Yeah, that is sort of what I am thinking too.

Perhaps rational happiness optimizers would try to enhance their longterm happiness will be enhanced by a short-term experience of its deprivation, and the deprivation of the concert, intelligence, and power they usually enjoy. Like whitespace in a painting.

Nope. Happiness is an lot more than figuring out the techniques. Happiness is a choice. We see people reject happiness all the time and its orthogonal to their intelligence.

Your scenario only makes sense if evil didn’t exist. But would happiness even be possible without it?

The optimal route to Mars does indeed depend on the orbital mechanics of every solar bound asteroid, but complete neglect of the mechanics of every asteroid not on an imminent collision path is extremely unlikely to make a measurable difference.

Suppose there is a contingent of explorers on a remote planetary outpost that is starving to death. Should we refuse the help of physics in guiding our rescue journey because the trajectory it recommends may be slightly less than optimal?

Likewise the idea that all utility metrics are dubious simply because they can rarely be known to perfection. Should a triage nurse discard his or her medical knowledge when directing the order of patient treatment because he or she doesn’t have x-ray vision and an immaculate knowledge of each patient’s medical history? I don’t think so.

In other words, your criticism is specious because the alternatives are worse. The optimal (and near-optimal) alternatives in the real world are governed by enormously complex factors that only a ethical utility metric can approximate. Preferring ignorance to imperfection is not an improvement.

Further, if you believe in capital punishment, then the right to life is not absolute. For those of us who don’t, no such problem. Further, you couldn’t possibly take away my right to pursue my own happiness although you may truncate the means by which it is accomplished.

Marl: I don’t require a subjective value metric; quite the opposite. It is the value extrinsic to the will itself that is the root problem for consequentialist ethics. If a “system” can never anticipate the proper decision, but it nevertheless morally requires it, then it follows that we can never fulfill the moral duties (optimal economic assessment of valuation) because we can’t know what they are. We always fail in any moral decision. That is just another problem with consequentialist theories if you’re going to have rules that merely approximate.

Kristen: Skeletor fits into this because Skeletor is a consequentialist whose rule of decision is to take out those who make life miserable for him and his ultimate purposes of evil. Thus, he will soon be after me and adopt Mark and Jacob as evil cohorts [grin].

How about the right to love whomever you choose?

Very good, you give me an example of a right which we do not know, in principle, how to violate. Of course, your theory of ethics requires more fundamental rights than this and these fundamental rights often end up in conflict. You say consequentialism fails because it cannot justify truly fundamental rights, but to me, this recommends it. Do people have fundamental rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness? I don’t think so, or we wouldn’t take these rights away from people so often in the name of justice.

Any ethical utility metric must be predominantly objective in character, or the the ranking of consequences derived therefrom would indeed be arbitrary. I submit, however, that all consequences for any given decision may be ranked ethically according to a partial ordering.

For example, we might say that no ethical utility metric rates eating ice cream higher than saving a child’s life. But ranking strawberry over banana isn’t properly speaking an ethical question, such that an arbitrary number of individual (and potentially fully ordered) utility regimes may follow the partial ordering that fundamental ethics requires.

Your second and third objections indeed apply to rule utilitarianism, which this is not, though the ideas are related. I maintain there are systems of ethical rules that approximate the partial ordering required of an ethical utility metric, but that such systems can never anticipate the proper decision in every situation, any more than any finite legal system can.