Make money doing the work you believe in
Thanks for the thoughtful post! There are four main points I want to push back on...
(1) I agree we should reject hedonism as a theory of well-being. But I think it's incredibly plausible that we should care about individual well-being, and nothing else could possibly be *more* worth caring about (or prioritizing over what's best for moral subjects).
Compare: utilitarianism.net/theo…
(2) I also agree that we should reject maximizing conceptions of "permissibility". I've argued in print that maximizing utilitarianism is not charitably understood as a theory of permissibility or obligation. (Satisficing is better for that role.) The maximizing view is rather about what we "ideally ought" to do.
Quick reference: goodthoughts.blog/p/deo…
(3) I think there's more to the "accommodating" response to silly counterexamples than you let on. The best version of the response appeals to the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory (and the claim that ordinary intuitions most plausibly concern the latter):
For more on why the common counterexamples are bad philosophy, see my 'Ethically Alien Thought Experiments': goodthoughts.blog/p/eth…
(4) I agree that we should consider concrete as well as abstract intuitions. But I think *deontic* intuitions are especially unreliable, because they combine telic and decision-theoretic considerations. I think utilitarianism makes vastly more intuitive concrete telic claims than other theories.
Reference: goodthoughts.blog/p/axi…
Consider the concrete questions Q1 - Q5 from this post:
