[Barraketh]

Interesting post. A possible more general restatement would be "under consequentialism (or utilitarianism) everyone's happiness (including the crime perpetrators') is weighted equally. Should that be the case?"

I suspect that specifically "family punishment" fails the cost-benefit analysis due to practical reasons, but the question of "should we weigh the suffering of good people equally to the suffering of terrible people in our ethics system" is interesting to me, and I don't currently have answer.

[CMCDragonkai]

Because suffering is suffering. If we distinguish suffering of good people from bad people then we have to expand this to a spectrum, the best people suffering is the worse, and worse people suffering is the best. But then it's all just relative, who is good, who is bad is your opinion. Most rational people would consider their own suffering to be the worse.

[dr_dshiv]

People who want to suffer (it’s a common enough feeling) often do so because they feel they aren’t good enough.

And when a really horrible person gets comeuppance we rejoice and when a great person suffers, we do too. Well, except for Will Smith.

[ajuc]

It shouldn't because of utility monsters. If you weight everybody's happiness equally - the greedier you are the more resources should be assigned to you. That's obviously wrong.

[orwin]

Modern utilitarism is more about minimizing suffering rather than maximizing happiness.

[ajuc]

Isn't that just minimizing -f(x) instead of maximalizing f(x)? So - the same thing?

[orwin]

It doesn't have the same effect. If torturing someone made 3 billion people sightly happy, and 3 miserable (the tortured, his wife and his child), but still the total happiness supercede the total suffering. Positive utilitarism says 'do it'. Negative utilitarism says 'do not'.

I'm not a full utilitarist anymore as I don't think a good utility function exist, but it is a good way to evaluate quickly if an action I do is more likely to do good than bad: 'do I risk hurting someone?'.

[_0ffh]

Interesting, I didn't know that utilitarians had figured out a way to oppose Omelas. (Doesn't make me change my mind about not being one, though.)

[orwin]

I'm pretty sure this predate Omelas, it's an idea from Popper (that he didn't carry very far tbh).

I think almost everyone is utilitarist, you probably are too. If one time you spent money to buy flowers or a gift for no reason but make someone happy, or you told a white lie/didn't tell the truth to avoid hurting someone, you're one too.

But like I said, it's not a good moral philosophy. It's useful in short burst, to take quick judgment on concrete, temporary actions, but it fails on larger ideas.

Which is fine tbh. I need philosophy to carry me through concrete decisions too, not just through political choices. Utilitarism is useful for the former, less for the later (in the best case you end up believing Pinker's statistics).

[austinjp]

Possibly a tangent, but I'd suggest that happiness and suffering are not opposites, so aren't both "x" in your function.

Someone might choose to maximise their personal happiness even knowing that their personal suffering would also increase (or even be maximised). Trite example: prisoner released from jail who sets out to kill the person who double-crossed him, knowing that he'll be re-incarcerated or even executed.

Happiness and suffering might be related but they're (somewhat) independent.

[Attrecomet]

The correct function to minimize would be θ(-f(x))*(-f(x)), using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_step_function

[ajuc]

Offtopic but I could never understand why math people prefer θ to pointwise conditionals or min/max.

θ(-f(x))*(-f(x)) vs max(0, -f(x))

[Attrecomet]

The heavyside-function is integrable and differentiable?