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Is Quantification the Only Problem of Utilitarianism

Could you give me a paragraph answer from your knowledge instead of making me sift through a bunch of stuff I already know?
 
Re. the 'stuff' that I linked: If you already knew the veritable troves of information contained therein, you would not be touting utilitarianism as a 'perfect' ethical paradigm. To the best of my knowledge, no professional ethical philosophers who subscribe to utilitarian ideas (indeed not even the founder(s) of utilitarianism itself) consider them to be 'perfect' (whatever that may mean). Next time you want to start a thread that will actually attract some decent, thoughtful feedback, perhaps you might want to consider writing a few paragraphs of your own. The irony may be lost on you, but I find it pretty comical that you wrote an 11-word, two sentence blurb of an OP, and got all saucy with me for not providing exhaustive, personally vested coverage of the very topic you so poorly and sparsely introduced.

And, to be completely frank, your OP is on the razor's edge of violating a couple of the P&S Forum Guidelines, but I let it slide in the hope that some meaningful discussion might come of it; or, at the very least, that you walked away with a better understanding of the some of the flaws inherent to utilitarian ethical systems by way of the articles I linked. As it currently stands, this kind of thread is best-suited to people who have studied ethical philosophy for some time (i.e., years), and are therefore competent enough to discuss utilitarianism (a well-established school of ethical philosophy that is rich in history and theory) in a coherent and mutually edifying way. I am not an ethicist, nor have I received any formal training in that particular philosophical field; I also don't read very much ethical literature on a regular basis; nor, I presume, are/do most of the Bluelighters who frequent this subforum. All of this makes me wonder what you hoped to obtain by starting this thread in the way that you did. Are you an ethicist? Do you know of any other ethicists, whether amateur or professional, on these boards (other than Impacto/L2R)?

Anyway, consider the foregoing rants your paragraphs for the day, Mr. Minh. Have a good one. :)
 
Perfect, believe it or not, can described with different contexts.

The thread was started so someone might pose a challenge, which apparently no one can/will. I was telling the truth; sorry that you chose to become offended at the fact that I pointed out you really don't know the subject-material. Did I hurt your feelings?

What did I violate again?
 
It seems the question is: perfect from what perspective? I.e. individual or societal or species? Personally from any perspective I see it as flawed because it places happiness and the reduction of suffering above sustainability. For example could we create a society that maximizes happiness and minimizes suffering for every individual while still ensuring the long term survival of the society/species? I would say no unless strict constraints were placed on the the efforts of maximizing happiness as to ensure long term sustainability but to me that seems contradictory to the goal of utilitarianism in the first place by essentially making happiness a secondary goal.
 
I was telling the truth; sorry that you chose to become offended at the fact that I pointed out you really don't know the subject-material. Did I hurt your feelings?

lolwut?

What did I violate again?

Well, I did use the words "razor's edge" to suggest that I do not consider your post to be in unforgivable violation of any major rules (otherwise, your thread would likely no longer exist). But, if you must know what qualities I found lacking in your post, cf. these excerpts from the P&S Forum Guidelines:

- Try to think in terms of how others will perceive your post. Make it clear whether you're looking to debate or not, or you might not get the kinds of responses you were expecting. This may sound obvious, but many threads fail simply because this gets looked over.

- Narrow your scope. Try to avoid "universals" like the dreaded "Does God Exist?". Not only are these discussions bound to appear in one form or another in more well-defined threads where they actually have a purpose, but also can be found in already-existing threads by searching for them. In other words, if it's a big question, it probably already has a big thread, so UTFSE.

- Showing overt political bias/agenda, particularly when starting threads, is bound to backfire one way or another. If you are unable to bottle up your political fervour regarding a certain issue, then you always have the option of posting in the Current Events and Politics forum or the BL Blog feature. Also don't forget that the rules above (No preaching, being respectful...etc) mean that posting politically-negative threads may very well end up closed, warned, and/or infracted, so save your time and ours and just don't do it...

And so on.
 
One problem with utilitarianism is that values are subjective and can't be calculated in any meaningful way. Part of this is due to the fact that it is impossible to understand the value judgements of another person. Also problematic is that value rankings can only be ordinal, not cardinal. It makes sense to say something like, "I prefer chicken to pork", but it makes now sense to say "I like chicken 2.678 times more than pork".

But even if it was possible to remedy these issues, a choice being the optimum in terms of aggregate utility does not necessarily mean that it is ethically or morally valid.
 
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