People who tell me that I should study for my exams which will be in the future fail to recognize the separateness of moments, and that there is no super moment that contains both this moment and the moment during which I'm taking the exam.
One interesting question is how exactly normative differences should affect attitudes. I'm slightly dubious that we should feel deeply conflicted when we're benefitting one and harming another, though we've discussed that before. But it seems even odder to think that when one is making a decision that has positive expected value but unpredictable actual value they should feel deeply conflicted and worried.
Your position here is very appealing, but I find it difficult to reconcile with your insistence that that ethics should focus on "what really matters," and that what really matters is benefits and harms to sentient beings. Are you saying that attitudes can also "matter" in a way that has moral significance?
It would be very plausible for a utilitarian to say that attitudes can have instrumental value insofar as attitudes shape behaviour. But it is harder to see how attitudes can be part of a utilitarian's fundamental moral theory, as you seem to be asserting here, rather than part of their practical moral advice or their empirical account of moral psychology.
A thought experiment:
Imagine two intelligent utilitarian robots, Annie and Bertie, both capable of responding to normative reasons, and also capable of editing their own software. They are programmed to act identically in all circumstances — the only difference is that Annie is programmed like a strawman (strawrobot?) utilitarian who just adds up benefits and harms, while Bertie is a sophisticated Chapellian utilitarian whose code includes some additional lines defining the function experience_heightened_angst() and calling that function whenever Bertie encounters the sorts of situations you describe in this post.
(Q1) If Annie gains access to Bertie's source code, should she edit her own software to include the additional lines from Bertie's code?
(Q2) If I am a robot engineer, should I make robots with Annie's code or Bertie's?
People who tell me that I should study for my exams which will be in the future fail to recognize the separateness of moments, and that there is no super moment that contains both this moment and the moment during which I'm taking the exam.
One interesting question is how exactly normative differences should affect attitudes. I'm slightly dubious that we should feel deeply conflicted when we're benefitting one and harming another, though we've discussed that before. But it seems even odder to think that when one is making a decision that has positive expected value but unpredictable actual value they should feel deeply conflicted and worried.
Your position here is very appealing, but I find it difficult to reconcile with your insistence that that ethics should focus on "what really matters," and that what really matters is benefits and harms to sentient beings. Are you saying that attitudes can also "matter" in a way that has moral significance?
It would be very plausible for a utilitarian to say that attitudes can have instrumental value insofar as attitudes shape behaviour. But it is harder to see how attitudes can be part of a utilitarian's fundamental moral theory, as you seem to be asserting here, rather than part of their practical moral advice or their empirical account of moral psychology.
A thought experiment:
Imagine two intelligent utilitarian robots, Annie and Bertie, both capable of responding to normative reasons, and also capable of editing their own software. They are programmed to act identically in all circumstances — the only difference is that Annie is programmed like a strawman (strawrobot?) utilitarian who just adds up benefits and harms, while Bertie is a sophisticated Chapellian utilitarian whose code includes some additional lines defining the function experience_heightened_angst() and calling that function whenever Bertie encounters the sorts of situations you describe in this post.
(Q1) If Annie gains access to Bertie's source code, should she edit her own software to include the additional lines from Bertie's code?
(Q2) If I am a robot engineer, should I make robots with Annie's code or Bertie's?