Zulu

Nice discussion.

Nermal,

The same sort of argument is brought up with slavery and the fact that utilitarianism isn't necessarily incompatible with it. The fact remains that your phrasing already implies a negative connotation or a form of contradiction. If the suffering of the minority was so intense as to provide minor relief of course it shouldn't be advocated! But when conditions are such that a suffering for some will yield far less suffering for far more...it should be done. It should also be noted that Utilitarianism is best furthered by not trying to directly apply its principles. I don't think any utilitarian would want people going around stealing people's kidneys 'for the greater good'. Due to practical limitation, Utilitarianism has little to say about specific amounts of suffering for varying amounts of people and what ought to be done about them.

If you'll notice, you haven't found a flaw in Utilitarianism. But turn the situation around: would you kill 1 innocent man to save 10 million others? Yes, you would. But how would you justify this deontolotically? You'd have to start making exceptions. Only utilitarianism stands up theoretically.

I'm not sure what you mean by desire but happiness can be quantified, or qualified, at least to some degree, in chemical terms.

-Zulu

Alonzo Fyfe

There is a large branch of learning responsible for looking into these questions. It contains some people who hold that talk of "belief" and "desire" is nonsense (e.g., Paul and Patricia Churchland). Since I do not need to know the specifics. These people talk about such things as type-type reductionism, token-token reductionism, functionalism, connectionism, and the like.

Because the specifics to how they answer these questions are not relevant to the questions that I seek to answer, I do not pay close attention to that body of research. I pay close enough attention to see which theory is generally winning the debate. At this point, BDI functionalism seems to be at the top of the list.


The only type of value that exists relates a state of affairs to desires. Without desire, there is no value.

This applies to desire itself. What makes a desire "good" or "bad" is its tendancy to bring about state of affairs that are the object of (other) desires.

So, there is a heirarchical structure to desires (some desires are better than others), but this heirarchy does not require a different type of desire-independent value; this value is as desire-dependent as all others.


Increase the compensation until some do come forward. If there is no level of compensation at which volunteers would come forward, then the original assumption that the benefits of such severe treatment exceeds the cost is false, and the utilitartian can then say that the suffering is not justified on utilitarian grounds.

Alonzo Fyfe

Any intentional action can be explained in terms of beliefs and desires. Why am I writing this message? Because I enjoy discussing and debating these topics with others and I believe that by typing and posting this message I will have an opportunity to participate such a debate.

Beliefs and desires are propositional attitudes. What this means is that all beliefs and desires can be expressed with a sentence:

X believes that P
X desires that P

Where "believes" and "desires" are mental attitudes, and "P" is a proposition.

A proposition is the meaning component of the sentence. "Snow is white" is a proposition. "I am writing this post" and "AlonzoFyfe is writing this post" are two different sentences, but they describe only one proposition.

A "belief that P" is a mental attitude that the proposition P is true. Beliefs are motivationally neutral -- they merely store data about the world.

A "desire that P" is a mental attitude that motivates the agent (to a degree proportional to the strength of the desire) to make it the case that P becomes or remains true.

Combined, beliefs and desires cause action. The action aims at fulfilling desires, given the agent's beliefs. Beliefs and desires are both necessary and sufficient to account for all human intentions, but working neural connections and properly functioning muscles are also necessary for the belief and the desire to actually cause an action.

Zulu

By why use that terminology? Why not stick to: happiness [and pain]?

It seems easier to qualify pain and happiness than to qualify desires, at least as far as I can tell.

-Zulu

Alonzo Fyfe

Because hedonism (pleasure/pain) and eudaemonism (happiness unhappiness) accouts are inadequate accounts of human action. Empirical data says that people want more out of life than this, and there is no non-arbitrary reason to exclude these other concerns.

Besides, neither hedonism nor eudaemonism are actually alternatives to BDI theory. Both take BDI theory to be true, and then adds one simple limitation.

Hedonism states that the set of potential propositions for "P" is limited to two: P = either "I avoid pain," and "I acquire pleasure" in all instances of human action.

Eudaemonism states that the set of potential propositions for "P" is also limit to two: P = either "I avoid unhappiness" or "I acquire happiness" in all instances of human action.

But both theories prove inadequate to handle all instances of human action.

I hold that "desire that P" and "belief that P" are similar in that, just as there is no limit to the set of propositions that an agent can believe, there is similarly no limit to the propositions that an agent can desire.

But if some set of limits is discovered, it will not alter the overall theory much. One will simply add caveats that it is unreasonable to hold that a person OUGHT TO "desire that P" for all P that cannot be the object of a desire.