Utilitarianism is a top-tier philosophy

It allows gang rapes.

I'd be surprised if a decent argument for that on utilitarian grounds could be made.

Utilitarianism is literally based on muh feels of the many.

>Consequentialism has in here problems as well because we have no super computer that will tell us the outcomes of all actions.

Yes! It's impossible to determine the net effect of any action. Our actions ripple outward and we might never see their ends. And even if we could calculate the sum of the consequences of our actions, we would only be able to do so in retrospect. That makes it useless when making ethical decisions in the present; we could only determine whether or not our actions are ethical well after taking them.

Utilitarian paradise.

youtube.com/watch?v=wWSAI9d3Vxk

As I said, that's a goal perpetuated by the capitalist system. Progressivism doesn't even make sense on a biological level, because there is NO animal that is naturally progressive. We learn progressivism from our culture. And our culture is dominated by money and fear of debt.

Idealism is a shit. There is no goal of society except to be in harmony.
People can't let go of fear if they're being controlled by a large entity, whether that be the government, the market or God.

Someone once told me that rights came from the government. Another person told me that rights are natural. And another guy told me that rights come from god. There are no rights. Right and wrong is based on the relationship one has with another person; thus morality is a communication skill like language. This is why autistic kids who grow up without good language skills often go on rampages and shoot their schools up; it's not that they lack empathy; they just can't communicate moral feelings.

Utilitarianism is like giving an autistic person a gun and saying "Shoot them up for the greater good", but that gets us nowhere.

>Right and wrong is based on the relationship one has with another person; thus morality is a communication skill like language.
I like this. I'm probably going to be thinking about it all day.

My proof? You're obviously a first-timer this semester to philosophy class. Am I wrong?

The problem doesn't lie in what is necessary, it lies in who decides what is necessary

the disutility of being raped is greater than the pleasure of raping someone. When more people are added to the rape, the collective utility of the group only increases arithmetically however, the disutility of the victim increases geometrically. The more people that are added, the less justified it becomes.

>How is a theory that advocates suffering in order to achieve a greater good pro-feels?

Because the "greater good" is based on feels.

>the disutility of being raped is greater than the pleasure of raping someone.

Prove it.

>When more people are added to the rape, the collective utility of the group only increases arithmetically however, the disutility of the victim increases geometrically.

Prove it.

>The more people that are added, the less justified it becomes.

Prove it.

This is the problem with utilitarianism. Any action can be justified by some nebulous greater good. By utilitarianism, all of history's great mass murders, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao were all justified in all of their actions because they believed they were working for a greater good.

End all suffering would be a better goal than increase happiness, makes fewer baseless assumptions. But utilitarism doesn't want that, because of a primitive fear of death, literally muh feels. If you changed your goal to minimizing suffering, your only baseless assumption would be that suffering is bad, a more objective goal than all the assumptions utilitarism makes.

Seconded.

It's anthropocentrism and good philosophy is theocentric

Utilitarianism requires you to make accurate judgments about the future in order to have moral judgement.

If you think you can do that, and you aren't a billionaire from the stock market or pony races, then fuck off.

This. Stalin really, REALLY liked his gulag.
Also: it's impossible to accurately predict the outcomes of actions beforehand. While killing someone might be wrong, reducing their potential utils, what if the person you killed was going to kill two people? But what if those people he killed were pathological criminals who got their kicks by writing philosophy books. Etc.

>LE funny "I pull the lever" meymey XxDDddd

If the goal is to end suffering, wouldn't the logical conclusion be to kill everyone?

Read Watchmen, it's an entertaining critique of your preferred ideology.

Yes, but utilitarists are so afraid of that conclusion that they have to add additional assumptions because they feel uncomfortable with that answer. The best thing we could do would be to destroy earth, leaving no life left. Possibly after we make self duplicating killer robots and spread them accross the galaxy.

When do you stop counting.

>youtube.com/watch?v=xwOCmJevigw

NO GREY AREAS!

>a philosphy based purely off of feelings is "top-tier"
>"You can't use "muh feels" to argue against it!"
you're fucking retarded

also, utilitarianism is based off of subjective concepts

also, what about people that have not been born yet? does their happiness matter? wouldn't it be utilitarian to wipe 98% of the world population to preserve resources for the future of humanity, who ideally would be 99.9%< of all people that will ever live?

fucking wastepaper basket philosophical stance it's grounded in nothing but feels.

>End all suffering
Even that's kinda stupid. I distinctly recall Plato IIRC arguing that such a moral benchmark ends in putting everyone in a dreamless coma.

ITT: Anime tier arguments

snortled

Is good and right the same thing?

Useless things are more essential than useful things.

>something is good/ethical if it results in more pleasure than pain
>implying it is possible to know or control how much good or pleasure will result from one's actions all, or even most, of the time
>ergo, we cannot choose "good" outcomes, as these are subjective based on what others who are affected find pleasurable or painful, and that's assuming it's possible to choose who is affected
>actions are not themselves ethical/unethical independent of their results
>thus, there is no way to choose to do/be good

I honestly think that Deontological ethics are more practical in ordinary situations.

It sets the meaning of life and ultimate end of everything as self-gratification, it's not really even a philosophy in that sense, since rats and lice have that "philosophy". Following utilitarian logic, things such as art, literature and philosophy, are just inefficient tools for self-gratification, and the optimal search for humanity is technology and drugs that would just stimulate our pleasure centers directly; all other pursuits would optimally be directed toward this. Humans would also optimally be engineered to move away from all other pursuits but those which make for a society that would have the highest chances of producing this technology.

"Greater good" is so hilariously maleable that you could say Hitler's Third Reich was utalitarian in mindset. Utalitarianism is literally "ends justify the means" codified and thus easily abusable.

same antinatalist aspy

Everyone believes their religion is for the greater good, the point of utilitarianism is to find out what the greater good really is.

The foundation of Utilitarianism makes a lot of sense up until the part where they try to extend it to other people than the self. Egoism is the highest tier of philosophies but Utilitarianism is bro-tier.

Utilitarianism is better applied to institutions rather than individuals. You can't just ignore the selfishness inherent in human nature and state that the personal ideal is that which benefits others. Don't blindly apply one philosophy to the entirety of life. It's obnoxious.

Sure, but does it actually do a good job at that? I would argue no. Let us consider an intelligent non-human actor that is perfectly utilitarian. It is incapable of suffering, but its capacity for happiness is, at least from its own point of view, greater or equal than a humans. Therefore, assuming it is capable of multiplying, the best course of action for it would be to drive humans to extinction: there are only limited amount of resources available, so letting suffering beings waste those resources would be considered suboptimal: after all, the net happiness would be greater if all humans were replaced by beings incapable of suffering.

>no muh feels
>utilitarianism is literally based on feels
Firstly you clearly dont understand Utilitarianism
Second, Utilitarianism assumes that all cultures unanimously agree on what objectively raises utility. If you try to fix that by going off of Mills interpretation then you start to lose the focus on utility and focus too much on natural rights, which can contradict utilitarianism in certain situations.
It just doesnt work when you think in terms of people and not the wider institution

>the disutility of being raped is greater than the pleasure of raping someone

Show me the math

the central utilitarian argument is "I believe happiness is good" in which "I believe" is an essential part.

this isn't complicated.

The greater good is a spook.

took long enough for someone to Stirnerpost

Happiness is a feeling and 'happiness is good' is a sentiment.

Logic is a sentiment.

'the greater good' is a sentiment.
>all these sentiments
Kill the 'victim' first then, or suspend them in a wacky sleep chamber made to restrain, mentally and physically, women into communal sex slaves.