I think your article is spot on. Given that your son is not objectively more important in virtue of being your son, relative to someone else's son, valuing your son more, independently of instrumental considerations, involves not caring about what is fundamentally important. Utilitarians can still give a perfectly adequate account of why you should practically value your son more, given that caring deeply for ones offspring makes things go best. However, baking personal relationships and partiality into our fundamental account of morality seems to clearly misidentify what ultimately matters.
Great article. I think that one of the greatest advantages of utilitarianism (or maybe generally beneficience) is the sheer grandness of its ambitions, and giving people acutally-achievable utopian visions can be a great pull toward the philosophy. Showing people the great advances in recent decades in the reduction of extreme poverty, and putting faces to those people whose lives have improved, is a great step. Show people the drastic difference between $2 and $5 a day, or the lives saved by good pandemic response. It's harder to dismiss mere pleasure and pain calculations when you understand what it means to no longer live with the anxiety of getting kidnapped or not finding food to eat.
My grandmother, who lived through World War II and was born in a Greek village where she was one of few girls to attend high school, today lives with a high standard of living without needing to work, and is likely to live to 100 with sound mind. I very much want a society where as many people as possible can expect this sort of life. Utilitarianism takes the radically optimistic step of saying, "Yes, we will achieve that ideal future by any means necessary."
(Arguably this utopian perspective can itself get dangerous if its ambitions run ahead of its science; which is why it is important to qualify its ambitions with humility and frequent sanity checks.)
To add, in the improving-global-wellbeing context utilitarianism's flexibility is quite important. "It is acceptable for some people to selfishly seek profits if this is a net benefit" is probably true *to a certain extent* when it comes to the track record of global capitalism in improving wellbeing. "By any means necessary" means ignoring the intuitions saying that people should always have pure motivations in the process of improving the world.
An evil genie offers you a choice. Either he kills your son, or he kills five random people in Madagascar. If you refuse to choose, he kills them all. According to your personal, internal, and coherently extrapolated value system, which do you pick?
I'm sure I would sooner save my son -- I'm not purely impartial by any means. But I'm also sure that I don't care about random strangers nearly as much as would be objectively warranted. So the answer might depend upon whether the "value system" you're asking about is one that's extrapolated from my actual desires or my normative beliefs.
There are no such things as "objective values". Your utility function is nothing but your utility function. If you pick option A over option B, you assign higher utility to option A than you do to option B, full stop.
With that in mind, what if it were instead 50 people in Madagascar? 500? 50k? 5 million? The whole island? The entire southern hemisphere? Either there are some number of lives you're willing to sacrifice your son for, or you would preserve your son at all costs.
If you would preserve your son at all costs, how many Madagascans would you kill to give your son an extra QALY? What about a decade? What about a week? What about an hour? Answer those questions, and then call yourself a utilitarian.
I think your article is spot on. Given that your son is not objectively more important in virtue of being your son, relative to someone else's son, valuing your son more, independently of instrumental considerations, involves not caring about what is fundamentally important. Utilitarians can still give a perfectly adequate account of why you should practically value your son more, given that caring deeply for ones offspring makes things go best. However, baking personal relationships and partiality into our fundamental account of morality seems to clearly misidentify what ultimately matters.
Great article. I think that one of the greatest advantages of utilitarianism (or maybe generally beneficience) is the sheer grandness of its ambitions, and giving people acutally-achievable utopian visions can be a great pull toward the philosophy. Showing people the great advances in recent decades in the reduction of extreme poverty, and putting faces to those people whose lives have improved, is a great step. Show people the drastic difference between $2 and $5 a day, or the lives saved by good pandemic response. It's harder to dismiss mere pleasure and pain calculations when you understand what it means to no longer live with the anxiety of getting kidnapped or not finding food to eat.
My grandmother, who lived through World War II and was born in a Greek village where she was one of few girls to attend high school, today lives with a high standard of living without needing to work, and is likely to live to 100 with sound mind. I very much want a society where as many people as possible can expect this sort of life. Utilitarianism takes the radically optimistic step of saying, "Yes, we will achieve that ideal future by any means necessary."
(Arguably this utopian perspective can itself get dangerous if its ambitions run ahead of its science; which is why it is important to qualify its ambitions with humility and frequent sanity checks.)
To add, in the improving-global-wellbeing context utilitarianism's flexibility is quite important. "It is acceptable for some people to selfishly seek profits if this is a net benefit" is probably true *to a certain extent* when it comes to the track record of global capitalism in improving wellbeing. "By any means necessary" means ignoring the intuitions saying that people should always have pure motivations in the process of improving the world.
An evil genie offers you a choice. Either he kills your son, or he kills five random people in Madagascar. If you refuse to choose, he kills them all. According to your personal, internal, and coherently extrapolated value system, which do you pick?
I'm sure I would sooner save my son -- I'm not purely impartial by any means. But I'm also sure that I don't care about random strangers nearly as much as would be objectively warranted. So the answer might depend upon whether the "value system" you're asking about is one that's extrapolated from my actual desires or my normative beliefs.
There are no such things as "objective values". Your utility function is nothing but your utility function. If you pick option A over option B, you assign higher utility to option A than you do to option B, full stop.
With that in mind, what if it were instead 50 people in Madagascar? 500? 50k? 5 million? The whole island? The entire southern hemisphere? Either there are some number of lives you're willing to sacrifice your son for, or you would preserve your son at all costs.
If you would preserve your son at all costs, how many Madagascans would you kill to give your son an extra QALY? What about a decade? What about a week? What about an hour? Answer those questions, and then call yourself a utilitarian.