No, my response was that time preference is irrelevant.
The way I see it, the issue is this: a libertarian cannot be a direct/act utilitarian, because that justifies all sorts of crazy things, e.g. killing one patient to redistribute their organs to five other patients.
But indirect/rule utilitarianism is not a coherent alternative, because it means following a rule even in cases when you could better promote utility by abandoning the rule; in other words, treating the rule as an end in itself (as a deontologist would) rather than as a means which promotes utility. So indirect utilitarianism is self-contradictory, because it ceases to be utilitarianism at all.
If you were a pure utilitarian/consequentialist and you thought it was “crazy” for you to do that, you wouldn’t do it. Because for a utilitarian, “crazy” = “net harm for me.” Either it benefits you or it doesn’t. Killing the donor, you net gain four lives, which may bring psychic benefit to you. Or, if directly taking a life brings you more psychic detriment than the psychic benefit of saving the other four, you refrain. Seems pretty straightforward.
Individualist utilitarianism is not the same as collectivist utilitarianism; the problem is utilitarianism in the context of a collectivist leader who justifies his actions by the Greatest Happiness Principle. Outside the monopolist and collectivist context, pure utilitarianism doesn’t have those problems. In fact, the problem lies solely in the collectivism, not in the utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a proximate cause, but the root cause is collectivism and monopoly statism.
Well, you would have to show why there is something wrong with killing-one-to-save-five (some would argue that it’s not wrong, although this example does serve as a good quick-and-dirty appeal to intuition if that’s all you want).
The reason why the indirect utilitarian has adopted the “unbreakable” rule is because they think that doing so will give greater long-run utility than not doing so, and that the latter is preferable after discounting for time preference. So there are no cases where they believe that breaking the rule will maximize expected utility.
Let’s say I’m a recovering alcoholic, and I have resolved never to drink alcohol ever again. My final value is good health, and I am teetotaling only as a means to that end. Nevertheless, although I recognize that there may be some cases where drinking alcohol will not in itself harm my health, I also recognize that having even one drink will set the precedent for future violations of the rule, and I don’t trust myself to be able to judge the individual cases with enough accuracy to prevent a relapse into alcoholism. Hence I act as if teetotaling were an end in itself, even though I still believe that good health is my ultimate goal.
(I still don’t think that morality can be derived from indirect utilitarianism; I just think that Long’s argument is too strong, insofar as it would have us believe that indirect utilitarianism is “praxeologically incoherent” even in the case of an individual privately maximizing his/her own utility, while we can see that there’s no inconsistency in reasoning like the ex-alcoholic above.)
This is my point. Utilitarianism recommends killing the patient if it best promotes utility, but this directly violates the NAP. Hence a libertarian cannot be a direct utilitarian.
Given the context (we’re all libertarians), I’m assuming the NAP as a premise.
I think your objection would be correct but for this sentence. It seems highly dubious to say that there are absolutely no possible cooked-up cases where utility is best promoted by violating the rule (and without setting a precedent for future violations, etc.). As Long writes:
there are possible cases, however infrequent, in which one could best promote utility by committing (not just any rule-violation but) a morally horrific rule-violation. In such a case, if a moral theory recommends the rule-violation, it is a bad theory; and if it does not recommend the rule-violation, it is no longer utilitarian.
And if such cases exist, then indirect utilitarianism is incoherent.
But killing the patient would not promote utility for a direct utilitarian who is also a strict libertarian.* Such a person would have reasoned that violating the NAP will always reduce his own net happiness.
*As you implicitly define libertarian: total non-violation of the NAP (however we define aggression; I don’t think I will agree with your definition, but I take it for granted above).
Everyone is a direct individualist utilitarian in the broad sense, in that everyone strives for more happiness and less unhappiness. That’s just the action axiom. Whether we have heuristics to help achieve this is beside the point.
In speaking about individuals, it’s silly for there to be a position called “utilitarianism” - it should just be called reality. The reason such a term exists is undoubtedly that it arose in the statist and collectivist context, where it involved recommendation to others and justification for statist atrocities; individual consequentialism (Mises’s direct “utilitarianism”) does not entail any such thing.