Just Say No to Utilitarianism

Meta comment: I'd prefer if you cross-posted the whole post because I'm unlikely to go to a new link.

There's no totally satisfying answer, I think, to the question of how ethical intuitions should affect what we think is good/right/best/etc. Among other reasons, those of us who prefer principles over myopic intuition-consultation point to the fact that human intuitions seem to turn on irrelevant facts (e.g., different framings of the trolley problem provoke different responses from many humans, even when the differences seem like they shouldn't be morally relevant). I recommend Peter Singer's Ethics and Intuitions. (And if it seems too long, I would prioritize section 3.)

Your chosen method - refuting a rule with a counterexample - throws out all moral rules, since every moral theory has counterexamples. This includes common sense ethics - recall the protracted cross-cultural justification of slavery, for one upon thousands of instances. (Here construing "go with your gut dude" as a rule.)

If we were nihilists, we could sigh in relief and stop here. But we're not - so what next? Clearly something not so rigid as rules.

You're also underselling the mathematical results: as a nonconsequentialist, you will make incoherent actions if you don't make sure that Harsanyi doesn't bite your ethics. You're free to deny one of the assumptions, but there ends the conversation.

(All that said, I'm not a utilitarian.)

I argue that utilitarianism is wrong and often motivated by a desire for elegant or mathematical qualities at the expense of obvious intuitions about particular cases. 

I don't think this is an accurate representation of the arguments for utilitarianism.

On intuitions and utilitarianism, see my debate with Michael Huemer.  I argue that deontology violates deeper intuitions in a more irresolvable way.

Here are features of EA that are justifiable from a utilitarian perspective, but not from other moral frameworks: 

1. DALY-based evaluations of policies. The idea of a DALY assumes that quality of life is interchangeable between people and aggregatable across people, which is not common sense and not true in a rights-based framework, because rights are not interchangeable between people.

2. Longtermism. Most arguments for longtermism are of the form "there will be far more people in the future, so the future is more important to preserve" which is a utilitarian argument. Maybe you could make a "future people have rights" argument, but that doesn't answer why their rights are potentially more important than neartermist concerns - only a population-weighting view does that.
 
3. (Relatedly) Population ethics. Almost every non-utilitarian view entails person-affecting views: an act is only bad if it's bad for someone. Creating happy lives is not a moral good in other philosophies, whereas (many though not all) EAs are motivated by that. 

4. Animal welfare. Animal welfare concerns as we imagine them stem from trying to reduce animal pain. You could bend over backward to describe why animals have rights, but most rights-based frameworks derive rights from some egalitarian source (making them unsuitable to say animals have "less rights than people but still some rights", which is the intuition most of us have). Moreover, even if you could derive animal rights, it would be super unclear what actions are best to support animal rights (how do you operationalize animal dignity?), whereas a utilitarian view allows you to say "the best actions are the ones that minimize the pain that animals experience" leading you to solutions like eliminating battery cages. 

I don't think you can reject utilitarianism without rejecting these features of EA. Utilitarianism could be "wrong" in an abstract sense but I think 70% of EAs see it as the best practical guide to making the world better. It often does conflict with common-sense ethics - the common sense of most people would suggest animal suffering doesn't matter, and that future people matter significantly less than people alive today! Utilitarianism is not an unwanted appendage to EA that could hamper it in the future. It's the foundation of EA's best qualities: an expanding moral circle and the optimizing of altruistic resources.

I don't think you can easily dismiss the argument that acting virtuously and honestly produces more utility in the long run. If everyone abandons this, then society falls apart and becomes a lot more miserable. 

It seems like a tax system helps solve the problems in all of these hypotheticals by balancing people's needs and desires instead of going to one extreme or the other. Of course, people have different ideas about what the exact numbers should be, and we can have an open and democratic debate about that. And maybe different adjustments make more sense at different times. 

We shouldn't force people to starve because one person owns all the food, and we shouldn't take all of someone's money just because other people are in need. But it's still good to help others and it's even better to help more.