Dolphin Rights

Heck, I don't even believe in human rights in the way that most people seem to use the term. I certainly don't believe in animal rights.

If you can find a rule that, when enforced across continents, enables the preferences of more people to be fulfilled, and enables more people to be happy, then it is not incompatible with Utilitarianism to ask that it be enforced.

Slight derail: Similarly, it is not incompatible with Utilitarianism to class a person as good or bad, depending on whether or not they've mostly carried out, or even intended to carry out, good and bad acts. A good person is someone who it will be probably better to keep existing than a bad person, although I would hesitate to introduce this concept into evaluating the worth of lives as this is one of the more difficult things to judge. Otherwise prison, the most practical short-term solution to criminality, is right out the window, as we cannot deny people happiness in freedom just because they are likely to impinge on others...and I think although prison needs to be reduced in our society, it cannot be removed except in the most restrictive kind of Utopian society.

Utilitarianism is, in my opinion, the basis of morality. It is the core, and what everything else is judged by. This should be self-evident, that a good act is a good thing, and a bad act a bad one. It is inherently flexible, though, and I think that its strengths as an unadulterated personal system of morality lose all meaning

If everyone was a wonderful Utilitarian, all the time, it wouldn't need to be. The problem is that the world doesn't work like that. We need rules that, if enforced, will result in a net profit of happiness and preference-fulfilment.

Luckily, the world more-or-less works like that already.

Sorting out the parts that don't might require extending the rules further, or reducing them slightly. In this case I would support extending the rules a little further.

The trouble with utilitarianism is that it's impossible to say how much happiness or good an action causes. Until we come up with a unit and method for meauring 'happiness', and a way to foresee every likely result of an action.

It's impossible to predict accurately.

It is possible to predict accurately enough for most purposes.

Usually it's common sense. Sometimes it's more difficult. In those cases, yeah, you might choose to go for the safer options rather than committing to a big change, or equally you might perform small scale relevant experiments that tell ya what's going on.

I also don't think you can realistically deny that sapience affects both intensity of sentience and the likelihood that a moral agent will cause more good than bad. So I'm not keen on removing the weighting from Utilitarianism and having some 'pure' form of Hedonism or Preference Utilitarianism.

That's a difficulty in doing as much good as you can. It's not a flaw in utilitarianism. It's like saying that it's wrong to consider it unethical to steal, because then you have to do everything yourself.

I never said that utilitarianism was wrong or a bad ethics system - just that it was difficult to carry out at times. There will always be issues when you try to quantify something as abstract as 'good'.

I don't really understand your comparison there, sorry.