Talk:Preference utilitarianism

Philosophy: Ethics Stub‑class Mid‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Philosophy, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of content related to philosophy on Wikipedia. If you would like to support the project, please visit the project page, where you can get more details on how you can help, and where you can join the general discussion about philosophy content on Wikipedia.PhilosophyWikipedia:WikiProject PhilosophyTemplate:WikiProject PhilosophyPhilosophy articles

Stub

This article has been rated as Stub-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.

Mid

This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Associated task forces:
/
	Ethics

This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

I feel there is a problem with the clarity of this article. It's difficult to understand what "Preference Utilitarianism" is, even if one is familiar with Utilitarianism, because Preference Utilitarianism is defined here in terms of something called "Preference satisfaction," which is never defined, nor is there a separate article on it.

Further comments/criticism are appreciated. --Zaorish 13:09, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

An obvious objection

My worry about preference utilitarianism is that it makes it too easy to do good simply by changing preferences. According to the view, the best thing in the world would be a "lower your expectations" gas released on everyone. It would change your preferences so that you think the status quo is the state you most want. But it should be obvious that in a messed-up world (with slavery, genocide, sexism, etc.) actual reform would be a better thing than simply giving everyone this gas. Yet the gas release will come much closer to creating a world in which all preferences are satisfied.

Objection to the obvious objection

"But it should be obvious that in a messed-up world (with slavery, genocide, sexism, etc.) actual reform would be a better thing than simply giving everyone this gas."

First of all, this objection is not preference utilitarianism specific: it can be applied just as well to classic utilitarianism.

Second of all, if people would really prefer to be gassed into enjoying slavery, then it is not obvious that doing such a gassing would be ethically wrong.

Third of all, Wikipedia is not a chatroom.

Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not User:Zaorish

There is no problem with posting an objection to a view in the discussion section of the article about the view. It's a very serious objection to which there is no satisfactory reply in the literature. The reply given above is inadequate. The point was that it's possible to make someone prefer suffering to pleasure, or in some intuitive sense, a bad consequence to a good one. So this is where preference utilitarianism diverges from a more standard utilitarianism. The question is, what's better: a world of suffering, populated with "broken" people who prefer to suffer because they think they deserve no better, or a world with happy people who, because they keep striving to improve it, don't have their preferences satisfied? If the answer is the latter, as I think it is, preference utilitarianism can't really get off the ground. So yeah, I suggest this be mentioned in the objections section.

Talk pages are for the discussion of article improvement, and not the topic itself. Take those types of discussions to private forums. --Wafulz 03:11, 20 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Did I miss something? What drove that response? Don't be rude unnecessarily. OptimistBen 03:18, 2 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Actual issues with the article itself

This artice is completely uncited and uses weasel words twice: "...quite probably the most popular form of utilitarianism..." and "Peter Singer is generally regarded as the leading contemporary advocate of preference utilitarianism" (emphasis mine). --68.100.240.209 (talk) 03:15, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Preference Utilitarianism a way to modify classic utilitarianism to make utility or welfare based on more than simply pleasure. is also know as desire-fulfillment utilitarianism and is referenced in both the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy article on consequentialism and the one on rule-consequentialism, neither is well-cited however, which makes it seem like this is more of a general conception rather than a fully explored theory. it also has the problem that people can desire harmful or useless things.