I think your article is spot on. Given that your son is not objectively more important in virtue of being your son, relative to someone else's son, valuing your son more, independently of instrumental considerations, involves not caring about what is fundamentally important. Utilitarians can still give a perfectly adequate account of why you should practically value your son more, given that caring deeply for ones offspring makes things go best. However, baking personal relationships and partiality into our fundamental account of morality seems to clearly misidentify what ultimately matters.
Great article. I think that one of the greatest advantages of utilitarianism (or maybe generally beneficience) is the sheer grandness of its ambitions, and giving people acutally-achievable utopian visions can be a great pull toward the philosophy. Showing people the great advances in recent decades in the reduction of extreme poverty, and putting faces to those people whose lives have improved, is a great step. Show people the drastic difference between $2 and $5 a day, or the lives saved by good pandemic response. It's harder to dismiss mere pleasure and pain calculations when you understand what it means to no longer live with the anxiety of getting kidnapped or not finding food to eat.
My grandmother, who lived through World War II and was born in a Greek village where she was one of few girls to attend high school, today lives with a high standard of living without needing to work, and is likely to live to 100 with sound mind. I very much want a society where as many people as possible can expect this sort of life. Utilitarianism takes the radically optimistic step of saying, "Yes, we will achieve that ideal future by any means necessary."
(Arguably this utopian perspective can itself get dangerous if its ambitions run ahead of its science; which is why it is important to qualify its ambitions with humility and frequent sanity checks.)
An evil genie offers you a choice. Either he kills your son, or he kills five random people in Madagascar. If you refuse to choose, he kills them all. According to your personal, internal, and coherently extrapolated value system, which do you pick?
I think your article is spot on. Given that your son is not objectively more important in virtue of being your son, relative to someone else's son, valuing your son more, independently of instrumental considerations, involves not caring about what is fundamentally important. Utilitarians can still give a perfectly adequate account of why you should practically value your son more, given that caring deeply for ones offspring makes things go best. However, baking personal relationships and partiality into our fundamental account of morality seems to clearly misidentify what ultimately matters.
Great article. I think that one of the greatest advantages of utilitarianism (or maybe generally beneficience) is the sheer grandness of its ambitions, and giving people acutally-achievable utopian visions can be a great pull toward the philosophy. Showing people the great advances in recent decades in the reduction of extreme poverty, and putting faces to those people whose lives have improved, is a great step. Show people the drastic difference between $2 and $5 a day, or the lives saved by good pandemic response. It's harder to dismiss mere pleasure and pain calculations when you understand what it means to no longer live with the anxiety of getting kidnapped or not finding food to eat.
My grandmother, who lived through World War II and was born in a Greek village where she was one of few girls to attend high school, today lives with a high standard of living without needing to work, and is likely to live to 100 with sound mind. I very much want a society where as many people as possible can expect this sort of life. Utilitarianism takes the radically optimistic step of saying, "Yes, we will achieve that ideal future by any means necessary."
(Arguably this utopian perspective can itself get dangerous if its ambitions run ahead of its science; which is why it is important to qualify its ambitions with humility and frequent sanity checks.)
An evil genie offers you a choice. Either he kills your son, or he kills five random people in Madagascar. If you refuse to choose, he kills them all. According to your personal, internal, and coherently extrapolated value system, which do you pick?