Theistic morality

[The Omnissiunt One]

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?

This is certainly more challenging. Of course, in the case where A murders his neighbour, a preference utilitarian would have to factor in the violation of a self-conscious being's interests, which would be a seriously bad action. Similarly, the beating of one's slave to death violates many of the slave's interests. In this case, though, I think preference utilitarianism would still think x to be good overall, perhaps.

However, this doesn't present a particular problem, because in reality, preference utilitarianism advocates the formation of general moral principles to follow in one's life, rather than judging as each situation arises (except in very unusual circumstances, where a diversion from the usual rules is likely to be better). On the whole, in probably 95% of cases, murder and slave-beating would not have such beneficial circumstances. Therefore, as a general rule, these should be avoided.

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?

My reply to this would be (and it's not easy... the difficulty of predicting consequences is a serious criticism of utilitarianism in general) that we have learnt from experience what sort of actions lead to what sort of consequences. In most moral dilemmas in life, the scenarios aren't as outlandish and as far from our experience as this one is. We know that mugging an old lady will probably have worse ramifications for her, those close to her, and even the mugger in the long term, than not mugging her.

Besides, I would argue that we all have to make utilitarian decisions at some point. Interests inevitably conflict in life, and we have to choose whose should be violated. Governments have to do it, as do those running hospitals, because there are limited resources to meet everyone's needs and desires. Anyone who says that they never use utilitarian reasoning is, I suspect, being disingenuous. If they're not, they're being impractical and, I'd say, unethical.

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.

I doubt that we will ever get to to find such a thing out. However, I'm not sure that conclusion would be warranted anyway, given that God could've (presumably) made a world in which there was no suffering. In a world made by a truly good, all-powerful god, utilitarianism would be redundant.