Bentham's Bulldog Should Become a Gay Prostitute
Utilitarians are morally obliged to maximize their income
In this essay I’ll demonstrate that
is morally obligated to sell his body to other men to maximize his personal income for donation to effective charities.My argument is fairly straightforward:
As a moral realist and Act Utilitarian, BB maintains that the morally correct action is that which produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
He is consequently a fan of the Effective Altruist movement, which encourages people to donate large sums of money to “effective charities” that produce as many utils per dollar as possible through efforts like buying malaria nets for impoverished Africans.
BB is so committed to this idea that he embraces the Drowning Child Argument:
…failure to give to effective charities is morally equivalent to walking past drowning children. Therefore, you have an obligation to give to effective charities, just as you would have an obligation to pull drowning children out of ponds
My contention is that by his own premises BB doesn’t go far enough.
He is looking only at what one gives while completely ignoring what one does to increase what he can give, which is obviously morally salient under Utilitarianism (hence the actions of SBF and his infamous polycule of EA conmen).
That’s very convenient, because by the latter standard BB is in fact monstrously immoral to pursue a career as a Philosophy professor.
For starters, the career prospects for that profession are empirically terrible: per the American Philosophical Association only 40% of Philosophy PhDs manage to land a tenure track job. Now BB definitely seems more capable than the 60th percentile philosophy professor, but he’s also written about some incredibly controversial topics and academic hiring committees will absolutely punish him for that.
But let’s assume he gets lucky and is able to land a tenure track position. The median pay for a Philosophy professor is about $110k, with the 90th percentile coming in at $233k. But we’ll be generous to BB and assume he’ll end up around $200k.
This is peanuts compared to what he’d make stacking remote jobs in a STEM field. I’m lazy and technically unskilled (having majored in Philosophy myself) and I already make twice that through easy data analyst positions at sclerotic midwestern insurance companies. Meanwhile some of the guys I know who work multiple software engineer roles hit close to a million in salary for well under 40 hours total of work per week.
If BB took such a route he could easily donate hundreds of thousands per year to effective charities and thereby save dozens of precious melanated lives. He’d also retain plenty of free time to write philosophy essays, and through Substack would achieve a much larger and more engaged readership than he’ll ever see in academia.
I suppose it’s really important to him that he’s eventually able to do boring committee work with Marxist lesbians and teach the cogito to Gen Alpha undergrads who'll ignore his lectures to watch skibidi toilet on their iPhones. But is that worth murdering thousands of African children?
BB owes us a good answer, because by his own logic not maximizing your income produces that outcome and makes you personally morally responsible for their deaths. Deliberate failure to maximize your income is morally equivalent to walking past dozens of drowning children every year.
This obvious fact makes me question how serious BB is about his Utilitarianism. Because technically he doesn’t even need to retrain in a STEM field or pursue any specialized credentials to do this. If he actually believed in what he says then he could easily be making a fortune right now to finance effective charities.
He simply needs to become a gay prostitute and sell his bussy to the highest bidder.