Mastodawn

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.

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outofthenorm

@ZachWeinersmith On modelling these things with numbers, I’m reminded promise theory (which only seems to have any usage in server configurations) considers any change in promise to be a broken promise, even if it’s numerically better. So if I promise to send you £10 after you send me a book, you might not be happy to send that book to someone who promises to pay £10,000 for the same book (because they’re totally not going to keep that promise).