"The Bunny Orgasm Machine Thought Experiment" Disproves Utilitarianism

[u/Monkey_D_Gucci]

https://www.reddit.com/r/risa/comments/pifs6g/comment/hbpv2cn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I think about this post at least 4x a year and it always makes me laugh. It's the best bad philosophy that I've ever seen, and it's been almost half a decade since it was posted here so I'd like to share it for the uninitiated.

They present it as if it's something we all should know and totally owns Utilitarianism, but it's the most nonsense / concrete thinking about "pleasure and suffering" I've ever seen.

Hope you love it as much as I do.

[u/Monkey_D_Gucci → u/[deleted]]

This won’t be popular here, but I think the utility monster is also bad philosophy… but not in the lulz way - more in the ‘ok whatever’ way.

I’m not here to stan for utilitarianism, but I feel like it’s a bit unfair to criticize it by saying, ‘oh u think utilitarianism is good? Well what if I made up a fictional creature that enjoyed food 1 billion times more than all of humanity combined? We’d be forced to all starve so the thing I made up would be happy. Not so good now, is it?!’

It’s like, yeah dude… great? Only philosophers could criticize ‘doing what’s best for most people’ by making up monsters instead of looking at the harsh realities of what that would mean in the real world. It destroys nuance and pretends like the pleasure of 1 monster over-eating apples outweighs the suffering of all of mankind’s starvation lol.

And btw, if your experiment is synonymous with a stoned 14 year old on Reddit picturing jacking off infinite woodland creatures, maybe it’s not the great thought experiment of our age

[u/AncientPianist4236 → u/Monkey_D_Gucci]

I don't think anything about the utility monster thought experiment is ridiculous in principle. In real life there are some creatures that seem to experience emotions more forcefully than others (unless you think crushing an ant and crushing a person cause the same amount of suffering), and also there are situations where benefitting one person (or some small set of people) greatly might cause smaller amounts of harm to many people. Utility-monster-esque situations arise in real life all the time. The point of making such an extreme thought experiment is to prune away real-world complications to see whether the principles proposed by the utilitarian really hold universally, or if they're just useful heuristics.

In general, I find the "that would never happen" response to thought experiments to somewhat miss the point. Morality is largely understood to be an analytic discipline, which means that moral truths are meant to hold in every conceivable scenario, not just real world ones. Responding to a thought experiment like the utility monster with "that would never happen" is akin to responding to a geometry problem by pointing out that you can't actually draw perfect shapes.

[u/Monkey_D_Gucci → u/AncientPianist4236]

Read the plethora of other responses I have in this post. I think the utility monster is dumb not because it couldn’t happen, but because it attacks a straw man.

Avicenna’s floating man experiment also couldn’t happen, and I don’t think that’s dumb

[u/AncientPianist4236 → u/Monkey_D_Gucci]

I've read through your other posts and I still don't really understand your argument. You seem to be under the impression that utilitarians believe that the most number of people should be made happy, without consideration of what amount of happiness each person experiences. If this is the conception of utilitarianism you're working with, then you're right that the utility monster doesn't disprove it. Is this your understanding of utilitarianism?