I meant to say “the immediate short-term consequence of (x) is”, but my x got swallowed up as an HTML tag. :)

- Chris.

I don’t know anyone who subscribes to the version of utilitarianism you present. In particular:

> The utilitarianist would claim that by torturing one individual, you can save many from death.

No, the utilitarian would see that we’re comparing a society that has many dead people with a society with fewer dead people (assuming the torture works) but where people fear torture happening to them, and know that they are a society that is willing to torture people, and many societies would make the utilitarian decision that engaging in torture here increases net suffering more than it decreases it. Fear and guilt are types of suffering.

Utilitarianism isn’t an excuse for sloppy thinking. Yes, it says that we should seek to minimize suffering in our decisions, but it doesn’t let us get away with saying “the immediate short-term consequence of is to reduce suffering for some people, therefore it must be the right thing to do” without analyzing the situation further.

- Chris.

How will you proof that healthy competition *will* cause maximum happiness? Hey, I agree. Don’t get me wrong. But me agreeing with you *is not* proof. Everybody on this world agreeing with you might not even be proof. Who says God exists if only one human survived a comet impact on our planet? In that case “everybody” believes something. But why would it necessarily be truth? And before not everybody agreed, so it wasn’t necessarily true. What if it wasn’t true and now everybody does. So suddenly it must become reality. Suddenly God must pop into existence now?

Surely you can think that it does because without healthy competition *you* would *feel* unhappy. But collateral damage like your non-standard feelings being hurt don’t necessarily mean that there aren’t three other persons who aren’t unhappy about it and who are, in fact, happy about the non-competition.

You could go count them. Problem is that the total amount of humans on this earth constantly changes and that by the time you counted all opinions I will ask you the question: but how are you sure that you asked the right questions? That you counted it right? etc. So just counting it is, which is what ‘democracy’ does, although definitely worth doing, not always going to yield a perfect answer. Also, who must be counted? Grown up man and woman? Children too? What about animals? They don’t have feelings and they can’t think? You’d be surprised about recent sciences on that subject.

If I for example throw a little bit of media attention to the subject and if I indoctrinate people about how great it would be if Microsoft could create more jobs if we’d make it impossible to compete with Microsoft (but put in a different wording, so that it still sounds as if Microsoft is a nice and cute company that does all these great things for humanity), are you then still sure that your feeling will be shared by the majority? Your own feeling might even be quite heavily influenced! I know mine would probably, because I refuse to be naive about myself: I introspect myself frequently.

Looking at the reality of media-influence in both Europe and the U.S., and actually in all parts of the world, I’m pretty sure that the feeling of the majority can very easily be skewed up to the point that it becomes the exact opposite of your feeling about the subject. Even if the current feeling of the majority is at this moment exactly the same as yours.

So how did that prove anything philosophically? It didn’t, regretfully.

As a person with background in economics, I think utilitarianism does NOT conclude that working at Microsoft produces greater quantity of happiness compared to developing for GNOME.

In general lack of competition (i.e. monopoly) in a market causes big inefficiencies. Healthy competition is critical for maximizing happiness, thus end of GNOME/KDE would result in increased inefficiencies and less happiness.

Secondly, working on open source software could lead into new ways of collaboration, development and innovation, not available in closed source development models. Thus, a utilitarian would recommend working on GNOME to see whether a more efficient collaboration model could emerge, eventually resulting in increased happiness.

Anyway, interesting points, interesting discussion.

The idea is basically that we have five different kinds of morality which are defined biologically (in our brain, by our genes) and culturally exposed (all cultures share the same moralities, but they all execute them differently). You also have ethics, which Jan Verplaetse also explains in the last chapter of his book (ISBN 9789057122811 for the Dutch version, It’s a quite recent work so you’ll have to wait for the English translation I’m afraid).

You can find the papers that his research-group published (in English) at themoralbrain.be though. The book is IMO a more ‘public-friendly’ story for the material in the research-papers with a chapter about ethics added (which I haven’t found a lot of on that website tbf).

About software: I don’t think it’s either proved nor provable that software that is freely shared is better in either long or short term than software that isn’t freely shared. I also don’t think that for the consumers it matters really a lot. For consumers open (patent free) standards like the ones IETF makes are much more important (at least in my opinion).

My reason for free software and open source is and has always been a selfish one: it’s the best way to interactively work together with people who are smarter than me. Enabling me to learn new things, to become a better software developer. I have a few other reasons, of course, but that one is my most important one. The licenses are in other words useful tools to achieve for example technical goals. But nothing more than that. I don’t feel like a ethical better person because I’m into free -and opensource software, not at all. In fact, I think the people who do are disturbing the scene more than anything else. Especially the ones who don’t really write software, but just act as free-software fanboys or religious freedom fighters. I indeed disagree philosophically with Richard Stallman on many things. That doesn’t mean his licenses aren’t useful.

Coming back to software, looking only at the short term coding for the Windows platform might look like it has the best payoff. But for the long term, the world benefits more by code that can be built on by others and freely shared.

My point is that if we are going to valuate X and Y in terms of ‘more tied to GNOME’ vs. ‘less tied to GNOME’, because [whatever the reason], then I think we are doing it wrong (that is, we’d be picking for example a utilitarianist ethic as compass for our moral judgment).

Which is wrong, and we seem to be in agreement about that?

> Usable, stable, awesome, Free software.

Usable, stable, awesome software is not necessarily Free Software
Free software is not necessarily usable, stable, awesome software.

> If you have to piss everybody off to get it,
> well, that sucks, do it anyways.

This is not utilitarianism. Using Jeremy Bentham’s definition is utilitarianism the art of directing men’s actions to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness. Pissing off everybody sound counterproductive if production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness is your moral compass.

To be honest I don’t have a clue why you’re trying to tie normative ethics into GNOME. Let’s try to keep our ethics platform neutral, eh?

*sigh*, life is full of surprises.. .

Doesn’t really matter.

The utilitarianist would claim that by torturing one individual, you can save many from death. Therefore it’s a similar scenario as the one where you physically need to touch a person to throw him on the rails in order to stop the train from killing five other people.

So the true utilitarianist would not only approve the torture, he would also claim it to be unethical if you don’t torture the terrorist to get access to this information.

The smart psychologist, however, would explain you that torture might not be the best method to get access to the truth. Fear is never a good driver to get the truth out of a person. Instead, if you make promises (about stopping the torture) if he says something, the tortured individual will almost certainly start saying whatever is needed to make you stop torturing him. Not necessarily the truth.

Even worse, the person being tortured might even start believing his own lies. Actively believing. A tortured person often starts seeing his own lies as facts. Especially if telling them stopped the torture before. Basic conditioning.

About the unlikeliness of a situation being limited to only two options I have only to say that the amount of creativity nor the amount of options are relevant within the context of the experiment’s outcome.

This paper explains it in higher detail (the scenario example that I gave):
http://www.themoralbrain.be/blog/Cushman.pdf

Although ‘utility’ ain’t the same as ‘happiness’ you can nonetheless replace the word ‘happiness’ with ‘utility’ in most of the cases where I used it. It just depends on whether you consider quantitative utility to have a higher priority than qualitative utility or not. In case of qualitative utility being prioritized it’s less easy to replace ‘happiness’ with ‘utility’. In case of quantitative utility being prioritized I think you can replace ‘happiness’ with ‘utility’ everywhere and it’s still all conform utilitarianism.

Furthermore, the moral puzzles you describe are artificial, and they resemble the one the neocons always trotted out to justify torture: there’s a ticking time bomb, and you have a terrorist undergoing questioning who knows where the bomb is, and the only way to get the information is to beat it out of him. So now do you support torture? Perhaps you would use this as an argument against utilitarianism, but the problem is that we must first swallow all of the assumptions. We know, by magic, that the captive is an actual terrorist and not an innocent person, that he knows where the bomb is (unlikely since most terrorist groups use a cell structure so information is minimally shared), and that by torturing him he’ll tell us the truth, rather than making up a credible story that would send us on a hunt in the wrong place.

In the case of the train platform questions, it’s very unlikely in real life that there really are only two choices (brutally use a live person’s body to stop the train or see five people die); human creativity often provides additional choices.