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by lrobinovitch
1387 days ago
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> converting to veganism would greatly outweigh 10% of a median salary to the most effective climate charity This claim itself is based on probabilities assigned to the potential impacts of veganism and donations. I would argue that this is a form of practical utilitarianism - assigning probabilities of event occurrence, weighted by their negative impacts, and attempting to do the most good despite the uncertainties and evolving information landscapes. |
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For some people, utilitarianism is a maximally permissive framework that allows you to discuss any set of preferences following the VNM axioms (I won't get into technicalities, but these axioms basically just say that your preferences are minimally coherent. This is not a real restriction on your ethics) by couching it in the language of a "utility function". This does not say anything about your ethics!. In this point of view, practically everyone who has ever lived can be cast as a utilitarian with some appropriate utility function!
For some people, "utilitarianism" implies much more stringent constraints on your utility function and also come with moral imperatives about how to act (notice the previous interpretation tells you what is good with respect to some utility function, but doesn't tell you that you should do anything). For instance, it might imply that you view utilities as additive, so two happy people are twice as valuable as one. And it might also command you to maximize expected utility, or worst-case utility, or it might be a straw-man of sane utilitarianism and command you to complete the impossible task of precisely computing the utility of every possible world-state before being able to ethically take any action.
And of course, there are people who think utilitarianism is anything between these two examples. For example, most flavours of consequentialism can be sensibly described as a form of utilitarianism and some people say utilitarianism when they mean consequentialism. Anyway, the word "utilitarianism" encompasses a ridiculously wide range of views, and when two people with wildly differing interpretations of the word talk to each other, they do not get a productive discussion.