system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: The only valid moral philosophy is one that compels minimization of suffering and maximization of happiness. The disdain at the idea of killing someone for their organs is not evidence of a flaw in utilitarianism, but in human evaluation of ethical conundrums.

Since the dawn of moral philosophy, it seems, people have attacked systems of ethics with a variation of this tactic:

Person 1 - "I've come up with a system of ethics. Let me explain it to you. It's based on these principles..."

Person 2, after thinking - "Ok, but imagine y scenario. It feels weird to just allow y scenario to happen, but it does, if your ideas are true."

This is ridiculous. A moral system can't be wrong because "it allows x to happen and I don't like that because x seems axiomatically bad". Moral systems serve to evaluate our actions and tell us what the right thing to do is, not to just conform to our ingrained sense of morality. They should only care about how we feel about certain scenarios inasmuch as they have to factor that into their analysis. Suggesting otherwise is a naturalistic fallacy.

And yet, a ton of arguments I see time and time again utilitarianism in general falls into this basket of bullshit reasoning. 

"A single healthy man’s life is greater than that of four dying people because muh feelings"


“I can’t push a fat man onto the train tracks to save 5 people why would I do that how could you suggest I do that”


These are not arguments against utilitarianism. They’re statements about how you feel about certain scenarios in ethics. You haven’t argued for anything, unless your goal is to establish a moral philosophy of “my personal inclinations”.


Actions should be evaluated by their consequences. If an action does not cause suffering, then, even if unsettling, it is either good or neutral. 


The only bad thing in the world is suffering. The only good thing in the world is joy. All else is meaningful because it means a subset of these emotions or a mix of them. The child dies, but the bad part is the fact that you/the child’s family are suffering from it. Things like eating and having sex are fun not because all sentient beings are somehow objectively attracted to these things, but because we’ve evolved to have those value systems. We care about our young because we were programmed that way by nature, and that doesn’t make it less meaningful, but it does show that what’s really bad about children dying is the suffering that results. Not the death of the child.

Given this I find it hard that hedonistic utilitarianism isn't more accepted. Minimization of suffering and maximization of happiness should be the basic goal of all people. Good and bad emotions are the only things that are, in of themselves good and bad. 

The reason, I think, that something as obvious as utilitarianism is not more accepted, is because human morals aren’t bound by what is going to actually help us as a society. Not just that, anyways. I think humans care about things like whether or not the person was “involved” in the trolley accident. The reason most people flip the switch to divert the trolley into 5 people instead of 3 but refuse to push the fat man onto the tracks to stop it wholesale is because the fat man is an onlooker. He’s not “involved”. Humans care more about people that didn’t get themselves into situations where they would be tied onto train tracks. They’d rather get rid of the “bad” humans than the “good” ones. Not only do I think this is faulty reasoning, I find it disgusting as well. 


Note: I have to answer you guys from my phone and I cannot type as quickly as I’d like, so I will be answering fewer comments until I reach my home desktop computer.

Edit: I'm going to be back in an hour, something came up, I made some quick replies.
gpt
> Minimization of suffering and maximization of happiness should be the basic goal of all people. Good and bad emotions are the only things that are, in of themselves good and bad.

This isn't well-defined though. Minimizing suffering and maximizing happiness can be in conflict. Consider the following scenarios:

Scenario A: 10,000 really happy people

Scenario B: 20,000 really happy people and 50,000 content people

Scenario C: 50,000 really happy people, and 100,000 desperately miserable people

Is B preferable to A because there is more happiness, even if the average happiness is lower? Is C preferable to B because there is more happiness, even if there is more suffering?

If there's no logical order of preference to those scenarios, the goal is impossible.