The Dreams Of Josephius

Many years ago, I subscribed to my own pet version of Utilitarianism that I called Eudaimonic Utilitarianism. In practice, it ended up functioning as the Classical Utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, but with higher aspirations. Over time, I added some additional ideas, like Kantian Priors, but the basic idea was roughly the same.

Recently, I’ve thought a lot about ethics and questions of what I actually believe now. I think, over time, I’ve drifted away from a practically hedonistic view, towards something that more closely resembles the Preference Utilitarianism of Harsanyi and Tomasik.

The way I see it, morality is about values. It is about valuing equally what everyone values. What we value is not set in stone. It is dependent only on what the subject, the sentient being, cares about.

Generally, sentient beings care about their happiness. They desire happiness and avoid suffering intrinsically, which is the insight of hedonism. But they generally care about other things too. They care about whether they live meaningful lives, whether there is beauty in the world, whether truth is upheld, whether their children go on to live good lives too. These things, it can be argued to be instrumental goals rather than intrinsic, but I wonder, how are we to judge this? Who are we to decide that some values are more important than others?

Happiness is still important, but it becomes one consideration among many. This form of Preference Utilitarianism is inclusive like that. This differs from the Objective List form of Utilitarianism, in the sense that we the outsider do not arbitarily choose some set of things to be important for someone else. The moral patients themselves, decide what matters.

In many ways, this idea is encapsulated well by the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” It’s a rule that exists not only in Christianity, but a myriad of religions and philosophies. It’s something that many wise people have converged on. It’s self-justifying, in the sense that, the world would be better for everyone if everyone followed it.

So, in some sense I’ve come full circle back to my upbringing, albeit with a tad more sophistication. If I look closely, Eudaimonic Utilitarianism as I originally proposed, is actually closer to Preference Utilitarianism than Hedonistic Utilitarianism. What matters to me is hopes and dreams being fulfilled, more than mere pleasures and pains experienced, though those still matter too.

This helps to counter the thought experiments like Nozick’s Experience Machine, or the Utilitronium Shockwave. Giving the perfect drug Soma to people against their will is wrong, even if they might be blissful. Tiling the universe with happybots, ignoring the wishes of everyone else, is also not right.

There’s the thought experiment of the mathematician who either dies believing they have achieved their life’s work in some grand theorem, but not actually, or dies believing they have failed, but actually succeeded. It seems to me, even disregarding the value of the theorem to society, that it is better that it is truly found, even if the discoverer never knows.

In my earlier writing on Eudaimonic Utilitarianism, I used the surprise birthday party example to argue it was different from Preference Utilitarianism, but in truth, it wasn’t a good example. While they may have a preference not to be lied to, they also have a preference to not have such surprises ruined, to learn that they have wonderful friends in a moment of joy and celebration. It is what they would want if they truly knew all the relevant details of the situation.

I might still use the formulation of “to maximize the happiness of everyone”, but with the understanding that happiness is partially a proxy. It is the emotional goal state we experience when the state of the universe matches our wants and desires.

Morality then, is a matter of finding the compromise where everyone’s hopes and dreams are reached as much as reasonably possible, a fair distribution of happiness and joy, of projects achieved, of wondrous worlds attained. From the perspective of an impartial observer of the universe, everyone’s hopes and dreams count the same.

This is my current theory of ethics. It is, perhaps, still not complete. I don’t pretend to know that it is The One True Morality(TM). It’s just a working theory I have about it. Perhaps things will evolve again in the future. But this is where I am now.

I have a confession to make. I own a grand piano that originally cost enough to, according to GiveWell, save three lives by instead donating that money to the Against Malaria Foundation. In a sense, I was responsible for the deaths of three people in that way.

It wasn’t even something that I could argue was necessary, like a car to drive to work with. A grand piano is pure unnecessary luxury. And one that depreciates in value, so selling it and donating now wouldn’t save all those lives.

It’s kinda like a Trolley Problem, except on one track it’s three human beings I’ll never meet, and on the other side it’s an old out of tune grand piano that I rarely even play and that mostly gets played by my wife.

Anyways, from the perspective of the saints and angels and probably Peter Singer, I’m actually pretty evil. But then, by that judgment, the overwhelming, vast majority of human beings are no better.

And who am I to judge? Utilitarianism is super demanding like this. It also leads to bizarre conclusions like the Hedonium Shockwave where the greatest good thing to do is to convert all matter in the universe into happybots or pulsating pleasure blobs as quickly as possible, tiling the universe with them, ignoring the concerns of everyone else.

Taking things to their logical conclusion can, intuitively, feel wrong. It’s very easy to focus on particular axioms and prove from first principles that something absolute is true. But… reality is more complicated than that?

From a certain perspective, I am well and truly evil. I am a murderer of innocent lives by virtue of not saving them when I very easily could. But that logic condemns nearly everyone. What use is there in that? Do people stop deserving happiness because they are so far from perfection?

Judgments like this are, in a way, cruel and cold moral calculus, lacking in compassion towards those who, like us, are inherently flawed creatures.

So, what do I do about the piano? I could still sell it and maybe save a life. I could try to play it more, make the most of it. Does it even matter that much? Powerful people toy with the lives of others quite casually these days. My sin seems orders of magnitude less evil. But, in a way, it is still an evil, and I am definitely no saint.