Much of humanity for much of its history
Has been illiberal. You already reject the moral authority of most of human history.

Do the consequentualist frameworks being discussed here take into account that preferences change, and that happiness and unhappiness change them?

The critiques used of Robin’s ethics (by Will in the last post and by Caplan) seem almost silly to me. A consequentialist ethic needs to not only optimize utility in the present, but in the future as well. Humans learn from carrots and sticks, and so some people must be made unhappy in the present so that more people can be made happy in the future. Racist memes are bad for society, so racists need to be carrotted and sticked into becoming less racist.

Caplan’s Nazi critique of Robin’s ethics (during their debate) seemed silly for this reason. We wouldn’t want to allow a billion Nazis to murder a small number of Jews even if this was a net increase in utility, because racist-nationalist memes are utility-decreasing in the long run. The same thing goes for Will’s example of a black family moving into a neighborhood of racists: we don’t care because we know racism needs to go the way of the dodo bird. It seems to me that most of our natural moral intuitions already take time and memes into account, at least to some extent.

I think The Watchmen said it best: Nothing ever ends.

I guess I’m going to read Robin’s paper (which I skipped because I already believe health isn’t special).

In saying “all else equal” I didn’t mean to say anything about who objected to the preferences, nor did I mean to disallow others to evaluate those preferences. I don’t understand how you can claim that “it doesn’t speak to what we want or why.” People can want others to want things, and that all counts in getting people what they want. The main rule is to get folks what they want, no matter what that is.

I agree that you need some way of determining the desirability of the coordination outcome.But what I was saying is that I don’t think there is a truly authoritative standard that is not endogenous to the system of norms that produces the coordination outcome. If you simply posit something like preference utilitarianism, you’ll find that it is not in fact acceptable from within the prevailing morality. People as they are won’t find themselves with adequate reason to endorse it. What you’ll have is a semi-arbitrary, intuition-based technique for suggesting radical revisions to the norms and beliefs that generate the coordination outcome. This is nice, because it feels like an archimedean lever. But it isn’t. If you’re worried that people have inconsistent moral intuitions, then you need to worry that they have inconsistent preferences, too, which obviously wreaks a kind of havoc on preference utilitarianism. (And if people don’t have consistent preferences, it’s probably because they don’t want to, and they should get what they want, right?)

As to “all else equal, it is better for each person to get more of what they want,” it really matters how you specify what it means for all else to be equal. You can’t mean “insofar as people have unobjectionable preferences,” because that’s cheating. And I think it would strikes most people as just bizarre to take preferences out of the realm of evaluation. Much of humanity for much of its history has thought that human nature is base, that our wants are despicably animal, and that we should only get more of what we want as long as what we want is sufficiently elevated or in accordance with divine or “natural” law.

Again, one of the reasons preference utiltarianism is so objectionable is that it doesn’t speak to what we want or why. It’s both too permissive and too conservative. That people with evil desires shouldn’t satisfy them is more intuitively plausible than the idea that, other things equal, people should get more of what they want. And patterns of preference are themselves an outcome of social and economic structure and process. To endorse people getting more of whatever they happen to want is one way of being complacently mute about the determinants of preferences when we’d like to be able to criticize precisely those things.

Anyway, I like it that we’re arguing because I agreed with you about Miller and Frank, but in the wrong way!

“Specifically, we can examine our evolved health-care intuitions with respect to the two common indicators of intuition-error that I discussed in Section III: excessive historical contingency of origin and hidden bias toward one’s self or one’s in-group.”

Ok, this seems right to me, but why does it seem right to you? Is it that these intuitions fail to cohere with our intuitions that ethical truths are universal? Or our intuition that the best indicator of moral truth are those judgments we make when taking an impartial perspective?

If so, then I can make sense of your error-detection method in terms of weight and coherence. We have weighty intuitions about impartiality (which itself is neutral between utilitarianism and deontology) and the universality of moral judgments (which cuts across most moral theories) and we want to choose moral principles in harmony with these weighty intuitions. So then why think that simplicity by itself is the best guide to accuracy? Why not think that the best guide to accuracy is a combination of different theoretical virtues? In fact, isn’t that the view you really take in your paper? (Despite my not having carefully reread it!)

So, your are more modest in the paper: “This is not, however, the only
possible response. If some but not all of our moral intuitions come under
a cloud of suspicion, we can simply rely more heavily on our other
intuitions. In other words, if moral intuitions taken from contexts outside
this cloud of suspicion are presumed to have smaller errors, then we can seek moral principles that primarily fit our data in those contexts and
apply those principles to health care.”

You go on to say: “This might, but need not, tip the balance of reflective equilibrium so much that we adopt very simple and general moral principles, such as utilitarianism. This might not be appealing, but if we really distrust some broad set of our moral intuitions, this may be the best that we can do.”

So you suggest that we weight simplicity more highly than many intuitionists do. That’s cool. But we can still assign weight to other metrics. And there are also other important deep, abstract and simple intuitions, like the ‘separateness of persons’ intuition? That seems pretty darn universal and weighty (and simple) and intuition to me. It is also, I think, incompatible with utilitarianism, as is the Bernard Williams integrity intuition that morality cannot demand as much of us as utilitarianism does.