>>Are you saying in your last paragraph that utiility can be measured very
>>roughly by pleasure and pain? If you can know that watching my children
>>starve is more painful to me than the Hoffman Farm etc., is pleasurable to
>>you then you must be able to make interpersonal comparisons of utility. I
>>thought most economists deny this.
>I would say, rather, that most economists would say that if you are
>making interpersonal comparisons of utility you are not speaking as
>an economist--but rather as something else.
Kinda diminishes the utility of an economist, though. Still, I could live with that if most of your (pre)occupation didn't then turn around and tell us the 'free' market is better for us than the alternatives ...
>Can I momentarily escape from utilitarian into deontological ethics,
As you're not at work yet, I suppose that'd be alright.
>and say that because taking pleasure in the (relative) pain of others
>is cruel and immoral, we won't count that source of pleasure as a
>plus in our utilitarian calculations?
You'd require an interfering state to prevent sadists purchasing the pain of others. That's okay for a deontologist, who could argue, for instance, that, regardless of possible outcomes, a democratic polity must always be able to discipline/distort the price mechanism from without. Which is why you'll have to abandon your argument on your way to work, where you're professionally bound to defend the price mechanism's production of sadistic utility and its concomitant agonies.
Or not?
Cheers, Rob.