
Utility monster - jasondclinton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster
======
dredmorbius
Existential Comics' proposal of a "freedom monster", an original contribution
to philosophy, is a particularly illuminating variant of this concept, and
suggests a fundamental conflict with the notion:

 _...Nozick 's conception of freedom is based largely on contracts revolving
around property rights. That is to say, freedom for Nozick is freedom to own
and control not just your own personhood, but any property that you own.
Property, like resources devoted to increasing "utility", is a finite resource
that could theoretically be entirely owned by a single "Freedom Monster", or
maybe "Justice Monster", but perhaps best named "Property Monster". Like the
comic imagines, a monster that lived forever and bent its entire will to
owning more and more land could, theoretically, through entirely voluntary
transactions, own all of the land. If this situation arose, the monster would
have infinite leverage in any negotiation that it entered into, because
everyone on earth would starve unless they made a deal with the monster. From
Nozick's point of view, because neither party was physically coerced, and the
monster's property came from a history of free transactions, the monster's
ownership of all its property is just and free. However, the situation that it
leads to seems to be one that severely lacks freedom. The monster could make
any rules it wanted, and everyone on earth would be more or less "freely"
forced to obliged it. Most people would not describe this situation as one
where humanity is more free...._

[http://existentialcomics.com/comic/259](http://existentialcomics.com/comic/259)

~~~
danharaj
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure)

~~~
dredmorbius
Thanks. I'm of course familiar but hadn't considered this light.

------
chaorace
Yeah, it's not surprising that you can blow out a weighting system if you...
blow it out.

If we're modelling utility in situations where human life could be endangered,
you should probably tie some amount of utility value to risk of death (or
inevitability of death, given the cookie example), preferably on a ramping
scale that approaches infinity as death becomes more imminent.

Maybe I'm missing the forest for the trees here, maybe the point is that it's
impossible to create a moral system for allocating resources in a world where
they are finite. I see little _utility_ in such an argument, however.

~~~
IanCal
Unfortunately for the risk of death idea due to the way that scales it means
we should bring everyone to the point of _almost_ certain death tomorrow to
avoid one _certain_ death right now.

~~~
chaorace
In that scenario, the utility value for the utility monster would have to be
enormous. We're talking something that would probably also result in human
deaths if it were to go unhandled, like triggering a war or nuclear meltdown.

I feel the greater ethical flaw in utilitarianism is the case where a utility
value scales positively with suffering. What can you do if the utility monster
derives positive utility value from others dying, as opposed to remaining
linear? Utilitarian measures simply don't fare well when the actors are
inherently antagonistic to one another.

~~~
IanCal
There's no involvement of the utility monster in what I'm talking about.

If you put the cost of imminent certain death of one person as infinite, then
given the choice between:

One person dies right now, everyone else survives and lives a full life.

And

In one hour, everyone in the world dies with a 99.9999% chance.

You would pick the latter. That's the issue I see with placing an infinite
cost on imminent death.

------
floathub
This is why the strict core of microeconomics never allows one to make
interpersonal utility comparisons. As soon as you start to try and figure out
"best" outcomes across groups (beyond ability to pay), it gets really
complicated, really quickly. This is the domain of areas like Social Choice:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_choice_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_choice_theory)

------
croon
I may have misinterpreted utilitarianism, but I thought it was egalitarian
because everyone's utility values were the same. Am I wrong?

Meaning the utility value of a cookie is the same for everyone, and the
utility value of your first $100 is the same for everyone, and the utility
value of anyone's second $100 is lesser than the first, etc, etc.

Obviously someone thought this Utility Monster idea warranted a wikipedia
entry, so I assume there's some point in it, but it does nothing to break my
head canon of what utilitarianism is.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
Yes you are wrong.

Simply consider a diabetic and me; the utility of an external insulin supply
to me is vanishingly small, yet its life or death to them.

Similarly, the graph of utility value vs amount of sugar will look very
different for us.

I've used a diabetic because its an obvious and massive difference, but the
cookie example applies too.

I like cookies, but my girlfriend likes them more. I dislike white chocolate
cookies, and loves them. This is a common difference in utility.

~~~
croon
Right, but I assume insulin has the same utility regardless of which diabetic
we're talking about?

And there are people who want to live in the woods without interacting with
people, with 0 use of $100. And people who don't like cookies at all, etc,
etc.

I view it more from a statistical point of view. Your model doesn't have to
consider individual preferences (or needs) to increase utility (it would have
to to literally maximize).

We can likely assume that out of 1000 people, 100 insulin pens would have more
utility being distributed to the ~10% diabetics, rather than the same diabetic
who "wants it more".

~~~
learc83
>And there are people who want to live in the woods without interacting with
people, with 0 use of $100. And people who don't like cookies at all, etc,

Whether you're talking about utilitarianism or microeconomics, your utility
function has to take those things into account.

If you use a statistical average model to distribute resources you'd end up
with a very unhappy population.

Did you never do the experiment in school where you randomly distribute candy,
calculate the class average utility score, then allow people to trade and
calculate it again?

It's always much higher after trading. Trade creating value is one of the
central tenets of economics, and it's based on the concept of utility
heterogeneity.

~~~
croon
We never did, no. But could you ever do that trading if one kid in class had
95% of all the candy from the off-set?

I was not advocating nor (intentionally) suggesting utilitarianism meant
everything identical for everyone.

~~~
marcosdumay
> But could you ever do that trading if one kid in class had 95% of all the
> candy from the off-set?

Hum... Yes. That's still in economics 101. Everybody will still be better off
after the trade. Also, it's very likely (but still dependent of the candy
distribution) that everybody will prefer to trade with that one kid instead of
everybody else.

------
enjeyw
It seems to me that the utility Monster argument has a critical flaw in that
it actually does a great job of describing the way we distribute utility in
reality.

We can't properly rationalise with a being that derives 100 times more utility
than humans any better than we can imagine a fourth spatial dimension, so
instead, let's go in the other direction.

What if humans were the beings that derived 100 times the utility? Would we be
then be able to justify consuming 100 times the resources?

Well, we can and we do. Case and point, literally any other animal.

That leaves a choice: either one accepts that being a utility monster is
actually ok, or refrains from causing harm to any conscious being, human or
otherwise.

~~~
jpmoral
Perhaps the fact that we act like utility monsters to other animals is part of
the point.

Also, no snark intended but 'case in point'.

~~~
enjeyw
Mmmmm I feel like if that’s what they were going for, they would have stated
it explicitly.

Also hahaha wow never realized that malapropism. Leaving as a memento

~~~
jpmoral
Fair point.

------
jjk166
Why should we not feed the utility monster?

Consider a population of mostly healthy people but one person has a rare
cancer. There is a small supply of drugs that treat that cancer. The vast
majority of the population would derive little utility from being allocated
this drug (there is some small chance that they may get the same cancer in the
future, so having it available does have value, just not much) whereas the
person who has that cancer derives a much larger amount of utility from the
resource. The cancer patient is in this case a utility monster and giving it
cancer medicine is feeding the utility monster.

Consider even further the case where most of the population is middle class
but some fraction is living in absolute poverty. A single dollar provides
little utility to the middle class people but a tremendous amount of utility
to the extremely poor. Taxing the population some small amount and allocating
it to the poor individuals would not only be feeding a utility monster but it
would be directly decreasing the utility of everyone else to do so.

Let's consider a third scenario: a researcher is trying to cure some terminal
disease but requires test subjects who may die as various possible drugs are
tried. The utility gain from curing a disease once and for all would be
immense compared to the life of one or even a few individuals. Carrying out
this research is again feeding a utility monster, and in this case literally
sending people to their deaths to do so.

While people might disagree on how we'd go about feeding these monsters in
practice, society has widely accepted at least in principle giving medicine to
the sick, providing welfare to poor, and taking calculated risks in the name
of progress.

The utility monster only sounds appealing as an ad absurdum argument because
the existence of such a utility monster presupposes such an absurd situation.
One can easily imagine that a utility monster which derives more utility from
every resource than the whole of humanity combined could exist, but actually
imagining such a monster is much harder. It feels wrong to support sacrificing
the whole of humanity to one being because I can not truly comprehend a
situation where one being could derive enough utility to justify such a
sacrifice. But in this hypothetical scenario where the sacrifice actually was
justified, I would by definition be able to imagine it, and thus I would apply
the same logic I do to the utility monsters which I can imagine, and there is
no reason to believe I would reach a different conclusion. Thus I would
support feeding the utility monster if I were ever in such a scenario.

------
stared
This is a problem only for unbounded utility, and can occur for both a super
happy monster, and a monster in extreme anguish.

Once you make utility which is in a fixed range, Utility Monster disappears.

~~~
IanCal
I don't think it does. You have still the issue of the unhappy monster once
everyone else has hit the "max" utility. You would spend all your resources on
them rather than improve things for the rest of the group because they are now
deemed unimprovable.

~~~
stared
You don't get anyone hit 0 or 1. (Compare with probabilities predicted by a
sigmoid - it never reaches 0 or 1.)

~~~
chaorace
Question: how is that mathematically different from bounding by negative &
positive infinity?

~~~
stared
sigmoid(x_1 + ... + x_n) != sigmoid(x_1) + ... + sigmoid(x_n)

------
lucideer
Maybe I'm missing something obvious but it seems surprising this argument
would gain any traction. It's pretty thin...

Even before you get into debates between average and total utilitarianism,
even for total/maximum utility, utilitarianism is predicated on the idea that
all beings are equally considered, from which the supposed egalitarianism
stems. The whole premise is that utility monsters don't exist.

~~~
gowld
> from which the supposed egalitarianism stems. The whole premise is that
> utility monsters don't exist.

Yes, but you took the wrong lesson. Utility Monsters prove that utilitarianism
is a bad model for reality.

~~~
gmac
_Utility Monsters prove that utilitarianism is a bad model for reality._

I think it's a pretty big stretch to say that something that doesn't exist
_proves_ anything at all.

I've always felt utility monsters were just bad philosophy trying to throw a
spanner in the works of a fairer society.

------
jl2718
This is how most welfare, insurance, medical, and education systems work
today. The opposite is basic income. Somehow I see most people supporting
both.

------
maliker
There's a fun SMBC comic illustrating this concept: [https://www.smbc-
comics.com/comic/2012-04-03](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-04-03)

------
aasasd
Sounds rather like plutocracy and corporatocracy.

------
hkt
..are billionaires real life utility monsters?

~~~
MereInterest
Billionaires actually present the opposite problem. People's happiness tends
to revert to a mean as they adapt to whatever situation they are in [1]. If
somebody wins the lottery, or their startup makes a big win, then they will
quickly adjust to their new normal. It takes more and more resources to add a
single unit of happiness.

If you pick a random person on the street and gave them a million dollars, it
would be life changing. Paying off all debt, move to a new location, buy a
house, set up investments to ensure that food and the mortgage are paid in
perpetuity. If you give a million dollars to a billionaire, it is a rounding
error on their total assets, and does not substantively change their
lifestyle. Conversely, taking a million dollars, or even nine hundred million
dollars, from a billionaire, will not significantly affect their lifestyle,
and that amount could improve the lives of many others. This is one reason why
taxation is ethical from a utilitarian perspective.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill)

~~~
hkt
That's a great answer, thanks. Double thanks for the link to the hedonic
treadmill, too.

------
convFixb
Utilitarianism is incompatible with Morals.

I'm no bible-thumper but I think the man from Galilee had a GOOD point or two.

~~~
ben_w
Some naughty boy walking over a pond distributing his blood without a medical
assay is no basis for a system of ethics. Supreme moral authority derives from
a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical reverse-vampire ceremony.

More seriously, the OT Ten Commandments come with a whole bunch of asterisks —
Thou Shalt Not Kill (except for war and executing criminals) — and even in the
NT, when Christianity first popped into existence a number of the new converts
immediately committed suicide right after baptism so that they would get into
heaven with all their sins absolved and no chance of, e.g., dying immediately
after an unwanted adultery boner [Matt 5:28].

~~~
MereInterest
> Thou Shalt Not Kill

Standard disclaimer that English words have shifted meaning, and that today it
would be more accurately translated as "thou shall not murder".

