[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).

[_0ffh]

Ah, I think we're at least partially on the same page. To me, considering the consequences of my actions is just good sense, that doesn't make me an utilitarian. Utility is subjective and ordinal, not cardinal. That means you can't do math with utility, and you can't even meaningfully compare it between individuals. That's more than enough for me to disqualify Utilitarianism from being taken seriously.

[ajuc]

Would you agree there's a way to quantify preferences for people so you have:

Preference(person, one_thing, other_thing) and it returns -1, 0 or 1 depending on what that person prefers?

You can do math on this and try to optimize it, it's just more complicated than if utility was cardinal and objective.