Okay, so I'm a new poster here; Ryan told me about this site and parts of his interpretations of utilitarianism. I had a question about the entire philosophy, but I'll get to that.

So, the suggestion was that I think of five interesting things to say about myself; here goes. I'm a maths/engineering student at ANU (in AUS), finishing the first year of my bachelor's now. I have worn women's clothing on more than five separate occasions, although most of them don't count. I currently don't drink alcohol, as part of a bet that I won't for a little under four more years, although people fairly frequently assume I'm drunk anyway. This is partly because I like both Twister and freestyle dancing to the extent of mania. And I'm not a utilitarian.

My logic behind this is that I understand that utilitarianism proposes that the best purpose in life is to maximise the sum utility (which I understand to equate to happiness) of all sentient beings. However, this presupposes that I care about the happiness of distant and unrelated sentients. Furthermore, it supposes that I should do as much to increase their happinesses as I do for my own. If I've misunderstood something here, please correct me.

Now, if I don't know someone (and don't know anything about them) then I generally don't care how happy they are. I certainly wouldn't give John Citizen's happiness the same priority I give my own, or that of my friends. But utilitarianism suggests that I consider the greater good of many people I neither know nor care about more important than the good of fewer people I do. I appreciate the logic of this, that the greater good is more important than ourselves, but it raises the question of why I would want to be moral if so being would result in benefits intangible to me and losses to myself and those I care about.

This is basically the question. If this interpretation of morality is liable to result in my personal unhappiness, why would I follow it, even if it is 'correct'?

Hi Mark, welcome to Felicifia, the best and only utilitarianism forum online. I realise that you're not utilitarian, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the community here. For the sake of freshness, I think I'll leave most of your opening post to be discussed by other Felicifians.

I do congratulate you on your solid performance in our bet so far. I imagine your discipline in the abstinence from alcohol would make you the envy of many-a-utilitarian. But it's sure to have its advantages for non-utilitarians too. It can't hurt the finances for example. Good luck on the next few years. You'll never win

Basically, grab a pew, sit down, and enjoy yourself.

Hi QM, and welcome. Great to have scientific types here, even if they don't identify as utilitarians. Rather than address your questions here, I'll save my energy for a series of posts I'm hoping to start (if not finish) making soon describing my logical path to util and hopefully addressing some of the more common criticisms. The grand idea being that I'll constantly edit them for logic and readability according to responses in the threads, and end up with something semi-wiki-like that still holds together as a coherent series of propositions and steps in an argument that we can point newcomers to. This might be hopelessly ambitious, but I'm hoping that breaking each point up into manageable chunks will a) make it more readable, b) make it more writable, and c) make it more refer-to-able.

Hopefully you'll find life without alcohol easier than you think. I haven't 'given it up', but I rarely have any desire to drink it these days, since I find life much more easy to enjoy when I'm usually sober enough to know whether I'm enjoying myself.

Questionable Mark wrote:This is basically the question. If this interpretation of morality is liable to result in my personal unhappiness, why would I follow it, even if it is 'correct'?

I don't think anyone does have a compelling reason for you to. But imagine a sadist whose life will be marginally more happy if he kidnaps you and tortures you to death - if his sole over-riding interest is his own happiness, he will presumably follow this course of action. "Should" he refrain from doing so for your interest, or out of any sense of morality? If he has no ethics or morality, he certainly won't refrain.
In any case, surely morality as a whole is based around actions that will result in your personal unhappiness? If not, you'll always take the action which you believe to result in your happiness, and morality simply becomes a way to gauge what's likely to result in this - which seems to sort of miss the point.
Finally, on the subject of morality, I suppose we're considering what we believe to be 'right' - whether or not we choose to take this course of action is up to us as individuals. I am certainly interested in trying to establish a definitive answer to the question of whether, ceteris paribus, it is deemed 'right' to kill one man to save two others.

Going back to something else you said, I've thought back to my uni days [pretty recent], and I can think of precisely five occasions on which I've worn women's clothing, though three of those were a Dr. Frankenfurter outfit - I wouldn't say any of them "count". I did once, while dressed as Little Bo Peep, have someone ask me what gender I was...