So there's this argument that utilitarianism doesn't work because (per work by behavioral economists) preferences are non-transitive. That is, you can't make a top to bottom list of preferences for each person where the higher position is always a higher preference.
But, like, surely preferences are *pretty* transitive? You can construct weird non-transitive cases. But for most purchase you could construct a list.
You'd be right, *if* in the real world you didn't find both passionately for better material circumstances independent of social other and passionately for a higher social position independent of material circumstances.
These are completely incompatible.
I suspect there are many others.
@dancer_storm
I'm not the right professor to ask, but there are good works on preferences favouring "collective harmony" over the individual benefit.
However, your specific question is not well posed, because by definition, utility is the final value, and may well include "making other people happy".
@ZachWeinersmith
@iinavpov @ZachWeinersmith what do you mean by well posed?
I'm thinking of something like \[u_a = U_a([C_{ax}, C_{ay}, C_{az}, ...], [u_b, u_c, u_d, ...])\] and \[u_b = U_b([C_{bx}, C_{by}, C_{bz}, ...], [u_a, u_c, u_d, ...])\]
Where \(a\), \(b\), \(c\) are individuals and \(C\) is consumption
Since \(u_a\) depends on \(u_b\) and vice versa, aggregation becomes more challenging I imagine. Do you have something specific that I can read?
Zach Weinersmith
Nemo
economística