I know it sounds unlikely that I'm a god, but you have to admit nothing is impossible. There is a non-zero chance that I'm telling the truth and I will actually follow through with everything. Since I am offering unlimited utility, the small probability is out-weighed by the potential outcome, and the expected utility of giving me 5 dollars is infinite.

Since you are all utilitarians, I trust you will give me the 5 dollars

I frequently listen to people at dinner discussing amongst one another what was right or wrong in a huge variety of situations. It’s almost entertaining watching them work through their mess of contradicting beliefs and values they’ve learned from others to try and form some arbitrary opinion that makes them feel the least uncomfortable.

In many of these situations I can work out almost instantly what the best outcome or right action would be. It’s very satisfying.

I am, and I think it's a pretty logical conclusion to come from utilitarianism. Most of us are atheists. Because we then do not believe in a soul, it is logical to conclude that consciousness comes from our brain structure. Other mammals (such as cows and pigs) do not have significantly less developed brains compared to us, so it is fairly likely that they have a consciousness as well. Therefore, we should do everything in our power to minimize their suffering, including not eating them and thus not supporting factory farming.

Edit: So far it's interesting. There's a much higher percentage of us that are vegan compared to the general population, which makes sense. An even bigger chunk is vegetarian, although non-vegans still make up the majority (along with people who voted for results). What are your utilitarian arguments for or against veganism?

One of my friends is strongly anti-utilitarian. He recently gave me the following dillemma:

A man working in mall security is monitoring the cameras. He sees a woman who changes her clothes in a changing room.

Whether the act of having cameras in the changing room is moral or not is not important.

What is important is that the man not only watches the survelliance footage with great pleasure, he also records it and shares it with all his friends. His friends also take great pleasure in watching the footage.

The woman has no idea that this has happened, but she would be horrified if she did, since she values privacy. But since she has no idea that it has happened, she doesn't suffer negative utility. The man and his friend, however, enjoys a lot of utility.

I initially argued that it was immoral on the basis that the woman, and society at large, would be horrified if they found out that footage was being shared like that.

My friend argued that in this hypothetical, we are (for whatever reason) 100% sure that this would never happen, and that no one would find out.

Obviously, this assumption isn't realistic, but it raises an important point: can an invasion of privacy really be justified if the person simply doesn't find out, or is there an intrinsic value to privacy that applies even if you are 100% sure the violated person doesn't find out.

This dillemma has more real world examples. Showing a naked picture of a girl to one of your friends, keeping nudes of your ex after a break-up, or checking someones phone without them knowing.

Does privacy have intrinsic value along with utility?

EDIT: I personally agree that it is immoral to breach peoples privacy, the point is to debate how you can argue against it from a utilitarian perspective. Or maybe, as I suggest, that things like "privacy" has intrinsic worth alongside utility.

“The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.”

What do you think of this quote from Brothers Karamazov?

Utility monster - A hypothetical being, which Nozick calls the utility monster, receives much more utility from each unit of a resource they consume than anyone else does. For instance, eating a cookie might bring only one unit of pleasure to an ordinary person but could bring 100 units of pleasure to a utility monster. If the utility monster can get so much pleasure from each unit of resources, it follows from utilitarianism that the distribution of resources should acknowledge this. If the utility monster existed, it would justify the mistreatment and perhaps annihilation of everyone else, according to the mandates of utilitarianism, because, for the utility monster, the pleasure they receive outweighs the suffering they may cause. (From Wikipedia)

Most people think that this is a major problem with utilitarianism. This is, mostly, due to how we feel about giving a person who already has a lot even more. Based on our experiences, it seems akin to a poor person giving up one thousand dollars so that Jeff Bezos can have an extra $10,000 - in other words, completely pointless because he already has a lot of money.

The key difference between these two scenarios is that, with the utility monster, we are assuming that its happiness will go up linearly with each "unit" of happiness that we give it, while, with Jeff Bezos, even an extra 10 billion dollars will not improve his quality of life or happiness in any meaningful way. People know from experience that happiness follows more of a logarithmic than a linear function, so they extrapolate that the utility monster would follow the same pattern, and that eventually, the utility monster would not even notice any extra happiness it was given. Therefore, they think that if everybody acted according to utilitarianism in this scenario, it would be like millions of people living horrible lives while one person was blissed out on an endless drug.

A much better "utility monster" is one that lives longer instead of experiencing extra happiness (assume that they do not get bored of life eventually). This is far more intuitive to the average person because they would realize that the utility monster would experience all of the happiness - basically, it would experience more happiness because of more time to experience happiness, instead of simply more happiness during a certain period of time.

Anyway, that's my two cents on the subject. I'm not sure if I got the point across very well or if my argument is good but there we go.

I've encountered resistance to utilitarianism. Which as I understand it is just saying we should do things that make the most happiness and wellbeing for the most people. Like that seems pretty easy to agree on as an ideal imo. But I have heard a lot of people act like utilitarianism is absurb.

I agree that these things are hard to do and I don't think I'm living my life in a perfectly utilitarian way. I would never claim that. Personally I dont think its useful to shame people for being imperfect because it is demotivating. But I do try to take stock of how potential actions will likely impact people and try to do more things that makes happiness and do less things that makes unhappiness. Like why would someone be against that?

It seems like people will use a lot of energy to believe things that mean they don't have to change, instead of finding the truth and changing behaviors that cause harm. In my case I accept that I'll probably never have my actions perfectly in line with my ideals but become aware of issues and trying to be better.

The consumption of meat and dairy has been demonstrated to be tremendously burdensome for not only the environment but for our own collective health, which consequently affects economical prospects. Not only is it about reducing animal suffering, but also human suffering, which is very much intertwined with that of non-human animals. It is important to note that so much food and land are being wasted on animals - whose eventual deaths have already been guaranteed - instead of going towards people dying in poverty. I think we can therefore agree that as utilitarians, we should all be vegan. I tend to adopt a utilitarian stance on many issues. I'm not so educated on the different types of utilitarianism, so am I right in assuming that veganism is compatible with all variants of utilitarianism?

If you don't know, "average" is known as the arithmetic mean, one of the three Pythagorean means. The geometric mean is the nth root to the product of n numbers. The harmonic mean is the reciprocal of the arithmetic mean of the reciprocals of the numbers. Geometric mean is always less than or equal to the arithmetic mean, and the harmonic mean is always less than or equal to both.

The thing about these two other means is that they weigh smaller numbers a lot more, which makes equality morally superior to making a select few super wealthy.

Lets take this random set of numbers, with some being relatively unhappy:

16, 15, 14, 17, 19, 21, 4, 5, 3, 2, 6

A set of numbers where we make some of them spoiled:

107, 52, 85, 17, 19, 21, 4, 5, 3, 2, 6

A set of numbers where we instead make them all relatively equal:

16, 15, 14, 17, 19, 21, 18, 19, 16, 15, 17

Now let's compare the totals and the means of the three sets:

Now obviously the exact numbers in this small dataset isn't fully representative of real life situations, but they will be sufficient to compare the three means.

Here are how the means compare:

• The arithmetic mean and total absolutely support a spoiled minority (163%) over equality (53%).

• This is obviously not what we want, and is a common criticism towards utilitarianism.

• The geometric mean gives significant gains for a spoiled minority (57%), but far more gains for equality (99%).

• I personally feel this is the most balanced choice.

• The harmonic mean gives essentially no gains for a spoiled minority (10%), but a ridiculous amount of gains for equality (176%).

• I personally feel that this gives no room for personal comfort.

Of course, the calculation could be made even more complicated by combining different means, bringing the median or trimean into the mix, etc. But this is good enough.