[hilbert42]

"Look at it this way: should the rest of us with smartphones pay for that bank office?"

To answer that question with any degree of rigor one has to go back to the beginning and study the works of Bentham, Mill and others—and the many issues that surround utility and utilitarian principles. This involves such issues as the greatest good for the greatest number, greed overpowering well established moral norms and the fact that the majority of modern states and cities were founded on utilitarian models where a lot of give-and-take was involved before workable consensuses were achieved.

Think twice, the obvious solution doesn't always turn out to be the most optimal one.

[Yeul]

I'm sorry I'm not losing sleep over the life choices of weirdos on HN but I will happily pay taxes for universal healthcare don't you worry!

[ctrlp]

Utilitarian models of ethics are fraught with peril themselves. Not the own you think it is.

[hilbert42]

So are many other political and philosophical ideas—essentially any field involving ethics is fraught with perils and consensus is never fully reached.

Just because unanimity is never achieved in respect of some philosophical idea doesn't mean it's not worthy of consideration and or it's never put into practice. Utilitarianism has been the subject of much study and debate and it's been widely practiced over several hundred years.

I'm well aware of the debates over utilitarianism and its ethics, any why those for and against it take the (usually) entrenched stance that they do. That ought to have been obvious by my use of the word 'consensuses'.

BTW, I could have made the same argument from a different philosophical perspective but the previous commentator specifically invited a utilitarian-type response by the words he used. That said, no matter what philosophical argument I'd have used someone would have found fault with it.

My main point still stands, which is that obvious solutions aren't necessarily the optimal ones. Note, I've deliberately not used the word 'best' for the above reasons.

[ctrlp]

You could just as easily have cited Aristotle or Augustine or Aquinas or any other philosopher who wrote an ethics. The previous commentator didn't invite a utilitarian-type response. He implicitly posed a question about the justification for the ordering of goods in society. Nothing about that statement is definitively answered (or even satisfyingly questioned) by big-U Utilitarianism.

Since you appear to enjoy a little bit of philosophical discussion, let's break down what you ackshually said:

> To answer that question with any degree of rigor one has to go back to the beginning and study the works of Bentham, Mill and others—and the many issues that surround utility and utilitarian principles.

The "beginning" of ethics hardly begins with Bentham or Mill or even the Enlightenment. Utility is quite a modern concept in ethics. The question of what is "the good" is presupposed in any system of value. "The greatest good for the greatest number" is perhaps one of the more perverse interpretations of human good on record.

> This involves such issues as the greatest good for the greatest number, greed overpowering well established moral norms and the fact that the majority of modern states and cities were founded on utilitarian models where a lot of give-and-take was involved before workable consensuses were achieved.

The majority of modern states and cities were most emphatically NOT "founded" on utilitarian models. Most states predate any notion of such post-hoc rationalizations. Cities were largely founded as commercial centers along trade routes or ports, or sometimes intentionally as colonies. States were largely the results of conquest by militarized groups that were certainly NOT utilitarian. Quite the contrary. In the bronze age, they would have simply been warrior bands centered around family/tribal bonds and vassal/suzerainty relationships founded on violence. By the time of the great early empires around the Mediterranean, formal structures of militarism and class privileges won through violence were the organizing forms of society, not "give-and-take" consensus gathering (unless you mean one group giving up the fight and the other either enslaving them or killing them outright).

Maybe you could have argued they are founded on something like Hobbesian social contract theory (certainly not Rousseau's version) but that, too, would suffer from being simply "not true in fact."

The main point that "obvious solutions aren't necessarily the optimal ones" suffers from being trivial, condescending, and a non sequitur. The commenter didn't offer a solution as such, but raised the obvious question of why they should have to pay for someone else's choices. Utilitarianism is the worst of all philosophical answers because it entails the most absurdities.

[hilbert42]

Point proven, your comment just confirms what I said earlier:

…an(d) why those for and against it take the (usually) entrenched stance that they do.

I'm aware of those issues and omissions for brevity's sake. Also, I would point out that what I said was a passing comment on HN and not meant for a paper in a learned philosophical journal.

BTW, in case you didn't notice, I never mentioned whether I was for or against utilitarianism specifically because discussion about it inevitability ends in arguments that usually remain unresolved. That it was just an example ought to have been obvious.

It would be informative to compare the syllabus content at your philosophy school versus that of mine.

[ctrlp]

My philosophy school was a library card. Am I presuming too much by your handle that you are a lover of the higher mathematics? Although I think it would be hard to derive a workable ethics from number theory, I believe it has been tried. Descartes and Spinoza metaphysics come to mind, but Plato's number magic is probably a more entertaining place to start.

As you say, not relevant to you, but do you think mathematicians generally have some kind of affinity for Utilitarian ethics?

[hilbert42]

"My philosophy school was a library card."

There's nothing wrong with that, sometimes it's one's best tutor.

I'm not a mathematician but I've studied mathematics in conjunction with my bread-and-butter subjects science and engineering. It's thus fair to say the analytical philosophers and their ilk have had a strong influence on my thinking—Frege, Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, and G.E. Moore—I can even see my copy of Principia Ethica on the bookshelf on the other side of the room from where I'm sitting.

(BTW, In my world I cannot see any relevant connection between number theory (as mathematicians understand it) and ethics.)

The analytical strand of philosophy is particularly significant for me as formal logic has a direct bearing on some of my technical work (they're closely related). It also led to me electing to take HPS.

Philosophy is a remarkably broad church and its analytical strand is only one section, and in no way do I consider myself pigeonholed to just one or two of its strands; Being and Nothingness, The Social Contract, Leviathan, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (the) Republic are just a few titles from the large compulsory corpus from which I was trained.

I will not delve further into utilitarianism given what I've already said except to say I have neither the talent of Shakespeare nor am I an APL programmer, so it would be impossible for me to present my rather convoluted views on the matter in a short HN post without some part being misinterpreted. To do it linguistic justice and present a watertight case that precisely and accurately explains my view I'd likely require a dozen pages of typed text, and clearly that's not possible on HN.

That's not a copout, it's just fact. Moreover, philosophy taught me long ago that précising and brevity can easily lead to misunderstandings unless one's words are very carefully chosen. I was reminded of that again earlier today when you came on the attack.

[defrost]

In general (there are exceptions) most adhere to the broader set of consequentialism of which utilitarianism is one form of.

A number would say that ethics and morality are subjective and not objective and thus an attempt to apply a utilitarian metric or measure of "good" along with a (partial?) ordering such as "greatest good" is a doomed endeavour.

Few would deny that from this, that would follow (for some specific values of this 'n that).

[atlintots]

Go on, then. Elaborate.