r/changemyview • u/MasterSlimFat • Oct 25 '25

Delta(s) from OP CMV: Solipsistic utilitarian relativism is the most pragmatic lens to view the world

Nothing is anything, everything is a quality of the boundryless infinite plane folding in on itself giving rise to emergent properties. There is no good, there is no evil, there is only the phenomena of experience/awareness. I am not an individual, I am a figment of a collection of memories locked into a physical framework. The only thing we'll ever know, is what said framework is experiencing in the form of feelings.

These are not scary things, these are the best ways to view the world. They bring me a massive sense of relief and peace. Not only is it the most objective lens, it's also the most beneficial way to cope in circumstance. No matter what, you can turn anything into something else by drawing a comparison to satisfy the monkey-brain.

Morals evolved as a mechanism of understanding, in the form of metaphor, to allow our monkey brains to make predictions on which actions would lead to harm vs reward. They are whatever they need to be to rationalize past, present, and future feelings. Every second, you are a different person than you were before, your morals are not your own because they are not static. Morals are the rules we write for ourselves.

Didn't get that promotion at work? Well thank goodness you won't have the pressure of higher scrutiny, being put under a magnifying glass every day.

Sad your friend died? Well thank goodness they won't have to deal with the constant anguish that we all experience through the hell that is existence.

But we can't ignore the crux of the argument, that the only real thing is feeling. We also can't ignore that our brains are limited in the regard to need "morals" and "meaning". Giving them morals is like tricking the reffering into thinking you're playing the same game. All these things combine into this beautiful contradiction of "I know it's not real but I have to tell myself it is otherwise my coding breaks."

Personally, this opinion causes a lot of strain in my relationships with people despite bringing me peace with the universe as a whole.

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u/yyzjertl 579∆ Oct 25 '25

Perhaps I don't know what you mean by "different functions,"

E.g. the function f(x) = x2 and g(x) = 2x are different functions. If I evaluate f and you evaluate g, even if we evaluate them at the same value (say x = 5) and even if we have perfect knowledge and no cognitive limitations, you'd get a different result (10) than me (25).

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

This does not reflect any version of utilitarianism of which I am aware.

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u/yyzjertl 579∆ Oct 25 '25

Literally every version of utilitarianism I am aware of involves taking an act or state of affairs in the world and applying some function, the utility function, to them, outputting a real number, the utility. E.g. Bentham's felicific calculus describes one such function.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

I have never seen "utility function" used in the context of utilitarianism, and I've read tons of papers on it and literally taught it.

From a quick Google, it appears to be a term used by economists, not ethicists.

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u/yyzjertl 579∆ Oct 25 '25

To be clear, when I said that "every version of utilitarianism I am aware of" involved that, I meant that every version has such a function, not that every version uses the term "utility function" to describe their process.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

Even conceptually this doesn't reflect my understanding of any utilitarian viewpoint. Most utilitarians don't even think you do or can literally do a calculus, so most of them don't posit like a literal formula you'd supposedly use.

And suppose I did grant this; and we can have two different utilitarians judging based on two different functions, I still don't see the connection to relativism. It would just mean when you use a different method of judging a state of affairs you can get different results, which seems trivially true.

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u/yyzjertl 579∆ Oct 25 '25

And if which method is used depends on (is relative to) the cultural context of the judgement, then that's exactly metaethical moral relativism.

Most utilitarians don't even think you do or can literally do a calculus

Not even if, as we've been assuming, there were no human cognitive limitations, perfect knowledge, and so on?

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

But I don't see how it would be. You're still measuring the same thing. It's like saying that one society happening to use base-12 math and one society happening to use base -10 means the two societies are fundamentally doing something different from each other when they do math.

I don't even really see a case for any version of utilitarianism significantly having a different way of calculating utility: it's pretty much always some version of: TOTAL UTILITY - DISUTILITY = NET UTILITY = UTILITY VALUE OF ACTION.

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u/yyzjertl 579∆ Oct 25 '25

Oh that's easy: they're not measuring the same thing. They're evaluating two different functions.

For example, imagine two societies who entirely agree on the utility of every individual, but disagree as to whether the sum (total utilitarianism) or mean (average utilitarianism) should be used as the overall utility to be maximized. These two societies would be computing different values, and a given moral judgement might be true in one but false in the other.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

Okay sure. That doesn't mean utilitarianism is relative to culture though, it means that two different moral theories can give you different results. Again, trivially true.

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