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purplecatVincent Wiegel presented joint work with Jan van den Berg investigating a criticism of a philosophical standpoint called act utilitarianism (contrasted to rule utilitarianism).
Roughly speaking, an act utilitarian evaluates each action, as they occur, in order to decide the utility of acting while a rule utilitarian acts according to a general rule about the utility. The thought experiment used to debunk act utilitarianism was that of an election. In a population of 100 an act utilitarian only votes if they are the 51st person to vote for their preferred candidate in all other situations they gain more utility by going and doing something else more interesting. Wiegel and van den Berg simulated this situation computationally. Obviously first they had some issues about why an act utilitarian might conclude they get utility only by being the 51st person to vote and of course, how they might determine that they have the deciding vote. Interestingly, when they varied their assumptions a bit so that act utilitarians only voted if they had reason to believe they were in the range of the 46th - 56th voter (or similar) - i.e., that their vote was likely to decisive then they did very well frequently getting the outcome they wished in an election while getting to do other more interesting things when the outcome was essentially a foregone conclusion anyway.
Roughly speaking, an act utilitarian evaluates each action, as they occur, in order to decide the utility of acting while a rule utilitarian acts according to a general rule about the utility. The thought experiment used to debunk act utilitarianism was that of an election. In a population of 100 an act utilitarian only votes if they are the 51st person to vote for their preferred candidate in all other situations they gain more utility by going and doing something else more interesting. Wiegel and van den Berg simulated this situation computationally. Obviously first they had some issues about why an act utilitarian might conclude they get utility only by being the 51st person to vote and of course, how they might determine that they have the deciding vote. Interestingly, when they varied their assumptions a bit so that act utilitarians only voted if they had reason to believe they were in the range of the 46th - 56th voter (or similar) - i.e., that their vote was likely to decisive then they did very well frequently getting the outcome they wished in an election while getting to do other more interesting things when the outcome was essentially a foregone conclusion anyway.