some for non-social reasons, pretty much like every other activity. This is a theory that doesn’t predict anything. Also, telling someone that “from an early age you felt different from everyone around you” is a cold-reading trick.
The second section is more interesting. Perhaps it’s also trivially true. She may have defined “substantive works of fiction” in a way that excluded readers unlike the group that she “discovered”. But it does describe what I like in fiction.
I agree that fiction is the only place where most people grapple with difficult problems in nontrivial ways, and might possibly change their minds. There are plenty of forums for debate; but I seldom see debate change anybody’s mind. I have better ways of arriving at truth than through fiction, but not of communicating it. Fiction manipulates your emotions to make you perceive facts differently, using stories as Trojan horses to smuggle in ideas and attitudes that your mental firewalls ordinarily keep out.
But its methodology is so sloppy that it’s hard to believe it can on average bring you closer to truth, rather than farther from it. Good writers aren’t especially good philosophers, so most of their ideas may be bad. If fiction does more good than harm, it’s probably just by shaking readers out of their local minima in thoughtspace. A random walk through mostly-bad ideas may eventually arrive in a place that’s clearly better.
Damn. I'm actually awake when a blog post hits, but am far too sleepy to answer it properly.
Could you ever, like, make a blog which requires a simple, 'don't need to think about it' answer? Something like "Should I wear stripes with plaid?" would be lovely.
You have a good point. I wish I had something to add.
Highly interesting. Now I have something else to thank FiddyLow for other than that Luna cellphone fic.
Personally I read because I love stories, and stories are always better in the mind, and reading has, of all media, the lowest barrier between story and mind. The words tell the story but your imagination makes it real.
One of the main things that leads people to bad ideas is when they come to simplistic, tribal conceptions of who other humans are. If you live your life in an echo chamber, everyone who disagrees with you is an eldritch alien monster.
The ideas of authors may be mostly-bad, but simply by having diversity in authors, they will present a diverse range of real people. It doesn't matter if the ideas are bad. The important thing is that well-read individuals will not be inclined to hear a simple label and assume everyone who fits it is evil. They'll do such deviant things as trying to figure out why the villain of the text is acting in a certain way. They may not even celebrate the defeat of a villain at severe costs. For instance, how triumphant would it be if the defeat of the changeling plot means the genocide of a race? Even if Chrysalis is personally irredeemable and deserved to be stopped, it wouldn't be triumphant at all. Not at that cost. Good stories have been written in this fandom about exactly that.
This stuff is all terribly impractical to anyone who fancies themselves as able to control society, of course. That's why large organizations always try to influence or even suppress literature among their members, and why long-term social movements are associated with specific classes of "necessary" literature, very much like when "upper-class" individuals cultivate an appreciation for specific stories. It wouldn't do to regard outgroup savages as people, now would it? Oh my, no. That would be depraved.
I just want to know what a "substantive work of fiction" is, and if I read it.
Okay, so by "trade-paperback fiction" I assume we're excluding Pratchett (his books go from hard cover to mass market,) but are we excluding Neil Gaiman? Sometimes those are mass market, sometimes trade. But I assume we're including A. S. Byatt, whom Gaiman sometimes resembles as a writer. Charles DeLint is another fantasy author who walks the "trade fiction" line (they're usually published that way, but in the sci-fi/fantasy section), his stories remind me of slightly more magic heavy versions of Alice Hoffman books (and she somehow stays planted firmly in general fiction trade paperbacks.)
Add into this that Gaiman, Hoffman, and DeLint have all published young adult books -- would it be decided by the specific title?
My point here is that I find separating "people who read the hard stuff' from "people who read" to be kind of pointless, unless you have some specific things you're looking at and for. "Early 20th century Russian lit" is a useful definition, "substantive work of fiction" is not.
Anyway, on to your assertion -- I totally agree, fiction is capable of changing minds in ways that other formats are not. But I don't think that's limited to the "hard stuff." Things like Uncle Tom's Cabin, hardly a deep book, or TV shows with African-Americans, professional women, or gay characters, have all be credited with using fictional characters to sneak past people's defenses and actually make them give a damn about other people in ways that the news and protests can't do by themselves. And whether you consider it "hard stuff" or not, there wouldn't be half as many objectivists in the world if Ayn Rand hadn't written novels. (Thanks, fiction.
)
Interestingly, I made this argument in an essay on that most frivolous of subjects, shipping. Those of us who ship can spend pages arguing our favorite pairings, but the only things that really change someone's mind, and really make them go "Oh, so that's what you see in it!" are good fics.
So it's clear that stories are a back door into the subconscious (which doesn't exist, except when you're not looking.) I mean, I can't say the idea is new to me (I'm a fan of both Jung and Bettleheim) but I guess the new angle is that some people read to make that happen. That is interesting, if kind of scary to me. Like deciding that you'd enjoy possibly having a bit of your mind brainwashed and reprogrammed at random.
I mean, I guess we're all doing that, but we don't say it that way.
1288082 The ideas of authors may be mostly-bad, but simply by having diversity in authors, they will present a diverse range of real people. It doesn't matter if the ideas are bad. The important thing is that well-read individuals will not be inclined to hear a simple label and assume everyone who fits it is evil.
Good point.
1288087 Those of us who ship can spend pages arguing our favorite pairings, but the only things that really change someone's mind, and really make them go "Oh, so that's what you see in it!" are good fics.
Heh. Good example.
Like deciding that you'd enjoy possibly having a bit of your mind brainwashed and reprogrammed at random.
Now that's an interesting and problematic idea.
1288087
Objectivist ideas compare favorably to human history. There are no castes in Objectivism. There are "better people" and "worse people", but no barriers to moving between the two, and none of the "better person" traits are accidents of birth. The point is to arrange everything peacefully and to reward skill instead of force or sophistry. On their own, the books promote empathy towards characters who don't get portrayed as real people very often, and deserve praise for that.
I think the problem is more Ayn Rand herself than anything she wrote. She was unpleasant in personality, and she promoted her works in a cultish, intellectually inconsistent manner[1]. The result is that objectivists have all too often read nothing else. They're actively discouraged from empathizing with anyone who doesn't totally agree with them already. Everyone who isn't part of their echo chamber is an eldritch alien monster. Outsiders are to be tamed and converted, never listened to.
[1] She sought political power, punished independent thought, wanted to be lauded for her charm rather than her accomplishments, made no differentiations between types of wealth in her personal affairs, and in general acted like the villains condemned in her own stories!
1288142
I totally agree with this, just so you know. My only problems with objectivism as a philosophy are 1) I believe that it often leads to rationalization of choices, rather than using reason to make them, and 2) objectivists are often annoying and hypocritical college students. (The second problem applies equally to a number of philosophies and political/economic theories, though, so it's probably unfair.)
I suspect that if I had the chance to speak with more older objectivists, I'd have a lot of respect for the philosophy.
I think this depends entirely upon what you are arguing and what your audience is. Scientific audiences are best convinced with predictive, testable hypotheses and data, and scientists can and are convinced by data like this all the time. Statisticians are similar.
The problem is that most of the public in general isn't very objective at all about things. Most people don't even bother trying to be objective.
1288142
As was once said by David Wong:
Incidentally, I think Cracked is actually a reasonably good means of educating people. Zoos also do good work, and I think things like Discover magazine and National Geographic help people to better understand the world.
I think the real key to arguing, though, is not explaining why you are right, but explaining why you -have- to be right. This is why the observation "people are convinced of ships by fics" seems true - because when you make a prediction, and then demonstrate it, that is very convincing. This is how science works - if you really want to do prove something, you make a prediction with it about the future, then observe the world and see if it matches. This impresses people, and is how relativity became universally accepted.
When you build something based on your principles, that proves your correctness to people.
Incidentally this is also why after natural disasters people are more interested in global warming, and also why they are more interested in it during the summer than during the winter.
But as regards objectivism as a philosophy, it really isn't a very good one. As it turns out altruism is actually a very good thing and it evolved in humans for a reason. Reciprocal altruism is the real rule of the day; all of us are greater than the sum of our parts if we work together on many things.
1288167
I'm not an Objectivist. I just was sort of wincing at the 'thanks fiction' comment, and so had to reply. A few years ago, I might have said that I was. That Objectivism leads to rationalization of choices is why I formally abandoned it. I could speak at length about the details of how I came to that conclusion, but it's not particularly relevant. Being off-topic like that would risk disrespect to Bad Horse's blog.
1288213
You do realize that 'all of us are greater than the sum of our parts if we work together on many things' is the essence of competitive advantage, right? People should work on diverse things and then exchange the results to everyone's profit. Reciprocal altruism and capitalism are not easily distinguished from each other. The fact that people can't see that results in tremendous restrictions on capitalism. The fact that Ayn Rand couldn't see that (see entry: hateful) is why she didn't put it like that herself.
Well, fiction certainly can change people's opinions,* but I seriously doubt that it is because fiction can indulge in longer-form, logical arguments. Writers are more likely to start with their own conclusion on a matter, and then construct a world and characters that are designed to be an ideal proof of the argument... and, in my experience, the proof is hammered home through emotion rather than logic.
Positions tested by rational debate** (in the absence of the ability to experiment) carry much more weight with me than ones forged in the heat of manipulated emotion. I think there is a strong reason why Heath never published.
-----
* Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Jungle, and Atlas Shrugged as examples.
** Yes, there is still such a thing in this anti-rationalist age: Try lesswrong.com for an example.
1288218
Reciprocal altruism is rather different from capitalism. Capitalism is trade, whereas reciprocal altruism is two people doing good things for each other because they have done so in the past. While the two may have similar outcomes at times, they are distinct from one another, though it is very much possible for relationships to turn into reciprocal altruism from trade after a while.
1288221
It is kind of funny seeing lesswrong cited as being a place for rationalism. Sadly, it isn't. It is a place of futurism, which is really not a rational mindset at all. It embraces cyronics, the singularity, and a great deal of other nonsense. They call themselves rationalists but they aren't actually rational; it is sort of a pseudo-religion to them. Their mindless embrace of utilitarianism doesn't help them.
1288229
Trade is people doing good things for each other because they expect to do so in the future. Trade is the preliminary stage of reciprocal altruism. Are you familiar with the "dictator" experiments which show greater altruism in market economies? Being engaged with trade encourages people to see each other as potential benefits rather than potential threats, and thus they seek harmony even with strangers.
1288240
Trade is the commodification of work. When I go to the grocery store, I have no real loyalty to anyone there; I just buy stuff with my money. There isn't much in the way of altruism there, beyond that we honor money as a medium of exchange, which isn't really altruism so much as it is convenience. We all pretend dollars have some set value because it benefits all of us to do so.
While people argue that trade promotes peace, it is really difficult to tell if that is actually true, given that there are many historical incidences of trading partners going to war with each other.
1288235
"It" (lesswrong) is not a monolithic structure, though I can see how the assertion would be in aid of a straw man argument.* I, for example, do not embrace either of the concepts that you mentioned, though I find the approach to rational thinking on the site to be very functional and the debates stimulating, even if (as is usual) the debates end in disparate opinions.
Is your objection with the scientific method or Bayesian reasoning? If so, you will have a difficult time changing my opinion of the site. Particularly when you use logical fallacies and ad hominem attacks piled on top of one another to dismiss a tangential remark of mine.
------
* Your argument-by-assertion did not convince me, either.
1288260
Trade may or may not promote peace between nations. Nations are ruled by people who derive their benefits from ruling, and who are often insulated from the consequences of a cessation of trade.
Every time you shop somewhere, you are benefiting them because you expect future benefits, and they are benefiting you for the same reason. As long as you don't shoplift and they don't defraud you, the relationship becomes mutually beneficial, and it is that mutual benefit which causes it to continue. If reciprocal altruism is two people doing good things for each other because they have done so in the past, then trade is by your definitions reciprocal altruism.
Back to the original post for a moment:
whaaaaaaaaaaaaat
1288221 There's a fimfic LessWrong group, although I hear the admin's kind of a jerk. But it's LessWrong that convinced me that argument doesn't work. I've been there from the start, really from long before the start. I think the pattern of voting is explained better by the "echo chamber" theory than by the "rational argument" theory. There are lots of smart individuals, but unfortunately the smarter someone is, the less likely they are to listen to reason, since the more likely they are to be right. And the votes of the rational are swamped by the votes of EY fanboys. And there's just a lot of cruelty, pride, arrogance, and emotionalism. It's still a remarkable accomplishment, but it doesn't inspire hope in me that people can learn to be rational. Just the opposite. The more rational someone thinks they are, the less amenable they are to reason.
LW is a special case, because most of the top contributors--possibly all the top contributors except me and Yvain--currently or have in the past lived in one of the LessWrong communal houses, and have a great deal of personal contact with each other, magnifying the "echo chamber" effect. "Burning Man Brony" was set in the LessWrong Burning Man camp.
1288346 I did a double-take at that too. Put a snarky comment in originally, then took it out: "What what religion is she thinking of? Judaism? Daoism?" My Christian upbringing was very clear on the point that the answers were all there.
1288282
It isn't a monolithic structure, but it has a certain sort of community which engages in massive groupthink around it. Yeah, you can argue with them about it, but it isn't particularly fruitful. For all their claims of rationality, in reality they believe what they want to believe.
My objection is neither with the scientific method nor Bayesian reasoning (though it is dangerous to rely on it exclusively), but rather the inappropriate application thereof. And they do rely very heavily on utilitarianism there despite the obvious flaws of that philosophy; there is nothing wrong with making use of it, but there is something wrong when you forget that it is known to have flaws and is entirely arbitrarily defined (something they very frequently forget).
The problem is that they use them as shields and mantras rather than truly understanding them, and they forget that any sort of probabilistic reasoning which isn't based on actual probabilities is wankery.
1288288
The future benefits aren't from them, though, and in any case trade is not altruism. Altruism is the practice of concern for others without the expectation of renumeration; reciprocal altruism is essentially not behaving altruistically towards those who fail to behave altruistically themselves.
1288396
Yes, that is a very valid criticism of the group. (And it is true that I've found the same problem with several other rational/skeptical groups I've been a part of.) I am not a very active participant* but have found the information on the site useful. I just think that a system that only works a small percentage of the time** is better than those that don't work at all.
Perhaps I am a bit biased because I have had my mind changed by persuasive arguments, and am of an age where my opinions (by the preponderance of evidence) should be calcified.
-----
* Understatement alert. Mostly I've been a quiet observer at some meet-ups.
** Mostly in off-line exchanges where there is little incentive to grandstand or white knight EY.
1288282 1288404 There are no flaws with utilitarianism. There is no possible rational ethical alternative to utilitarianism; all other approaches at best reduce to search techniques that seek to approximate in the real world of limited computation what utilitarianism would accomplish with infinite computational resources. This is by definition. If you believe that you should be able to compare two actions or outcomes and decide which is better, you are a utilitarian. If you believe otherwise, you don't really believe in rational ethics. If you want to compare actions instead of outcomes... it's too late at night to get into that, but it's one of those approximations.
This hinges on what you mean by "ethics", but I'm going pretty much by Sam Harris' definitions.
I'm almost certain, given that I've had this conversation dozens of times before, that you are saying "utilitarianism" but meaning a particular way of combining individual utility functions to compute social utility, such as by addition. Utilitarianism is simply the framework which says that ethics is done by comparing alternative actions and having defined, rational criteria for choosing one as being more ethical than the others.
There are "flaws" with particular ways of combining functions, although in fact many of these "flaws" are perhaps better described as flaws in human thinking that make us give wrong answers when dealing with large numbers.
The only alternatives to having a utility function are mysticism or nihilism.
1288404
Well, a lot of that is certainly true. As far as my personal experience is concerned*, it's true of every skeptical/rationalist group. As far as Utilitarianism is concerned, it seems to me that the flaws are more in the application** than in the basic tenants. But we have, perhaps, wandered far enough off topic? I'm more interested in Bad Horse's original subject. Did you have any comments on that or the main part of my reply?
--------
* Yes, anecdotal evidence, but I've got no studies to quote. Call it a personal survey.
** Mis-application, I should say.
Well, this conversation seems to have gone off topic, but that won't keep me out of it.
1288240 I've seen some descriptions of the use of the dictator game, or something similar, in developing countries. While it seems technically accurate to say that these sorts of experiments show "greater altruism in market economies," that feels like a bit of a canard to me. I'm not aware that anyone's done any deep investigations into the reasons for the cultural differences you see (though that certainly doesn't mean they haven't), it seemed to me that the observed differences probably had more to do with general scarcity considerations than anything else. Then again, that's just my filter on things.
I do tend to think that markets are a good idea, though I'm much more of a market socialist myself. You get good results through competition, but capitalism is naturally inimical to competition unless you have some sort of force acting on markets to prevent the formation of monopolies and cartels. My preferred solution is just to throw the government into the marketplace on roughly equal terms as a non-profit player, kind of like how USPS competes with UPS and FedEx—except for the whole thing about USPS having to deal with the hugely unprofitable side of the business, daily mail delivery.
Actually, I'm Christian, which means I'm crazy, and believe in universal altruism. I support the wholesale abandonment of personal motivation and the move toward a society where we're all driven by a desire to improve the lives of others and benefit humanity at large. But I don't think most people favor that idea, so I try not to argue with them too much.
But as for Bad Horse's blog post, I find I'm mostly on the same page as 1288087, not sure how much I care about this definition of "substantive works of fiction". Certainly, I don't recognize much of myself as a reader in the picture being painted. I don't look to literature to challenge ideas. I do that for myself. I enjoy it when I see it in literature, but in much the same way I enjoy plot twists. I like when people play with the rules, because it's what I like doing in my head when I have free time. But the idea of reading to maintain a sense of ethical or intellectual integrity?
I don't understand that idea.
And I'm not saying that as a criticism, particularly. More as a request for elaboration. I have no earthly idea how one can get that out of reading, and I'm kind of curious. This just seems outside my realm of experience. What does it mean to read to do these things, and why would one do that?
I wish I could form a better question out of that, but it feels a bit like asking the sky what it feels like to be blue.
1288422
The most obvious flaw is what is known as the mere addition paradox. In other words, a world full of people who are just barely not miserable enough that life isn't worth living is better, according to utilitarianist logic, than a world which has fewer people who are much better off. So QED, utilitarianism is flawed. You may claim "Well, that's just human perception", but there is no objective reason why that world is better. You claim it is based on some arbitrary defintion of utility. I personally value one high-value life over a great number of low-value ones, even if "utility" claims otherwise, and honestly feel the real world bears that out. In the end I prefer people like me over line workers in China or India, even large numbers of them, not because they're Chinese or Indian but because I feel they are just worth a lot less.
A second major flaw is the "happy consumer" paradox. Basically, if you have X amount of resources, it makes sense to distribute them in such a way as to maximize overall happiness, right? The flaw comes in that some people might gain a lot more happiness per unit than others, and as such you might neglect some people in favor of other people simply because it makes those people happier, even though it isn't "fair" or even very reasonable. This can threaten the stability of your system, and isn't very "fair".
However, the truth is that utilitarianism is entirely arbitrarily defined, so the idea that it is not flawed is simply silly. All you have to do is reject the arbitrary tenants of utilitarianism, and you reject the entire system. ALL ethical systems are ultimately arbitrary, after all, given that the universe doesn't define them for us.
Good examples of problems with it include but are not limited to the subjectivity of utility, that it ignores justice and principles of fairness (the given example being that a utilitarian might frame an innocent black man for a crime in order to prevent anti-black riots, even though he knows that the black man in question is innocent, because it would maximize utility), and the degregation of personhood.
But of course the single largest problem is that it requires that you can actually predict the future accurately. As has been proven by people, they are notoriously bad at this. Therefore, you cannot expect a system which is reliant on continuously calculating utility to actually be very good at maximizing utility due to human error, and it violates many principles of fairness and arbitrariness (which are bad things to violate). As such, it is better to actually have rules in place than trying to calculate utility constantly, because ultimately utilitarianism is just an excuse to come to whatever conclusion you want by claiming whatever consequences you want - and that is precisely what humans will do in reality.
It is also a completely unrealistic because it requires you to favor others more than is wise for your own well-being, or over the well-being of those you care about. Indeed, in a utilitarian society, it behooves me, as a selfish individual (and all individuals are selfish to some extent) to take advantage of the suckers (i.e. the people who buy into utilitarianism).
This is why relying on utilitarianism alone doesn't really work. This is not to say that calculating utility isn't useful, just that if you are trying to use it as a central philosophy it has very real flaws. It doesn't actually work in reality because in the end all ethics are arbitrary, and it tries to pretend that they aren't. After all, there's nothing non-arbitrary about maximizing utility.
1288434
It is true we've wandered a bit.
1288461
The mere addition paradox is only a paradox because it is reductionistic to a fault. It does not consider time or consequences. It also assumes that all persons are actually equal in all ways, which brings to mind the old physicist's joke about spherical cows... uhmn... but there's only so far I'm willing to wander. Let's just say that a zero sum game to produce the best outcome at a single instance is a problem of application, not method.
I also take issue with your assertion that, "...in the end all ethics are arbitrary...." It is very likely that basic human ethics are hard-wired into us by natural selection. Compassion, charity, honesty, etc. convey evolutionary advantages to groups of humans (and most gregarious primates) that have become instinctual behavior. Individuals that acted in a purely selfish manner seem to have been selected against. In that light, "ethics"* seems to be a purely mechanistic system based on the best strategy for survival considering group dynamics. Utilitarian, in other words.
Well... I could go on (and on and on), but as fascinating as this discussion is, I've got a load of work looming for me in the morning, and I've got to sign off.
-----
* Some common ethical assertions, at any rate.
1288518
None of that actually fixes the mere addition paradox. It is a very real flaw in utilitarianist ethics. Also, as any scientist will tell you, if you have no means of applying your method, then your method is worthless because it makes no predictions.
All ethics are indeed arbitrary though, regardless of whether we are hard wired with them or not. Ethics are not an inherent property of the universe. All morality is arbitrary. We may have reasons for behaving in certain ways, but that doesn't mean that the universe actually -cares- about those things - there is no such thing as inherently good or bad, because those are fully subjective value judgements.
And while people will say compassion, charity, and honesty are hard-wired into us, so are violence, hatred, tribalism, rape, and deception. The reality is that humans have become MUCH nicer since the advent of civilization, and especially since the advent of the industrial age, not because of evolution or hard wiring but entirely because of culture. We are massively less violent than tribal cultures were, but it isn't because we are very genetically distinct from them, but rather because we are culturally distinct.
Deception, in fact, gives a very large survival advantage, and it is actually believed that a great deal of why we evolved to be so intelligent has nothing to do with tool use (because our tools were primitive for a very long time) and everything to do with successful navigation of social life - the ability to deceive others and to detect deception are good reasons to evolve larger brains, which were then co-opted for other purposes.
Awesome blog post, Bad Horse: I relate to the second class of reader. I love pterry because he made possible a world I could escape into when I needed it most—a world of seemingly infinite size. It didn't throw me that there were like forty books, it more throws me that there cannot possibly be 400 or 4000. Discworld, though full of alarming and dismaying things, contained better friends and better places than the real world had, and was able to present these things compellingly enough that it could wrest my attention away from the stuff I didn't want haunting me.
Escapist literature has real utility to those who live in jails, even if it's jails of the mind or of their own pasts.
I like the romance-writer's code of 'emotional justice': to me, closure is vitally necessary, but I can still see the argument for unpredictability because that is how story arcs are DONE. You establish strong character directions, and then throw doubt on how they'll get there, and that makes each little victory a lot more interesting. I don't think motives need to be unpredictable or arbitrary, nor does closure have to be unpredictable, but the path taken ought to seem fresh and unexpected.
There's nothing so fun as that 'this won't end well' moment, unless it's seeing it through to a satisfying ending along a bizarre and counterintuitive path
1288422
I agree with the substance of your argument here, but one terminology nitpick: in this sentence, I think you mean consequentialism. Utilitarianism also relies on the assumption that people other than yourself have value. (I know two people who agree with the first assumption and not the second.)
1288812 You're right--historically, "utilitarianism" has been used for consequentialism that sums over individuals. I need perhaps some different term for what I think is the logical closure of utilitarianism. The key distinction is using utility functions. If someone has a utility function which they can apply to actions rather than consequences, I'd still want to call them utilitarians. If someone has a private utility function that doesn't incorporate utility functions of others, I in practice do call them utilitarians; otherwise, I'd have to try to figure out whether people are using a social utility function, or a private utility function that values the well-being of other people. I don't think we can figure that out.
The term "consequentialism" relies on an artificial distinction between actions and consequences. But each consequence can be regarded as an action, unless you can look All the way ahead to the heat death of the universe. And the other distinction relies on a less-obviously artificial distinction between self and other, which will become more obviously artificial as technology advances.
If you say that utilitarianism requires assuming that other people have value, you're restricting utilitarianism to be used only for the construction of state constitutions and laws, but not for personal ethics. Now I know that just about everybody has always done this, but that's because just about everyone has always made the mad assumption that one's private ethical judgements should give the same outcome as, e.g., public laws and social ideals. This just leads to hypocrisy and makes it impossible to either talk about ethics, or to be ethical.
1288461 The most obvious flaw is what is known as the mere addition paradox. In other words, a world full of people who are just barely not miserable enough that life isn't worth living is better, according to utilitarianist logic, than a world which has fewer people who are much better off. So QED, utilitarianism is flawed.
I already said, "I'm almost certain, given that I've had this conversation dozens of times before, that you are saying "utilitarianism" but meaning a particular way of combining individual utility functions to compute social utility, such as by addition." The mere addition paradox applies to the use of addition to combine individual utility functions.
A second major flaw is the "happy consumer" paradox. Basically, if you have X amount of resources, it makes sense to distribute them in such a way as to maximize overall happiness, right? The flaw comes in that some people might gain a lot more happiness per unit than others, and as such you might neglect some people in favor of other people simply because it makes those people happier, even though it isn't "fair" or even very reasonable
The preferred term is "utility monster". This is how humans operate. We say that humans have a greater capacity for happiness than all other beings, and therefore we can ignore the well-being of all non-humans in our ethics.
Good examples of problems with it include but are not limited to the subjectivity of utility, that it ignores justice and principles of fairness
This is a feature, not a bug. It gives people a way to evaluate different outcomes rather than relying on emotional reflexes evolved for low-tech tribal societies. But if you want fairness, you can program that into your utility function.
If you have an ethical system that deterministically, non-magically tells you which of two outcomes is ethically preferable, you are a utilitarian using that system as your utility function.
1288850
The people I'm thinking of argue that they only care about their own subjective experience, and while they like knowing their friends are happy and dislike watching people suffer because empathy exists, these things only matter because of the effects on their personal wellbeing. I guess that would be utilitarian in your taxonomy.
I don't understand this claim.
And vice versa, just as unfortunately...
Still, another wonderfully thought-filled post and comment section, so let me say an honest "thank you" and a tongue-in-cheek "quit it! I've got stories to write here, and I've found that thinking usually just gets in the way of that!"
Don't get me wrong: I love this mooshy little puddle of meat sloshing around inside my skull, but it seems to do the writing thing so much better when I get outta its way and let it quietly ruminate. I mean, this thing I just finished where Cadance creates the changelings after her Aunt Luna's banishment because she needs help with her duties as Equestria's death goddess, that story's conclusion came completely outta left field as they say. I like the ending very much and it fits the story, but I never woulda guessed that the theme I'd been working toward during the course of 40,000 words, twelve chapters, and three months of writing and rewriting was the concept that friendship is more important, more lasting, and more difficult than love.
I'm not even sure if I believe the concept is true--I'd hafta think about it, and, well, I'm not really interested in doing that. But it works for the characters and the story, and I guess that's more important to me than truth. Besides, I'm moving on: like I said, I've got stories to write!
Thanks again,
Mike
1288932 Re. "If you say that utilitarianism requires assuming that other people have value, you're restricting utilitarianism to be used only for the construction of state constitutions and laws, but not for personal ethics."
My model is that each person has a personal utility function, and a social utility function combines all these personal functions, and that's what we usually call utilitarianism. But the personal utility functions, the things we're summing--those are what individuals use as their ethical guides. I don't believe it makes sense to say that you have your personal utility function that encodes your non-ethical preferences, and then you use the social utility function to compute a final preference with ethics factored in--necessarily the same final preference as anybody else using that utility function. I don't distinguish preferences from ethics. Wrote a big controversial post on that on LessWrong once (62% up / 38% down), saying ethics is more a matter of taste than of willpower.
Preliminary note: I apologize if I've covered the same ground as someone else. I've answered in the order I've read things because, well, the thread is big and I am small. :)
Also, magnificent post as always, Bad Horse. You know you are reading BH's blog when the offtopic wrangle is still one of the most interesting things you've read all day.
1287995
Yes. Always wear stripes with plaid. It's not just a good idea, it's the law.
1288082
It's, I think, a feature of art[1] that it gives us leave to see things from angles we wouldn't, normally. Generally, we don't make judgements about the morality of, say, Changeling genocide because the real-world examples are more complicated, slathered with tribalism, and, well, thinking is hard.
You've a point there.
Mind, I don't think direct suppression is what happens. Not always. Sometimes books aren't suppressed so much as an odium is created towards the learned and the freethinking. A national myth of trahison des clercs is created, a climate of anti-intellectualism and books are thus rendered suspect and those who swim against the tide of popular opinion are rendered untrustworthy before they even utter a word. Very effective.
And the thing is, more often than not, this suppression, whether of books or the trustworthiness of books and those who read them, is not deliberate. Sometimes it's just people exploiting ambient anti-intellectualism for their own ends, and it ends up being bolstered in a myriad of ways by a myriad of people. And sometimes intellectual oppression is just a by-product of other oppression. After all, a starving man can scarce afford to read, and those who must toil ceaselessly have little time, and what time they do have is spent in rest, rather than intellectual labor. It's not for nothing that 'school' derives from σχολή, leisure.
But, this aside, your point does stand.
[1] I was going to say 'literature,' but it occurred to me that a lot of art--abstract art in particular--likes to toy with how we think we see.
1288087
Regarding 'hard stuff' -- I've always bristled at the idea that books can be divided into 'proper' literature and 'icky stuff for the proles.' I'm not unsympathetic to the notion that there may be such thing as 'good' and 'bad' literature[1], but the divisions into 'substantive' and 'vapid' always seem to me to be based on snobbery of one stripe or another.
When I was younger I admit I was a fool[2] and worried mightily if I was reading the right literature, but as I grew slightly older and slightly less foolish I find that I care less and less. My own estimation of the literature I've read[3] varies wildly and cleaves to no well established taxonomy of literature, proper and not.
Now I could be an idiot[4] and fail to see the subtle distinctions and shadings, but I think that it's far more likely that the whole idea of high-vs-low art is all about social signifiers and snobbery and not a whit about actual quality or intellectual stimulation.
What's your take?
Clever!
I never thought of thinking about it like that, but no, the more I think about it, the more the experience of reading is like that. Setting aside a section of your mind and having it reprogrammed with the perspective of someone else in a world that's, quite possibly, very much unlike your own. And unless you police the boundary with vigor, ideas from there can easily leech out and change you. Hence the notion of, ahem, self-improving books.
[1] I'm not yet convinced that such a distinction is possible or useful, but it's not that bad of an idea, really.
[2] Well a bigger fool.
[3] How interesting, how fun, and how stimulating it was.
[4] Yes, okay, I am an idiot. Which does rather undermine my point, true. But I'm right about this! Honest!
1288213
Here's a fun experiment: Take one (1) scientist of good character who supports political party X and one (1) scientist of good character who supports political party Y. Mix thoroughly. Watch the triumph of the scientific method at work.
Okay, snark aside, I accept that scientists can and do change their minds all the time (they have to) and that this is a praiseworthy trait, but this change of opinion made easier through compartmentalization. Otherwise brilliant scientists are perfectly capable in believing in complete and utter twaddle because they compartmentalize it away from their understanding of the scientific method &c.
And they aren't bad people for doing this. Changing your mind is very difficult. I've done it when it counted and failed to do it when it counted, too. Not because I'm stupid[1] but because I'm human.
And that's why stories-as-trojan-horses-for-good are so important. They make this very difficult and necessary thing easier.
[1] I've known people, many people, who'd contend that point, but...
1288218
I really don't want to argue this point with you, but I want to bring your attention to the notion that while purely theoretical capitalism applied to perfectly spherical cows in vacuum might work like that (and be indistinguishable from altruism) the sort that actually happens invariably seems to lead to oligopolies and abuse. This is not actually an argument against capitalism[1], I hasten to add, or against what I suspect is your position.
[1] Of which I'm not a fan for a considerable number of reasons. But that's neither here nor there.
1288396
Really? I've met the admin a few times, and he strikes me as a very reasonable chap of good character and sharp wit. You might like his stories, actually.
:)
Regarding LW -- I'm not a member[1] but I've hung around the site a bit and what made me leery is two things:
1. Self-assured smugness[2]. Oh, heavens above and heavens below, so much smugness. They are right about nearly everything ever and are so enamored with their rightness that they hardly have time for other people. Oh, hell no, other people just cut into their special 'basking in my rightness' time.
2. Using rationalism to justify cruelty and coldness. Critique is fine and useful. But it costs nothing to dull the bite of it with a pleasantry or a smile.
So. Very very desperately clever people, it would seem, who, sadly, appear to be creating a truly toxic culture. It's a shame, too.
But, of course, I defer to your superior grasp of LW and its culture. Does what I wrote strike you as reasonable in any way?
[1] Though I find, as you know, a lot of the things LW stands for and discusses very interesting.
[2] Oddly the admin of their group on FimFiction doesn't have this trait, striking me as a lot more introspective.
1288346
1288398
I think it's an intellectual posture you have to adopt when discussing religion as a sociologist or anthropologist. You can't call them fiction (because then people will set you on fire, possibly literally depending on where you are) and so you strike a posture that they are just happy, fluffy closure-providing assemblages of old-time-y wisdom and charm.
Well it's better than being on fire.
1288422
While I agree with you I want to poke at you a little bit:
1. Your definition of utilitarianism differs slightly from the orthodoxy. What you speak about is optimizing actions based on an abstract utility which could be anything at all while, classically, utilitarianism uses happiness[1] as the ultimate utility.
2. Your statement isn't really bout utilitarianism, really. Instead it is about a pair meta-ethical[2] statements necessary for utilitarianism to function, viz. 'there exists a way to compute the utility of the outcome of arbitrary actions' and 'there exists an utility such that its maximization leads to what we would term good[3].' I make this very nitpicky distinction because it is possible for a utility function to exist but to be impossible to compute, either practically or theoretically[4] which is a non-mystical, non-nihilist alternative. And this alternative means it is necessary to approximate the utility function via, say, some sort rule-set, or anything really. And this is a slight crack, true, but the whole remainder of ethics fits snugly inside.
[1] The derivation of an useful definition of 'happiness' is left as an exercise to the highly motivated reader. :)
[2] Actual word. No, honest.
[3] The derivation of an useful definition of 'good' is left as an exercise to the absurdly motivated reader.
[4] In the same way that Chaitin's construction is, say.
1288444
Regarding markets: I think a shorter Bradel[1] would be: Markets are a solution to some problems, but not the solution to all problems.
Regarding universal altruism: I'm fairly certain that a perfect kenosis and abnegation-in-service-of-common-humanity is not possible[2], but as an ideal I find it very pleasing, very alluring. And, as you know I'm not the most religious of people. So there is a non-religion-y appeal to this idea worth considering.
[1] And consequently shorter Ghost. We...ah...we agree a lot.
[2] Not without perfectly spherical humans in vacuum, anyway.
1289220
I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately. I recently decided to fix a hole in my classic romance reading, and jumped into Pride and Prejudice.
I found that, by today's standards, it's not a well written book. It does nothing but tell (I mentioned on a shipping forum the idea of finding and replacing names with pony names, and sending it to EqD just to watch a prereader's head explode.) and follows all sorts of other strange, antiquated conventions like telling you the first part of a conversation before picking up the dialogue. However, I can't put it down. The story is clearly one of the best romances I've ever read. Even knowing the famous outcome, there are more than enough twists and turns and subplots to keep me guessing as to how it turns out for other characters than Elizabeth and Darcy, and to make me totally unsure about how they'll get there.
I'm rambling on about this because it's a perfect example, this is a "classic" book that's not about deep thoughts on human nature. It hasn't lasted 200 years because it's a "substantive work of literature." It lasted 200 years because it's a hell of a lot of fun. And I know from experience that there are more books like that which sneaked into the hallowed halls of classic literature. There's a tendency to try to reverse engineer them into saying important things, but honestly this book isn't fooling me. This is a great story, and that's why people still read it.
And more, Austen is credited as the founding mother of the romance genre, the lowest of low brow literature. Who knows how many equally fun books have been written in that genre that are ignored because they didn't have the luck to sneak into "classic" literature? Most people who are in charge of judging that stuff wouldn't be caught dead with a modern romance novel, and wouldn't dare compare it to Austen, no matter how much they enjoyed it.
Then, on the other side of the coin, you have low brow books that deserve credit for as much, or more, deep thought as trade paperback literature. I immediately brought up and dismissed Pratchett in my initial post, because even if his books are more complex and cover more exploration of our society than most things you'll find in the general fiction section, it would be very hard to give an accurate description of one that would convince the uninitiated that they deserved to be called "substantive works of fiction." Even if you make it past "fantasy novel," by the time you get to the Librarian you've probably lost most people who are looking for the "hard stuff." Sucks to be them.
So I totally agree: "high" art is more about who buys it than how the book is written. I think classics, serious trade paperbacks, and mass market all have their great thinkers and their masters of entertaining brain candy, it's just a matter of what a person thinks they're supposed to be reading.
In terms of "good" and "bad," I'm a firm believer that entertainment is the first and only required goal of fiction. There are a million ways of entertaining people, and things for writers to study that will help them with that or other side-goals, but the only bad writing is writing that fails to entertain. To that end I can recognize writing as better or worse (more or less entertaining, entertaining while succeeding at some other goal), but there's a lot less bad writing in the world than people think.
1288855
See this is the flaw of utilitarianism. You claimed it wasn't logically flawed and here you are talking about how it isn't even logical.
Non-humans have no utility - not even widely agreed upon. Indeed, most people agree that non-humans have utility and are indeed worthy of consideration, hence the existence of nature preserves, our animal cruelty laws, general consideration of the well being of animals (particularly animals in our care), and dozens of other examples. Humans make sacrifices for the well-being of non-human, non-sapient animals, and claiming that they have no ethical standing is very questionable - indeed, humans are very likely programmed to enjoy the company of animals to some extent. Our close alliance with canines dates back over ten thousand years, and they are hardly the only animal humans form close bonds with.
Really what you've done is convinced yourself that you have some sort of logical system when you've just made up a bunch of stuff, then claimed that it is all justified via some sort of vague utility function. This is known as rationalization, and is something that all utilitarians engage in on a very massive scale. Indeed, it is ultimately the point of utilitarianism - people claim moral superiority without recognizing that their system is in fact entirely arbitrary and is indeed a rationalization of their stances on issues.
You're going to claim otherwise, but why did you disregard the utility of non-sapient animals? You have no actual, logical reason to do so. There's no inherent reason why they have no utility or can be safely disregarded. You simply have decided that they can be disregarded, and then accepted or came up with a rationalization as to why that is okay.
This isn't even to say that I disagree that animals have no moral standing, simply that the idea that it somehow arises logically is unsound. It is a rationalization to claim that they have zero or low utility and therefore can be disregarded, when in actuality what is really happening is you want to disregard them, so you assign them low or no utility.
Indeed it is this fundamental lack of honesty that makes utilitarians so annoying to deal with when you're talking about morality - they don't actually have any sort of logical system, but they BELIEVE that they do because they've convinced themselves of it. They're engaging in hardcore rationalization and believe they have subscribed to some sort of internally consistent moral philosophy when in actuality it is just as arbitrary as any other system.
Now, you could say that all utility functions are utilitarian in nature, but this is just wrong. Utilitarianism is ultiamtely a system which is about maximizing utility; in a utilitarian system, that is the greatest good. If you disagree with that premise, then you aren't a utilitarian, even if you DO use utility functions in order to facilitate decision-making.
Consider, for an insant, the following utility function. Say we could device a virus which killed all unintelligent people on the planet. It is half past the future, and we have robots capable of doing most simple repetitive tasks, like farming, and our assembly lines have been largely mechanized. A utilitarian might say that releasing this virus is clearly the moral thing to do - sure, you kill all those people right now, but in the future, because you have eliminated all those pesky low-IQ sorts, the people in the future will be better. Is this a moral decision? It certainly maximizes utility.
And yet I would argue that in so doing you've fundamentally betrayed moral principles which are more important than the maximization of utility, and that your naive calculation fails to recognize the fundamental lack of humanity in your decision. There's no particular reason not to bash your head in with a rock, after all - we don't do that not because of any utility function, but because it is instilled in us that killing people is wrong. And it even benefits ourselves because if it is generally agreed that killing people is wrong, then it means that other people are less likely to kill us out of the blue for arbitrary reasons as well.
While I consider maximization of utility to be A good, it is not THE ONLY good (and indeed, I actually separate utility out into a number of things). I balance between happiness, progress, intellect, justice, altruism, and a few other things because those are all things which tend to lead to better tommorrows. Indeed, I will always choose to know the truth over a lie, even if the lie would make me happier, and I think that should be true of all people. A utilitarian would disagree.
1289220
I have done this before. The results vary based on how good of a scientist they are.
Good scientists will actually be able to talk about their views on the subject matter in a cogent and reasonable way and will reach some sort of accord, even if it is the recognition that their views on what is best are fundamentally incompatible. If they are good scientists, they will understand where the other person is coming from, even if they disagree with them.
I've known a number of scientists who were exactly this way. It doesn't actually bother them if someone disagrees with them as much if they actually understand why and find it to be at least interally logical. For instance, I have friends who are conservative because they believe that I am overly obsessed with the neck tax and the idea that society will be better off if we improve social welfare, because they don't think it will actually end up benefitting them more than decreasing those things so that they have more resources to use. There is nothing wrong with their point of view, we just disagree on our projections - I think that a rising tide raises all ships, including the higher ones, and that in the end the people who are well-off who deserve to be well-off will be even better off under the new system, while they disagree and think that people need to fend more for themselves and that it will still make everyone better off that way (also some of them believe that some people deserve to suffer more for their foolishness than I believe is wise).
You can agree to disagree so long as the reasons for it make sense. If someone has a well thought-out moral philosophy, then obviously if you value different things you'll come to different conclusions. If they accept the same facts that you do, but come to different conclusions, that's fair enough. It is rejection of reality which is ultimately bad.
I disagree that it is actually a function of compartmentalization, though many people DO compartmentalize their beliefs. I try to avoid it, as do all true scientists; if something from your data points towards something in some other portion of your life being silly, you should reevaluate it.
Heck, I've changed my views on gun control as a result of a discussion with people who were not advocates of it and then ran statistical analysis myself (on numbers from the FBI, no less), revealing that guns neither help keep people safe nor put them in any more danger. The whole "guns don't kill people, people kill people" maxim is actually true, even if many pro-gun advocates instead believe that guns keep them safe (foolishly, I might add, as the numbers show that you are more likely to accidentally injure or kill someone with your gun than you are to prevent a crime with one, at least as a civilian - you're actually 50% more likely to accidentally kill someone than to purposefully kill someone who is in the process of committing a crime).
Indeed one of the great frustrations of politics as far as many top-tier intellectuals I know see it is that most people don't actually have any sort of rational basis for their beliefs at all, so even if they are factually correct, they don't believe in it because they are factually correct but because they -want- to believe in it. And trust me, my view on gun control (registering firearms is a good thing because it makes tracking down criminal suppliers much easier, but trying to prevent people from owning guns won't actually prevent crimes, but neither is owning a gun going to make you any safer as an ordinary civilian) doesn't exactly earn me many friends on that. Even though the stats show that all of these things are true: gun ownership and violent crime (and homicide) are not correlated, your odds of accidentally injuring or killing someone else with your gun are roughly equivalent to your odds of ever preventing a crime with one (it is difficult to pin down the prevention numbers exactly, but they appear to be lower; the defensive homicide rate is certainly lower than the accidental homicide rate though, even though both are very low - 400 (for civilians) vs 600 per year in the US, roughly). No one likes this and the various forces involved won't accept it, even if the numbers are presented plainly - indeed, the pro-gun side gets angry when it is pointed out that gun ownership isn't related to crime rate, because they believe that lots of guns should PREVENT crime (which isn't the case), EVEN THOUGH IT SUPPORTS THE IDEA THAT GUN CONTROL ISN'T USEFUL.
But I digress. Point is, I think it depends on the scientists involved. Not all scientists and engineers are actually THAT detached from their work, or even capable of such detachment. This is why it is so important to follow proper protocols when doing such things as it helps fight against your internal bias.
1289597
1. I'm of the opinion you are characterizing utilitarianism poorly. Or rather, you are railing against a version which is different that the one Bad Horse appears to be talking about. Now I'm no mind-reader, but it seems to me the root cause of your misunderstanding is you thinking of different things when it comes to 'utility.' What Bad Horse appears[1] to espouse is consequentialism with the notion that the desirability of a course of action can be determined and expressed in some tractable way. Please note, that all this says is that the morality of actions depends on their consequences alone and that we can judge consequences based on some metric. What this metric is or can be is not something BH appears to comment on, and neither he speaks of the decomposition of this metric (to say the utility function of individuals, groups, &c) nor of the methodology of its calculation. So you could, in your IQ plague example, make it a part of the utility calculation that certain courses of actions are a priori forbidden or, indeed, adjust your ethical calculus however you saw fit. This is not utilitarianism as orthodoxly defined, but it is what BH appears to be talking about.
You mentioned moral rules in your reply. The question[1] is, are acts moral because they follow a set of rules, or is a set of rules a heuristic that produces moral acts which are adjudged moral based on some other consideration, such as what happens when you do these acts?
2. Regarding your reply re: scientists. Firstly, there is something of the No True Scotsman fallacy in what you wrote -- we can tell a scientist is good/true iff they do exactly as you propose scientists act. If they don't, they can be disregarded.
That said, there is some point to it. I admit that the scientific outlook demands that beliefs be changed to fit available evidence, no problem with that. And I certainly aspire to that happy state. But, I think you underestimate how tightly people can cling to their beliefs for all sorts of not-rational-at-all reasons. Obviously, we can play dueling anecdotes for as long as we wish, but we both know perfectly well that won't settle anything.
I will point out that, in your story of conservative-vs-liberal (in the American sense) there is civility, certainly, but people aren't changing minds. If both sides are rational and clever, that means there is a disconnect, or both would come to the same conclusion, surely? Why don't they? Because they start from different axioms[3], it would seem. Your friends think it fitting to punish[4] people with poverty, you do not. Either they are irrational, you are, or you both hold these beliefs for reasons which are emotional[5] or tribal.
But I'm picking nits in your example and growling at you. Very emotional. Very tribal. No good will come of that. Sorry.
My point is: it is a human thing to cling to beliefs for reasons other than reasonable ones, and it behooves, pardon the pun, us to be weary of this imperfection in us, and to seek to overcome it, in ourselves and others. Sometimes it's discipline, sometimes it's trojan-horsing ideas in stories so they get past the tribal/emotional gatekeepers our minds are saddled with. Would you not agree that this is a reasonable thing to say?
[1] I don't want to put words in his mouth.
[2] Well, one of many.
[3] You may disagree on the effect of welfare, but that only means you are operating under considerable uncertainty, yes? Wouldn't you then hold opinions based on such uncertainty very lightly?
[4] For what, is a bit of a mystery, but let it pass.
[5] I agree with you, incidentally, on welfare (and guns[6]) but my stance of welfare is rooted as much in my estimation of what happens to society when you let people suffer in poverty as it is on compassion. And while I like compassion, it isn't exactly rational.
[6] I'm a proponent of light gun control, let's say. I was a proponent of no gun control, then a proponent of strict gun control, then this.
1289597 See this is the flaw of utilitarianism. You claimed it wasn't logically flawed and here you are talking about how it isn't even logical.
I didn't say anything like that.
You're going to claim otherwise, but why did you disregard the utility of non-sapient animals?
I don't. I said, "This is how humans operate. We say that humans have a greater capacity for happiness than all other beings, and therefore we can ignore the well-being of all non-humans in our ethics." "We" in that sentence means humans, not me. My point was that you raise the utility monster scenario as if it were a fatal flaw, but almost all people throughout history have acted as if humans were utility monsters. Therefore, any ethical system that doesn't allow for utility monsters can't model how humans act.
1289417
Well, I think Jane Austen's characters are a lot more interesting and realistic than any of the characters I've met in modern romance shorts & the one novel I read. I also think the absence of explicit sex counts for a lot in some peoples' estimate. It is telly, but you know I love me a good tell.
If you're looking for something "substantive," you can't rule out love. I've said that the most-important jobs in the world are driver's ed instructors and romance novel authors, because they can have the biggest impact on our quality of life.
Here's a secret the academy doesn't talk about much: If you read interviews with famous writers, you'll find they often can't stand the works of other famous writers. The idea that there's a set of great writers that everybody with taste admires is false.
I'm not a firm believer that entertainment is the be-all & end-all of fiction. War and Peace just isn't entertaining. Borges short stories are interesting, but also not entertaining.