Existential Comics' proposal of a "freedom monster", an original contribution to philosophy, is a particularly illuminating variant of this concept, and suggests a fundamental conflict with the notion:<p><i>...Nozick's conception of freedom is based largely on contracts revolving around property rights. That is to say, freedom for Nozick is freedom to own and control not just your own personhood, but any property that you own. Property, like resources devoted to increasing "utility", is a finite resource that could theoretically be entirely owned by a single "Freedom Monster", or maybe "Justice Monster", but perhaps best named "Property Monster". Like the comic imagines, a monster that lived forever and bent its entire will to owning more and more land could, theoretically, through entirely voluntary transactions, own all of the land. If this situation arose, the monster would have infinite leverage in any negotiation that it entered into, because everyone on earth would starve unless they made a deal with the monster. From Nozick's point of view, because neither party was physically coerced, and the monster's property came from a history of free transactions, the monster's ownership of all its property is just and free. However, the situation that it leads to seems to be one that severely lacks freedom. The monster could make any rules it wanted, and everyone on earth would be more or less "freely" forced to obliged it. Most people would not describe this situation as one where humanity is more free....</i><p><a href="http://existentialcomics.com/comic/259" rel="nofollow">http://existentialcomics.com/comic/259</a>
Yeah, it's not surprising that you can blow out a weighting system if you... blow it out.<p>If we're modelling utility in situations where human life could be endangered, you should probably tie some amount of utility value to risk of death (or inevitability of death, given the cookie example), preferably on a ramping scale that approaches infinity as death becomes more imminent.<p>Maybe I'm missing the forest for the trees here, maybe the point is that it's impossible to create a moral system for allocating resources in a world where they are finite. I see little <i>utility</i> in such an argument, however.
This is why the strict core of microeconomics never allows one to make interpersonal utility comparisons. As soon as you start to try and figure out "best" outcomes across groups (beyond ability to pay), it gets really complicated, really quickly. This is the domain of areas like Social Choice:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_choice_theory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_choice_theory</a>
I may have misinterpreted utilitarianism, but I thought it was egalitarian because everyone's utility values were the same. Am I wrong?<p>Meaning the utility value of a cookie is the same for everyone, and the utility value of your first $100 is the same for everyone, and the utility value of anyone's second $100 is lesser than the first, etc, etc.<p>Obviously someone thought this Utility Monster idea warranted a wikipedia entry, so I assume there's some point in it, but it does nothing to break my head canon of what utilitarianism is.
It seems to me that the utility Monster argument has a critical flaw in that it actually does a great job of describing the way we distribute utility in reality.<p>We can't properly rationalise with a being that derives 100 times more utility than humans any better than we can imagine a fourth spatial dimension, so instead, let's go in the other direction.<p>What if humans were the beings that derived 100 times the utility? Would we be then be able to justify consuming 100 times the resources?<p>Well, we can and we do. Case and point, literally any other animal.<p>That leaves a choice: either one accepts that being a utility monster is actually ok, or refrains from causing harm to any conscious being, human or otherwise.
Why should we not feed the utility monster?<p>Consider a population of mostly healthy people but one person has a rare cancer. There is a small supply of drugs that treat that cancer. The vast majority of the population would derive little utility from being allocated this drug (there is some small chance that they may get the same cancer in the future, so having it available does have value, just not much) whereas the person who has that cancer derives a much larger amount of utility from the resource. The cancer patient is in this case a utility monster and giving it cancer medicine is feeding the utility monster.<p>Consider even further the case where most of the population is middle class but some fraction is living in absolute poverty. A single dollar provides little utility to the middle class people but a tremendous amount of utility to the extremely poor. Taxing the population some small amount and allocating it to the poor individuals would not only be feeding a utility monster but it would be directly decreasing the utility of everyone else to do so.<p>Let's consider a third scenario: a researcher is trying to cure some terminal disease but requires test subjects who may die as various possible drugs are tried. The utility gain from curing a disease once and for all would be immense compared to the life of one or even a few individuals. Carrying out this research is again feeding a utility monster, and in this case literally sending people to their deaths to do so.<p>While people might disagree on how we'd go about feeding these monsters in practice, society has widely accepted at least in principle giving medicine to the sick, providing welfare to poor, and taking calculated risks in the name of progress.<p>The utility monster only sounds appealing as an ad absurdum argument because the existence of such a utility monster presupposes such an absurd situation. One can easily imagine that a utility monster which derives more utility from every resource than the whole of humanity combined could exist, but actually imagining such a monster is much harder. It feels wrong to support sacrificing the whole of humanity to one being because I can not truly comprehend a situation where one being could derive enough utility to justify such a sacrifice. But in this hypothetical scenario where the sacrifice actually was justified, I would by definition be able to imagine it, and thus I would apply the same logic I do to the utility monsters which I can imagine, and there is no reason to believe I would reach a different conclusion. Thus I would support feeding the utility monster if I were ever in such a scenario.
This is a problem only for unbounded utility, and can occur for both a super happy monster, and a monster in extreme anguish.<p>Once you make utility which is in a fixed range, Utility Monster disappears.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious but it seems surprising this argument would gain any traction. It's pretty thin...<p>Even before you get into debates between average and total utilitarianism, even for total/maximum utility, utilitarianism is predicated on the idea that all beings are equally considered, from which the supposed egalitarianism stems. The whole premise is that utility monsters don't exist.
This is how most welfare, insurance, medical, and education systems work today. The opposite is basic income. Somehow I see most people supporting both.
There's a fun SMBC comic illustrating this concept: <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-04-03" rel="nofollow">https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-04-03</a>