(July 23, 2010 at 6:05 pm)The Omnissiunt One Wrote: Clearly x is overwhelmingly preferable in the long-term, so x is good and not x is bad. Death means, for self-conscious beings, that both their plans for the future are thwarted, and any potential future interests they might have had go unfulfilled. That was easier to decide than I thought it would be, when I saw a hypothetical scenario coming up.
I thought that is what you would say. However, this seems to reveal some flaws in at least your application of preference utilitarianism. I would like to address two general flaws as I see it.
1) Given that you say x is good and not x is bad, one can then fill in x with something and conclude that that x is good. For example, say x is that A murdered his neighbor, one can follow your line of reasoning to conclude that not all murder is bad because at least in an instance like this, it is good. (Murdering one's neighbor is certainly something that would land A in prison.) Likewise x could have been that A beat his slave such that he died on the spot leading to the conclusion that at least in some instances, beating one's slave such that he died on the spot can be good. But what I really had in mind in the hypothetical (which really wasn't all that hypothetical) was the Biblical account of Joseph in Genesis chapters 37-45 or so. In this case, x was A's (Joseph's) brothers selling him into slavery. I did make up the time periods and the number of people. As a result of Joseph being sold into slavery, he was the slave of Potiphar whose wife wanted Joseph. When Joseph refused, Potiphar's wife lied about Joseph which landed him in prison. Well, you get the idea and can read the account for yourself. Anyway, following your application of preference utilitarianism to this situation, we could reasonably conclude that selling someone into slavery is sometimes good and from this we can conclude that slavery is sometimes good. From this we can reasonably conclude that preference utilitarianism at least sometimes allows slavery and coupling this with your position that "anything that allows slavery is bad" we can conclude that preference utilitarianism is bad. What do you think, Omni?
2) The second flaw is that it seems to me that for your application of preference utilitarianism to draw proper conclusions or to make valid moral judgements using preference utilitarianism, you really need more information than you will ever have. Let me explain. I am guessing that if I had stopped my hypothetical after TP1, then you would have concluded that x is bad (assuming imprisonment for A was not justified). It is only after you learn "the rest of the story", as Paul Harvey would say, that you then realize that x ended better than not x. We as humans can never fully know the ramifications of our actions to properly conclude that an action is good or bad using this type of analysis. We can only know for sure after all is said and done. (You know...hindsight is 20/20.) Let me know what you think of this, too, Omni?
One last observation for you, Omni. If all is said and done and we find that on the whole over the course of time that more people are fulfilled than are hindered then even based on your own moral system, you may have to conclude that God is good in spite of the fact that you now think some of the Biblical teachings are bad.
