Choice and Utility

As Mill notes in Utilitarianism, often the best indicator of the utility to an individual of some outcome is whether or not the individual would choose that outcome. This is intuitively consistent: each person is the leading authority on her own likes and dislikes, so provided that a person is well-informed about the nature of the options, her choice will result in greater utility for her than the choice of an equally well-informed third party.

For most real-world moral questions, the best that one can do is to give others choice. Take as an example charitable giving. Suppose that you could give a poor person in the developing world either a mosquito net that costs $10 dollars, or the $10 dollars: which is likely to maximize the utility of the person you mean to help through your charity? If the mosquito net is the utility-maximizing use of that money, then the recipient of the $10 will turn around and purchase it – the outcome will be the same. If, on the other hand, utility would be greater through some other use of the $10, say through investment in a small business or a tin roof, then the utility would be greater if the recipient were given the choice of how the $10 is spent. If those are the only outcomes (more on this below), then the expected utility of the act of giving cash is higher that that of giving a mosquito net.

Further, consider that a person will always be better informed about his own utility. That information can’t be faithfully passed on. As a result, an ideal world will be one in which individuals are able to act on the maximum of information about their choices: the most informed decision possible about what will maximize a specific individual’s happiness must be one made by that individual, because she alone has access to both the subjective and the objective data to inform the decision.

Of course, this is just the maximum. Above, I intentionally excluded the case where the person making the decision was less informed about the the options, limiting the choice to between two optimal outcomes. Certainly there are cases where a benefactor can be better informed than a recipient about the options available, so even though the benefactor’s knowledge of the recipient’s preferences is imperfect, that imperfection is outweighed by the difference in knowledge. Consider for instance a person choosing between medicine and alcohol who has no knowledge of modern medicine or the modern science of disease. This person may well choose the alcohol, knowing its effects on her utility, even though if they were informed they would choose the medicine.

But note that this is not really a choice between medicine and alcohol. For the individual concerned, it is a choice between alcohol and an unknown. No preference for drunkness over health has been expressed by the choice. And it is clear that adding real choice, here by informing the individual about what medicine can do for them, would increase utility, because the individual could combine her subjective knowledge and the knowledge of the objective choice.

A similar point could be made about addiction and other failures of rationality: is it a real choice is someone does something by habit, or without reflection, or to avoid short term pain in sacrifice of long-term pleasure? To some extent, these aren’t choices at all, and again, turning them in to choices, improving rationality, improving perspective, improving awareness – if a greater level of real choice is given to the individual, the resulting utility is expected to increase.

Choice, then, must be an integral part in utilitarianism. Individuals have better knowledge about what will maximize their own utility; introducing real choice should be expected to increase utility; and choice is the only way to access individuals subjective evaluations. Indeed, because of the limits on our ability to know others’ subjective experiences, choice must be inherently valuable in any applied utilitarian moral system: even though the aim is still utility, that utility can only ever be objectively determined by choice.

Are you really trying to merge a utilitarian analysis of choice, with a concept of whether or not tweakers have free will?

This sounds like a debate for a homeless shelter director to have with his top donors, explaining why some people simply put can’t get out of living in shelters no matter how much money you throw at them. It isn’t quite a debate for philosophy, as it’s been proven to go NOWHERE for the last few generations. Maybe I should add generations on top of that claim of generations… this goes back quite a while.

If you add a few dimensions to it, might make it worthwhile. 10 bucks to buy a net vs giving a ten dollarbnet doesn’t consider in either case it is distributed by port and depot. Can people really be expected to get handouts on a one time basi, and choose net? Nope… you need a excess of supply, and the reason you need a excess is your stamping out a disease… so just a surplus, easy access to nets trump. Not just one time, but as often as you need them… for the motivations for this program has nothing to do with their capacity for choice, but rather, necessity of operations to eridicate a disease. Their thinking process only matters as far as getting a successful program running. If they dont sccept it, bad program, bad intent… if they do, its a winner.

Note tweakers are the least cooperative group. While your helping one install a net, the other is stealing your car battery to recycle for drug money.

Your argument seems to be entirely from consequences of the argument that you reject based on prior political stances. Let me sum up the argument differently, and rather than provide more dimensions, I’ll remove those dimensions that seem to distract from my point:

In principle, an individual has greater potential access to information about what provides her utility than does any third party. Each individual is the ultimate authority on his own level of utility. The only way to objectively assess the amount of utility an individual gets from something is to observe the choices that she makes. So utilitarianism must value choice; ceteris paribus, more choice means more utility.

Choice is an illusion of determining circumstantial factors.

I don’t disagree with that. How does it apply? Does the fact that there’s no free choice entail that there’s no choice for practical purposes? Isn’t it not very useful in most questions of what to do with oneself to say, “well, for starters, I know that the decision of what to do with myself is an illusion of determining circumstantial factors”, and then reason from there? How does that advance the question of what one should do with oneself?

By choice, I don’t mean any sort of existential radical freedom. I mean something much more like agency, i.e. the chooser is the person who makes the act that results in the outcome, regardless of whether it’s clockwork.

Bad or evil choices are the side effect of deeper, older, chain reactions of natural processes.
It’s like a row of dominoes.

Because humans can’t stop that from happening, they suppress it.
They only suppress it when it’s too late.
Example : punishing a killer only after he kills someone,
instead of preventing the mentality and inner disease which causes such things in this case.

Even practical purposes are determined on circumstances.

Are all forms of practicality the same for everybody? Of course they’re not.

Choices are determined by environment. Consciousness or agency the very mechanisms that chooses only reacts to environment. Environment rules all.

And yes, I would be bold by saying it’s exactly like clockwork.

Back it up Carleas, what political stance?

My stance is from direct exposure as well and reading on this. I offered it up on the spectrum of homeless shelters and donors, not government and state finance… though the answer would be the same.

I’m furthermore NOT Anti-Utilitarian, I’ve been plenty and long convinced by some fine research by others it’s largely based off operations in the left hemisphere. I don’t fight against what IS in human nature. However, I recognize it is a severely limited mode of thought capable of its own evils.

Now, back to those nets. What I said is very much correct. I need to stress this as you live in DC, think your important, and might accidently put ideas in someone’s head capable of effecting policy… choice us directed in this case by Etiology, and Etiology is approached by Means of Effecting Operations.

To get something from A to Z, you need to make certain it is able to overcome all the friction in between. Giving a choice between $10 bucks or a Ten Dollar Net isn’t giving them much a choice at all, as it isn’t a choice worth having, if the goal is getting rid of malaria. Both systems rely on shipping the nets, and a depot system, and availability of product. Your juggling want vs need here.

You saturate them with nets, including expecting accidental destruction and wear and tear. You don’t hand them 10 bucks and hope they make the wise choice, cause people in Africa have bigger concerns than Carleas or DC whisker stroking… $10 can but a lot of things. They might not care about Malaria cause they already have it, and let those mosquitos chew them half the night indifferent, passing that shit on. People in the third world aren’t going to think like some well off lawyer living in DC.

The whole idea behind Bush releasing all those anti-AIDS medicines (whole lot of other stuff too) was because the economic theories during his administration carried it farther than you are in your current scope… that if you show they can live longer, they will regain hope and try harder to keep themselves healthy, which in turns has economic and social advantages for said society… they suddenly feel something more is at stake. They will invest themselves back into their society.

If you look at members of the forum… say Joker and Phred, both lost everything, feel chucked and are disgruntled and pissed. No amount of Utility to Currency calculation is going to work, they already went Sith and feel society is discredited. Best you can hope for by flushing them with money is that they turn into Smears… a self sufficient druggie who doesn’t work anymore.

By giving them programs with check and balances, you can pick off select portions of the population still receptive still to ideas. Its like lithics… your breaking flakes off a core, you still have a core in the end… your statistical success is that sliver you broke off from the larger problem.

From my personal experience, governors like 5 year plans to solve “problems”, but first that problem needs defined, and it’s usually some career paracite from DHHR coming in getting random people to offer suggestions and do questionnaires… this results in a study, sent to a state legislature, and either money is given or not. Often, it doesn’t even get this far… just that paracite doing surveys, and it ends up on a library shelf somewhere. I’ve sat in on a few of these meetings, they are really, really pointless. Its really embarrassing, one of the worst features of American Democracy.

Ideas for utility must always begin and end in logistics and operations. From start to finish. If for one second, your not doing that, it is a dead theory. You only offer up options when that bell curve is seen to be too shallow… when it occurs that choice increases success.

In your scenario Carleas, by default, we must presume choice retards the purpose of mosquito nets… some will choose to forgo them, cause they can. My position shifts once your able to show for whatever magical reason people who are given nets are less likely to use them than people given cash, and not nets. This would be, of course absurd at face value, but silly stuff like this does happen. Just luckily, not from our experience in distributing nets… people get Malaria sucks.

You can make arguments that people value nets they have to buy (heavily subsidized), but quite frankly, your trying to stamp this disease out… yes, they value nets they gotta buy more, but accidents happen, and you want them to have quick and rapid access to this stuff. A basic net needs to be freely and very readily accessible to all. You can offer pimped out variations for fees if valuation ranks that high up on the grand scale of things, not everyone can afford paid nets, but everyone can afford free nets. From the US dinar perspective, we are paying for it either way… and it’s still being shipped the same, distributed largely the same through depots, just one is merchants, other is aid workers or government supply houses… no matter what we gotta provide more nets than people to make up for accidents and thefts… does it really matter if we give it for free or charge someone? Not really from our end… might keep the longevity if some nets. But giving a choice between costs and nets at this stage is stupid… goal is to stomp the disease out, not encourage it to survive on a statistical fringe that we willingly perpetuate.

Should soldiers be given cash to buy ammo?

Again, Turd, this thread is not about policy and it is not about mosquito nets. I offered a toy scenario to illustrate how choice can raise utility, and your response is to look at the geopolitics of real scenarios that resemble the toy scenario. The toy scenario isn’t about malaria, it’s about the utility that is derived from choice.

As I summed up earlier, I’m only claiming here that “ceteris paribus, more choice means more utility”. Your response, which is best summed up as “ceteris is not paribus”, is a red herring.

HHH, this thread is also not really about the nature of choice either. I’m taking as a given that decisions are made about how to act. Whether those decisions are predetermined is also a red herring.

If it helps, think of the proposition like this: there are computers that determine some outcome, and we want to maximize some value in the outcome. But that value is made up by properties internal to each computer, and each computer will include its own internal properties in its calculations. These properties can’t be perfectly communicated to another computer, the other computers can only infer them from a computer’s output. Given these constraints, which would we expect to create more value: a situation where a computer is tasked with maximizing the value in its own internal properties, or one where e.g. computer A is responsible for maximizing computer B’s internal properties? (Note that here we have a god’s-eye view, the computers can’t ever have perfect information about the sum of the values from all internal properties.)

I’m proposing that the computers should make the calculations that affect their internal properties, because they are the ones with perfect information about those properties.

Alrighty Carleas.

The only thing that might see something wrong with what you as an individual think is good, is the society.

I think this pushes me on the subject of what exactly counts as “ceteris paribus”. I don’t think I can mean completely equal outcomes, because if two outcomes where the people are equally happy and they have the same net utility, I don’t mean to claim (here) that the outcome that had more individuals choosing their level of utility is better by a utilitarian yardstick than the one where their happiness was given to them.

There will be cases where one individual (Call her i) choosing thing A will increase her own utility at the expense of the utility of others. However, the same is true when a third party (call him t) chooses on behalf of i: whether or not i or t chooses outcome A, i’s utility will be increased at the expense of the utility of others. But uniquely in the case of i’s having chosen A, we will know that A produces the greatest utility for i. If t makes the choice, we aren’t told anything about the utility of A to i. Again, from the god’s-eye view, we know that A is the best outcome, but we don’t have the god’s eye view in practical morality.

So consider instead that we have three possible outcomes, A, B, and C. Suppose that each will have some impact on society’s utility Y, that we know what that impact is, and that it is the same for all outcomes. Let the outcome’s impact on i’s utility be X, so net utility is Y+X (where either number can be negative). If i decides the outcome, the expected value of Y+X is maximized. If t decides the outcome, the expected value of Y+X is average of all the possible outcomes, which must be less than or equal to the expected outcome in the case where i chooses herself.

The case is different if the impact on society’s utility is different in A, B, and C, but this would be some of the ceteris that is not paribus. In many cases, there may be a strong argument that one outcome has such a large impact on society that no difference in outcome to i could outweigh it. Still, the value of choice applies at the margins: in cases where there is no difference, or even no known difference to society, choice should be expected to increase utility. There will also be cases where that expectation is defied, but that doesn’t change the fact that, in prospect, our expectation is greater where the choice is greater.

Have you ever tried buying an egg sandwich in NYC? Fried, over-easy, sunny side up? Rye, bagel, sourdough, granary, wholegrain? Margarine, butter, mayo, spread? Salad? Mustard? Ketchup? Eat in or takeout? I. Want. Food.

Choice is not a background physical variable that acts in fixed relations, it’s an active demand on one’s cognitive functions. The art of designing website interfaces, car dashboards, air traffic control systems, all sorts of things, lies more in simplification and filtering out information than expanding choice, because a reduced choice increases the utility for the user. Even much basic moral philosophy aims to make us happier by simplifying our moral choices.

Additionally, there are interesting psychological experiments on the tyranny of choice: people offered less choice can be happier than people with more. Hypothesised to be because most people react more strongly to a negative event than to the corresponding positive - humans are intrinsically somewhat risk-averse. The result being that the minor increases in utility that having over-easy on rye, mayo and mustard no salad to take out, is gradually swamped by the feeling you could have enjoyed all of the other options more. From bollier.org/tyranny-choice : “There’s obviously much to be said for consumer choice. But it’s also true that a life marked by boundless choice ends up being a life of hyper-calculation in pursuit of a perfection that always seems just a little bit out of reach… consumers find too many options troubling because of the “risk of misperception and miscalculation, of misunderstanding the available alternatives, of misreading one’s own tastes, of yielding to a moment’s whim and regretting it afterwards,” combined with “the stress of information acquisition.””

On top of that, cognitive distortions rule our natural choice-making utility assessments, and can guide us to do things against our best interest, or take up illogical, inconsistent positions. Choice is pure utility if we’re dealing with homo economicus, with his even logical thought and infinite time, access to pure data and equanimity in the face of loss… but since no-one believes in him any longer, we’re stuck with homo sapiens.

Dare I say it Only_Humean but this is the first post of yours I’ve seen that I like. I mean that sincerely.

Can you provide me with some reading material on what you discussed here?

I would also like to interject that choices within civilization, culture, and society seems to be preselected by those with power where what is perceived as freedom or free will really isn’t.

You’re limited to what is prescribed, offered, or given to you by those that control societies.

What real choice, freedom, or free will do we really have?

Society or culture or whatever you might want to call it, has created us all solely and wholly for the purpose of maintaining its continuity and status quo.

It would seem so, yes.

But it makes sense to me that one of the choices would have to be the best one, and the more options a person has, the more difficult it could become to sort out which option is best. There are 2 doors, one has a million bucks behind it, and the other a pile of turds. So 50/50 chance you increase your utility. So you give em 3 doors, one with the money, one with the pile of turds, and another one with a 1 year supply of skittles. Now they have a 1/3 chance of maximizing utility, unless they eat exactly a million bucks in skittles a year. If you just gave them 1 door, they’d have no choice, but if that door had the money behind it then they would have an increase in utility.

Only_Humean, you raise good points, some of which I can respond to better than others. Nonetheless, I will attempt to respond to them all.

First, there’s an equivocation at work between the ‘choice’ in “more choice means more utility” and that in “the tyranny of choice”. The tyranny of choice seems more damning of choices, the individual outcomes between which one is choosing, and I agree that increasing choices isn’t necessarily going to increase utility. But increasing choices isn’t always increasing choice. From here forward, I’ll us the term ‘options’ to refer to choices, to help make clear the distinction.

Adding more options can decrease choice in the sense I mean it. The practical limits are the easiest to see: if there are a gargantuan number of options, then it can’t necessarily be said that someone has chosen X over Y, because with a large number of options, it’s unlikely that most have truly been considered. For just this reason, I wouldn’t say that adding options is necessarily adding choice. Similar to the point I made above, that someone who doesn’t understand medicine isn’t choosing alcohol over medicine, someone who is overwhelmed with options isn’t really choosing between them. Choice, in this sense, can be decreased by the addition of options.

But I don’t think this response fully addresses it. Choice, in the sense I mean it, does have a cost, so there are times where adding more choice will not add value equal to the cost. That is a more complete response, and I agree that it undermines my main point. I still think choice is inherently valuable, but it is also costly in practice, so more choice doesn’t always mean more utility, even certeris paribus.

I don’t think the critique that humans are irrational is a big problem. Again, I do think irrationality can decrease real choice, and that seems intuitive (a drunk person can’t consent, children and the mentally disabled can’t be held to contracts, etc.). And I’m also skeptical of some (though not all) labeling of actions as irrational; the fact that cognitive biases exist and can be manipulated experimentally doesn’t mean that in most real situations they tend towards the right answer. But most of all, it’s not a problem because the irrationality exists on both sides: someone has to decide, so the fact that people are irrational doesn’t add or detract from the argument that a particular person should decide in a particular set of cases.

MrR, your objection that choices decrease the probability of making the right choice only applies if you reverse the allocation of information. If you know what’s behind the doors and I don’t, of course your choice will produce a better result. But if we’re actually looking at a pile of skittle and a pile of money, only I know how much I value skittles and how much I value money. The utility of those things to me is subjective, so the information is on my side. Adding more choices (‘options’) could tax me to the point where my decision is less choice-ful, but that’s the problem O_H raised that I (try to) respond to above.