Many versions of utilitarianism never specified the function to compute the sum for the many. Your example assumes that the function is simple addition, but others have been proposed that reflect some of the complexities of the human condition a little more explicitly (e.g. sad neighbors make neighbors sad).
Reinforcing your point, Peter Singer, philosopher and noted utilitarian, has explicitly said that he weights misery far more than happiness in his own framework. From a personal level, he said he'd give up the 10 best days of his life to remove the one worst day of his life (or something like that).
All of his work with effective altruism is aimed at reducing suffering of those worst off in the world and spends no time with how to make the well off even happier.
I hadn’t heard that about Singer’s philosophy (unsurprisingly as I’ve read very little of his work). It’s interesting for me in that it lines up with Kahnemann & Tversky’s “losses loom larger than gains” heuristic in psychology.
Singer publishes his book, "The Life You Can Save" for free -- it was revised for the 10th anniversary. It is available in various formats, including an audio book. It is a short, easy read. It is also one of the most impactful books I've ever read.
Along the header there is an item "free book" if you want to get the book.
In short, there are a few theses in the book that combine in a compelling way. This isn't his summary, this is the summary I got out of reading it. (1) the suffering of someone you don't know is just as real as the suffering of someone you do know. (2) there are many worthy causes, but we aren't allocating enough resources to address them all, so it is best to allocate them such that they do the most good for the worst off (3) if you are reading hacker news, you are likely in the 1% (worldwide) and your primary needs are already being met and you can make meaningful contributions to help those most in need without affecting your lifestyle much.
Each chapter tackles a topic. For instance, part of it brings up many the counter arguments about why someone might not want to donate and then debunks them. Eg, in a poll, most US citizens believe that 10-20% of their taxes are going to foreign, and say about half that, say 5%, would be reasonable. In fact it is well under 1%. Or people will say there have always been poor people and there will always be poor people (counter argument: to the people who are helped, aid makes a huge difference to them personally, and there have actually been great strides in the past 30 years at reducing global poverty).
Another chapter talks about the typical feel good news item about someone in the community who has gone blind and so the community pitches in to pay for a seeing eye dog for the person (it costs up to $50K to train and vet such dogs). Yet that same $50K could have prevented river blindness for thousands of children, or been enough to perform cataract surgery on thousands of blind adults.
People often say, why give to a charity in Africa? It will just end up in someone's pocket before it helps anyway. The book talks about the effective altruism movement and describes how charities are vetted and monitored. The website above has links to many such vetted charities.
Another chapter talks about where to draw the line? Sure, I can afford $700 to pay for corrective surgery for a woman suffering from fistula and feel good about myself. But in reality I could afford another $700, then another $700, etc. Do I need to keep donating to those worse off until I am one of the worse off people? (spoiler: no)
As an aside, this is why buying insurance, despite being a financially bad bet (or the insurers would go out of business), actually is a sensible thing to do from a quality of life perspective.
Insurance isn't a financially bad bet. They're providing a service (not needing to maintain the liquidity of replacement costs) in exchange for a fixed monthly fee. It's cheaper for me to grow my own food but it's not a "bad bet" to not be a subsistence farmer and buy my food at the grocery store even though many people are making money off my purchase up the chain. I get to use my money and time for something more productive.
You are right for catastrophic insurance, ie insurance that covers outlays that would financially ruin you, or at least be majorly inconvenient.
Many people buy (or are forced to buy) insurance that covers minor outlays, too.
Using that kind of insurance has pretty big (relative) overheads not just in terms of money but also in terms of annoying paperwork and bureaucracy.
Some of the worst offenders are probably health insurance plans that include a fixed hundred bucks allowance towards new glasses every year. They might just as well charge you hundred bucks less in premiums and strike that allowance. (Unless in cases where that scheme is a tax dodge.)
Profit is only one part of the overhead. They also have to pay agents, adjusters, underwriters, managers, office stationary, postage, fraud investigators, lawyers, taxes, interest on bonds etc.
Similar for hospitals etc. Profit, ie cost of equity capital, is usually (but not always) a relatively small part of an organisation's overall cost structure. And the non-profit alternatives typically don't have meaningfully lower costs.
Yeah, utilitarianism means you want to act in a way that's beneficial to most people.
There's many ways you can interpret that, though.
But I think if you say, before we had 1 apple per person, and now we have 2x as many apples, but they're all owned by one person - that's hard to argue it's utilitarian.
If before you had 100 apples, and everyone who wanted one had one, and now you have 10,000 apples distributed to people at random, but only 1 in 100 people who wants one has one - that also seems hard to argue as utilitarian.
Businesses are value maximization functions. They'll only be utilitarian if that happens to maximize value.
In the case of software - if you go from 1m users to 10m users - that doesn't imply utilitarianism. It implies that was good for gaming some metric - which more often than not these days is growth, not profit.
Which conceivable method of summing is the least problematic? Depending on the summing method you might find yourself advocating creating as many people as possible with positive utility, or eliminate everyone with below-average utility, etc.
Utility is very complicated and summing might not even be possible. Folks have argued for completely different utility systems, such as cardinal utility where utility is modeled purely as relations instead of something that is isomorphic to a real. Even going by the mainstream view of ordinal utility, utility tends to be a convex function (simplistically, having 1 food is much better than having no food, but having 1000 food isn't that much better than having 500 food.) Modeling utility as something purely isomorphic to reals gives it all the fun paradoxes that we know the reals have and can be used to create some really wacky results. The "repugnant conclusion" is a direct consequence of that.
I much prefer, "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." At least in that case nobody will confuse a trucker hat slogan for a viable system of ethics.
