Foundation for law

[tylerdurden]

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You're required by law to act compassionately? This sounds like the worst basis for a legal system of all time.

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I'm an idealist. Like I said, that would maximize happiness, if people liked other people to be happy. But, there are some jerks out there that get their kicks by hurting other people. So, more rules... and more suffering.

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What definition of happiness are you going to use when you try to maximize it?

Once you find the optimal distribution of happiness points, how will you determine which comrades get which happiness rations?

What happens to those who end up less happy because of your engineering than they would have been without it? Too bad for them?

Here's some stuff I've written previously:

You cannot decide what's best for the community, and even if you could, you SHOULD NOT implement it, unless everyone voluntarily agrees. You can determine what YOU think is best for the community. Your DESIRE to do what's best for the community doesn't mean that you actually will make the best decsion. Also, what's best for the community will often be detrimental (sometimes catastropically so) for individuals in that community. Utilitarianism is just another form of oppression.

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There are some people in the hospital. Two that each need a kidney, two that each need a lung, one that needs a heart, one that needs a liver, and one guy that has a broken leg.

Let's make it more interesting. The people in need of organs are nobel-winning scientists and they all have families, and the guy with a broken leg is a drunkard bum with no family, but has never hurt a fly.

The people that need organs are going to die within the hour if they don't get transplants. A miracle doctor can perform all the transplants in time, but the only prospective donor is the guy with the broken leg.

Should the doctor kill the one broken leg patient to save six others?

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The funny thing is, we can show that utilitarianism can lead to bad outcomes, but we really don't need to go to so much effort - just showing that utilitarianism assumes centralized decision making (someone picks the "best" utility-distribution scheme) is enough to discredit it.