http://www.abolitionist.com/ wrote:Bentham championed social and legislative reform, which is great as far as it goes; but he was working before the era of biotechnology and genetic medicine.

utilitarians in the past didnt know of the issues we face now and its very difficult for us to predict the issues that will exist in the future. if we promote specific campaigns and stuff thats fantastic but in the future they may no longer be issues or otehr issues may be much greater. if other people hadnt promoted utilitarianism we might not know of it now and if we dont promote utilitarianism then the idea could be lost, or maybe not lost, but remain the way it is now, largely unheard of.

if utilitarianism was publicised i imagine there would be more utilitarians, and a lot more people opposing utilitarianism but given that it doesnt seem like the people opposing utilitarianism are going to end up making less utility, or more disutility, than they would have already and also i dont see any other way around having people opposing you! humans are just like other animals, and theres no evolutionary drive to be utilitarian.

so anyway i was thinking along the same lines as having a utilitarian charity, just that instead of funding things if we could fund a explicity utilitarian organization which then funded other things and when it got publicity so would utilitarianism.

anyway sorry my ideas arnt clearer,

what think ye?:)

A utilitarian charity would be great, and there is at least one: "Charity International" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charity_International (official site: http://www.charity.se/)

They are currently altering their approach (probably to reach a wider audience) and rebranding to "Global Happiness Organization" which will have less of an explicit utilitarian stance and 3 specific directions: (1) human happiness, (2) animal happiness, and (3) future happiness

There is a thread about your topic here: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=497

yea they look great but i dont think they're going to promote utilitarianism, it would be very hard to without being explicity utilitarian anyway!

does anyone happen to know how many people other charities manage to convinve to donate, become vegan, etc, per dollar?

Here is what I think:
1. We need to raise consciousness to the issue of consequentialism. Utilitarianism and consequentialism are just common-sense. But it's an intuition that most people have in the backs of their mind and don't give much regard to. That has to change.

2. In ethics, it's impossible to achieve change by just bossin gpeople around. We need to model utilitarian behaviour. That means we need to figure out what helps the world, then do it as best we can, then tell people about it. We need a vehicle that others are aware of.
Giving What We Can is one. It figures out which charities are effective, it donates to them, and when it sprouts a chapter in a new city, it gives a press release about it. Brilliant. If in 2011, there is any stronger way to send a utilitarian message about charity, I'm not aware of it.
2a. there is a special category of leading by example. You can specifically label yourselves as utilitarians. If we could gather a hundred people who would donate under the banner of utilitarianism, we might create a Utilitarian Donor Fund that donated annually to givingwhatwecan's top ranked charity. This would be a mimic of the atheist effort to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars, explicitly in the name of atheism, to causes that everyone knows and cares about. I don't see why this could not be done within the next 5 years.
2b. One vision of how we could lead by example is by creating an evidence-based guide to living ethically. This is what Wiki Felicifia could be if it was worked on by twenty editors for ten years. Think of how Cochrane reviews have transformed medicine. We could point to this guide to utilitarianism and say "I act like this because I have the strongest evidence that this makes the world better".

3. In creating a social movement, we have to be very inclusive. The more people we include, the stronger we are. However, the more we include, the more complex our discussions will be, and the more complex our conclusions will be. Clearly, there's no reason to exclude hedonistic, preferntialist, negative, desire or any other utilitarians. Prior existence utilitarianism is fine. Prioritarian consequentialists are fine (a crude form of justice). Risk aversity can enter into calculations. I think we can include all of these forms of consequentialism and still retain our distinct flavour.

the more i think about this the more awesome it seems, people love a purpose, a reason for living, something to believe in and give them confidence and let them know that they're a good person. utilitarianism can give this to them instead of them wanting to do good but not beng sure how to go about it. not only do more utilitarians bring more resources they would bring new ideas and new perspectives on old ones.

multiple utilitarians will do more benefit than one utilitarian (me) therefore as long as i can inspire more than one person to be utilitarian in the course of my whole life it seems to be cost effective,

high impact careers happen to be talking about this in the newsletter they just sent out:

We believe it's more ethical to become a professional philanthropist than to take a conventional ethical career. But is earning money to donate to high impact causes the most high impact thing to do?

One activity which seems to be clearly better is influencing others to become professional philanthropists. Persuading one person to take that route does about as much good as taking the route yourself. (bold mine)

obviously theres a scale of diminishing returns, but i dont think it really kicks in until utilitarianism is so widely known that putting more resources into it makes less than 1 extra utilitarian. however also the people who we inspire to be utilitarian were probably already quite likely to do something good, but still id say its unlikely they would of thought of wild animal suffering and stuff like that! and also the people who dont become utilitarian may become slightly more utilitarian, or at least consider or remember the ideas.

but then as well as the above (which seems to make it cost effective) it has great benefits for the future, and given the fact that we cant predict the future perhaps all that well but it seems likely the power humans will have in the future is likely vastly more than now this is really important. while trying to get the people research who AI and other utilitarian-relevant futuristic topics to go in a more utilitarian direction is great it seems inevitable that at some point when it starts to take off people will notice and the government will legislate on it, which will largely be at the direction of the public (and the politicians of course ), if there are virtually no utilitarians then what chance do we have there?

also perhaps the futuric issues which we think are important at the moment will never come to happen, perhaps other things no one has yet thought of will be whats important. if we promote utilitarian thinking in specific groups and the things these groups predict do not happen then our investment may be lost, but if promote utilitarianism in general that isnt something that can ever be lost it will always be good to have more utilitarians, its a very "safe" investment.

in the same way that if we promote concern for factory farmed animals now and in 100 years there are no more factory farmed animals (well that would be fantastic but) then our investment has reached the end of its potential, whereas investing in inspiring people to be utilitarian does not, regardless of what future happens, so this approach removes a lot of risk.

if it became abundantly clear in the future that the life of the unviverse was going to be net negative, or the same of the wild, or some other naturally abhorrent idea and it became abundantly clear that we should end life or end the wild or do something else abhorrent to human nature, promoting utilitarianism would make people more open to a possibility like that, not that i think if we were handing out leaflets and giving talks that we shoud really mention these things much at all but by getting people to be utilitarian if it then became so clear that that was the best course of action im sure they would then be more open to it and it would get more support.

one reservation i can think of as regards it is how its going to work practically, i dunno is there enough utilitarians at the moment that we could have lectures and give out leaflets or are we all too disbursed? i guess this would stop being a problem as our numbers grew. if we didnt have the people power i guess we could have ad campaigns or something hm:/

RyanCarey wrote:1. We need to raise consciousness to the issue of consequentialism.

! so how best to do this?

RyanCarey wrote:. We need a vehicle that others are aware of.

absolutely, gwwc is awesome but they're promoting giving a lot and i think giving efficently to human charities. rather than utilitarianism itself, for the reasons i was saying above i dont see this being as good. perhaps the gho could be a one?

RyanCarey wrote:there is a special category of leading by example. You can specifically label yourselves as utilitarians. If we could gather a hundred people who would donate under the banner of utilitarianism, we might create a Utilitarian Donor Fund

to me that sounds frickin deadly, and could definitely be a vehicle that we could make people aware of, but would you not donate to the most utilitarian cause rather than the top ranked gwwc charity? it would be cool aswell to have this and for gho to be in existence also, one explicity utilitarian and one not so that we could kinda tell people about one depending on how "ready" they were for ideas they might find radical.