You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Arguing About Ethics: Part 1
Utilitarians make bad ethicists! They are too usually caught into formulating quantitative tools in order to make qualitative propositions.
In my opinion, they have the wrong tools in explaining things when it comes to ethics and morality.
I also fear that their approach is somewhat misdirecting and concepts of ethics should not be investigated exclusively under the light of utility. That assumes that we have a way to actually measure utility, something which I'm also highly sckeptical of.
Upvoted/Resteemed!
I think utilitarians also have the issue of having ex ante knowledge of another's utility, which is problematic for a utilitarian position, even if it could be quantified and measured. For instance, how could you know what someone's reaction to an action would be before you make it, whether it would increase or decrease utility? In some cases, it may be easy to deduce, but certainly not all. We've all been in situations (or at the very least could imagine them) where we think we're helping, i.e. increasing utility, when in fact we're doing the exact opposite, which is immoral to a utilitarian. Rule utilitarians try to get around this through proposing generalized rules, but this can be reduced to act utilitarianism and its problems. Moreover, it seems that utilitarianism is open to reductio ad absurdum objections whereby one would be committed to doing something morally objectionable in order to increase total utility.
Hoppe's argument makes no appeal to utility of any sort, which I take as a strength. He is very Kantian in his approach invoking the principle of universalizability and acknowledging that sometimes things might not work out, but we have, on his view, these inviolable principles to abide by.
As I said, I am sckeptical at the very notion of utility. First, how do we ever arrive at such a metric in the first place? If any thinks that he acts ethically while taking as a guide his hedonic calculus he may very well be in great error as then he bases moral assertions on sense perception.
I've never read of Hoppe before and the list you provided is very interesting! It's also good to hear that he makes no appeal to utility as it seems nowadays most of the thinkers are infuenced by the notion more or less.
I'll investigate him further!