As a fellow philosophy major, I see the appeal of utilitarianism and other rational articulations of OCD, but it's worth noting how much of an aberration they are from the ethics found throughout most of the history of philosophy. Epicurus and Lucretius didn't write about the immorality of anything whose opportunity cost is not reallocating resources to those most in need. It's only post-Enlightenment thinkers who've embraced this abstract, OCD-induced ethics designed for everyone and useful for no one. Confucians conceived of moral obligations in terms of concentric circles and five relationships, each of which had a governing principle, because they realized that we only exist as persons in relation to each other. Hence, In Japanese and Korean first- and second-person pronouns change according to the relationship the speaker has with the interlocutor. The moral dimension of human nature is our ability to relate to each other as agents with the appearance of free will and, consequently, to recognize obligation and take responsibility. None of this makes sense when it's detached from the reality we inhabit, which comes with involuntary associations whose demands can't be weighed on a universal scale given that we exist in relation to each other.
Throughout most of college I wanted to become a philosophy professor, but I eventually realized the futility of most of the field (with some exceptions; philosophy of mind seems to encounter new issues that require new theories). You could dedicate a lifetime to scrutinizing one premise within one argument for one position, and it'll remain unresolved. I concluded you have to just know your priors and empirics, then go out and act on your knowledge. This is, of course, a philosophic position, but I'm not going to spend the remainder of my life scrutinizing its merits at the cost of participating in society and its institutions as they exist. Philosophy has value, of course, but nobody has infinite time to know every argument about even a single philosophic issue-- let alone the time to read multiple books on every issue-- so you have to find a philosophy that articulates your instincts and priors and that can actually affect you. It's unsurprising, therefore, that so many people read the ancients and so few indulge in the writings of GE Moore or AJ Ayer.
I remember once reading a short essay in a Peter Singer book answering the question of whether moral progress is real, and his answer was basically "yes, b/c the world's less racist and sexist." Of all the advancements since the Scientific Revolution, the one this great philosopher cited as the most pertinent to the discussion is whether people are judged prejudicially. Nonetheless, his wacky conclusions serve a useful purpose by making us question our priors.
>I remember once reading a short essay in a Peter Singer book answering the question of whether moral progress is real, and his answer was basically "yes, b/c the world's less racist and sexist.
This is why I hate philosophy professors. They all say something like that at some point in the semester.
But philosophy majors are def the highest overall quality people, I can always tell a former philosophy major right way.
I'm not much of a historian of thought, but _qualitative_ arguments of the kind are found at least since Seneca and the Bible. As for quantitative, is it really surprising that people only started using quality math post-Enlightenment, just like in physics?
Great thoughts. Also enjoyed Walt's. I'm really here for the takedowns of utilitarianism ("rational articulation of OCD"), which I've always hated viscerally since first encountering it in high school, but I'm not the best at articulating why. Maybe blame my decision to major in Econ. It makes sense that some level of studying philosophy gives you the potential to acquire good tools for thinking, but dedicating your life to its academic study is a waste. Many such cases.
>It's only post-Enlightenment thinkers who've embraced this abstract, OCD-induced ethics designed for everyone and useful for no one.
I'm a Christian, but my take is that, per your very point, a secular moral philosophy ought to be useful and practical. Imposing a quasi-religious and frequently counterintuitive mandate on everyone, "just because", never made any kind of sense to me. But that's how I've always perceived utilitarianism.
I go back to Pascal: "It is certain that the mortality or the immortality of the soul must make an entire difference to morality. Yet the philosophers construct their ethics independent of this."
//You should want to not be a racist, for instance, because racists care about things that obviously don’t matter.
Don’t matter to whom, BB? Analytic philosophy professors? Liberal college students?//
Well, I know you're not a moral realist, but I am and have spent quite a long time arguing for it. In short, then, the question doesn't have an answer. Things can matter without mattering to any particular person. Even if everyone approved of torturing babies, for instance, it would still be wrong. https://benthams.substack.com/p/moral-realism-is-true
Most people have a preference for nonarbitrariness. They want the things they care about to make some degree of sense. They also care about morality in some sense beyond social convention. Most people want to be the types of people to oppose slavery even if society tolerates it. Even if one isn't a moral realist, that can be tapped into.
//Shall we really play this childish game, BB? Because my own readers have an average IQ of 125 and a mean openness at the 90th percentile relative to the general public, and I would predict that Spencer’s audience is similarly erudite.//
I win! Mine have a higher SAT score if converted to IQ--coming in at 143 with a SD of 15. I don't deny that a lot of Spencer fans are decently smart, but I think they are poor at thinking. This was also my impression of Spencer when I interacted with him. I suspect I'd think something similar about much of your audience, full disclosure, though I think most people are bad at thinking, so this isn't unique to you (analytic philosophers, I think, tend to be way less confused than average, though I agree they're annoyingly intolerant to various ideas, as are most people).
//My family is more important than someone else’s family. My countrymen are more important than foreigners. My cat is more important than a chicken in a factory farm.//
But that's caring about things other than distance. If the thing you care about is nationality, well, we can make the drowning child case involve a foreign immigrant child and you still are obviously obligated to care about them. Note I wasn't saying it's obvious that there aren't special obligations, though I do hold that view and have argued for it at length https://benthams.substack.com/p/believers-in-special-obligations?utm_source=publication-search
//any ethical system that in practice will never be adopted by a psychologically normal human being is a weak paradigm that people will promptly discard the moment it’s inconvenient//
I don't really care about what other people will adopt. I care about what is actually true morally. Even if I wasn't a moral realist, I'd value some sort of nonarbitrariness.
//You know who is actually evil? The obese welfare scrounger who kills the space program agitating for food stamps. The middle aged woman who leeches off disability benefits claiming Long Covid or Fibromyalgia and gradually makes everyone in her life a little lazier and less agentic. The pedantic schoolmarm who resents her brightest students and kills their intellectual passion with pointless busywork.//
Can you elaborate on this claim? What do you mean when you say it's evil? Earlier you seemed to suggest that values can't be wrong or mistaken but just diverge from yours. Do you think a person who does that is genuinely going wrong?
//Utilitarianism is the real evil facing our society, not right wing tribalism or vitalism.
Util maximization will invariably result in Wall-E, because whenever you don’t have a painful crisis emerge to reset everyone’s hedonic treadmills and shake things up, the desire to make people happy interfaces in a very dangerous way with advanced technology and basically ensures the arc of history bends towards Honey Boo Boo. Our hyper-optimized Skinner Boxes are just getting too strong.//
LOL, there are like 5 utilitarians and they're all tech nerds and philosophy professors. Utilitarians have reason to oppose things that leave people miserable and unfulfilled because they don't make people happy in the long run--not to mention not being conducive to other things of value like relationships.
>Well, I know you're not a moral realist, but I am and have spent quite a long time arguing for it. In short, then, the question doesn't have an answer. Things can matter without mattering to any particular person. Even if everyone approved of torturing babies, for instance, it would still be wrong. https://benthams.substack.com/p/moral-realism-is-true
I guess you can maintain that all you want but:
1) power acts how it wants independent of morality
2) your own moral intuitions are obviously very distinct from those of the average person, so you aren't likely to incite a grassroots revolt against the power structure
3) it follows inductively from 1) and 2) that you are unlikely to accomplish your goals under a utilitarian framework
But I think your *actual goal* is to have fun arguing with other high IQ disagreeable autistic guys on the internet, which was also my goal at your age. Obviously I still cared about things, but I was just some random kid so there was no incentive to adopt a practical ideology or ethical framework that could help me actually secure power vs something LARPy that put me in a position to stretch my rhetorical and intellectual muscles (for me it was communism / veganism -> extreme ancapism and Austrian economics - > white nationalism).
Utilitarianism / EA kind of has a similar cultural niche for zoomers that libertarianism had for millennials so I think this is kind of a fun thing for you to do right now but by the time you're 30 you will prob be somewhere else, because as u note "there are like 5 utilitarians".
>Most people have a preference for nonarbitrariness
Race is one of the least arbitrary markers of identity there is lol, at least in America
>I win! Mine have a higher SAT score if converted to IQ--coming in at 143 with a SD of 15.
lmfao maybe if your subs are all boomers! But modern SAT doesn't map to IQ nearly as well as it did in the 90s and before. Anyway go take the danish mensa test on my page and tell me how you stack up ;)
>I don't really care about what other people will adopt. I care about what is actually true morally. Even if I wasn't a moral realist, I'd value some sort of nonarbitrariness.
I guess my attitude is tree falling in the forest etc. If nobody knows or accepts this "truth" does it even exist in a meaningful way?
>Can you elaborate on this claim? What do you mean when you say it's evil? Earlier you seemed to suggest that values can't be wrong or mistaken but just diverge from yours. Do you think a person who does that is genuinely going wrong?
Sure, I was being poetic. I think these people are parasites and socially destructive in a way that's obviously worse than an edgy Nietzsche-loving theater kid like me or RS who is clearly a good productive member of society who inspires their younger followers to more agentic and masculine standard of behavior.
>LOL, there are like 5 utilitarians and they're all tech nerds and philosophy professors. Utilitarians have reason to oppose things that leave people miserable and unfulfilled because they don't make people happy in the long run--not to mention not being conducive to other things of value like relationships.
Alright but once you start talking about long term vs short term utility, different types of happiness, instrumental utility, etc., Utilitarianism just becomes a framework for arguing literally anything. You could make weird accelerationist arguments for starting a nuclear war, you have to start thinking hyper-probabilistically about everything, etc. Eventually it collapses into a game of elaborate Talmudic debate where two guys at our IQ level could literally argue that *any position* is or is not utility maximizing. It goes nowhere. Same things happens in anarcho-capitalism with whether various kinds of stateless society are ackchully just a state.
My point is that it's a bad mindset to think happiness = good. I think a better heuristic is that meaningful struggle and a good story = good.
1) power acts how it wants independent of morality
2) your own moral intuitions are obviously very distinct from those of the average person, so you aren't likely to incite a grassroots revolt against the power structure
3) it follows inductively from 1) and 2) that you are unlikely to accomplish your goals under a utilitarian framework//
I sometimes hear people say this and it just seems like they don't get what morality is. First of all, your moral view is not necessarily likely to be accomplished. It could be that some action is very immoral but I can't accomplish anything to stop it. Second, the fact that few people have some moral view doesn't imply that you're unlikely to achieve your aims under that moral view. E.g. suppose my moral view was that the only good thing came from moving my arms. I could do that even if no one else would be on board. Of course, this means it would be hard to make a flourishing political movement where everyone is on board with it, but that's obviously not what I'm trying to do. I don't think that's what you're trying to do either. The things we writers produce is ideas that hopefully move people in the right direction. We're unlikely to move the world.
//But I think your *actual goal* is to have fun arguing with other high IQ disagreeable autistic guys on the internet, which was also my goal at your age. //
That's one of my goals but not the only one. I'm glad, for example, that I have gotten quite a few people to donate quite a bit of money to effective charities! I'm also glad I got people to be vegan. I don't just have a single goal. My blog is mostly something I do for fun, rather than to maximize impact.
//Utilitarianism / EA kind of has a similar cultural niche for zoomers that libertarianism had for millennials so I think this is kind of a fun thing for you to do right now but by the time you're 30 you will prob be somewhere else, because as u note "there are like 5 utilitarians".//
//>Most people have a preference for nonarbitrariness
Race is one of the least arbitrary markers of identity there is lol, at least in America//
One can care about things that correlate with race but caring about race for its own sake is stupid and arbitrary. It's like caring about hair color.
//lmfao maybe if your subs are all boomers! But modern SAT doesn't map to IQ nearly as well as it did in the 90s and before. Anyway go take the danish mensa test on my page and tell me how you stack up ;)//
Yeah, yeah. Poll yours on their SAT, I'll bet mine are higher!
//Sure, I was being poetic. I think these people are parasites and socially destructive in a way that's obviously worse than an edgy Nietzsche-loving theater kid like me or RS who is clearly a good productive member of society who inspires their younger followers to more agentic and masculine standard of behavior.//
But on you're view, when you say they're parasites, you just mean their values are out of accordance with yours, right? A person who cares more about school lunches than the space program isn't making an error of any sort?
//>I don't really care about what other people will adopt. I care about what is actually true morally. Even if I wasn't a moral realist, I'd value some sort of nonarbitrariness.
I guess my attitude is tree falling in the forest etc. If nobody knows or accepts this "truth" does it even exist in a meaningful way?//
Yes! This is just the thesis of moral realism, that things matter even if people don't care about them. We might all be mistaken about some moral issue--maybe wild animal suffering or abortion is really important, for example. Similarly, if there were underground torture chambers that tortured mentally disabled people without moral beliefs, that would be bad! Also, many people do, in fact, care about morality.
//Alright but once you start talking about long term vs short term utility, different types of happiness, instrumental utility, etc., Utilitarianism just becomes a framework for arguing literally anything. You could make weird accelerationist arguments for starting a nuclear war, you have to start thinking hyper-probabilistically about everything, etc. Eventually it collapses into a game of elaborate Talmudic debate where two guys at our IQ level could literally argue that *any position* is or is not utility maximizing. It goes nowhere. Same things happens in anarcho-capitalism with whether various kinds of stateless society are ackchully just a state.//
You can make arguments for anything but some arguments are braindead and unconvincing. It's not like there are huge numbers of EAs arguing for giving money to blind people to have guide dogs. Most of the time the verdict of utilitarianism is obvious. For example, it's obvious that factory farming is deeply terrible.
Talking about long-term vs short term utility is literally just what utilitarianism is. There is not, to my knowledge, a single utilitarian in the history of ever who hasd advocated only taking into account short term utility.
>One can care about things that correlate with race but caring about race for its own sake is stupid and arbitrary. It's like caring about hair color.<
I don't think there is anybody who cares about race purely for its own sake, without believing that it correlates heavy with lots of other things. Would you expect a racist not to believe that whatever race they dislike has a bunch of inferior traits?
What’s cool is we multiplied the amount of impoverished diabetics by like 1000 x and then hired the the direct descendant of a guy who colonized their continent of origin just to get back into space.
>And this is precisely why I don’t take Analytic Philosophy seriously anymore. Back when I majored in it a little over a decade ago, all my professors would do irritating shit exactly like this—basically assume that the tenets of their liberal worldview are true, and then boisterously assert the self-evidence of these tenets using the covert ad baculum of institutional power / social prestige / status bullying.
Uh, I have some bad news for you about continental philosophy. Please see Professor Butler in her office after class.
Mostly just a shitpost about the grass not being greener on the other side of the fence, as far as institutional academic incentives go. (I did lit theory, so I'm bitter.) That said, it's interesting that there are right-wing readers of Foucault now. That potential reading is present in his work, but it definitely wasn't being talked about when I was a student.
Stephen Williams once created the imaginary intellectual right-wing version of Paul Krugman: https://newmonetarism.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-right-wing-anti-krugman.html The point of the exercise was that such modeling was indeterminate and depended heavily on the assumptions of the modeler. Similarly, if one can create arbitrary variants on Foucault, that suggests his philosophy doesn't carve reality at the joints.
I don't care what your IQ is, or his SAT score. I could fit you both into the same locker, but I'd settle for adjacent lockers so you can have this pointless discussion without bothering normal people.
I agree with BB that much of the disagreement here appears downstream of diverging beliefs about moral realism, and you seemingly conflate moral proximity with physical proximity at times. Also, the notion that continental philosophy is superior to (or more relevant than) analytic philosophy because of its more normie-friendly rhetorical style is a wild take.
You can be utilitarian and attach value to let's say Faustian spirit (for example I could sacrifice the life of someone that I care if I could save someone that I am sure has this high proxy). Obviously this shows that utilitarianism does not give you a clear response on what is of value, and I agree, utilitarianism is a meta principle to order your preferences. Our readings give us ideas on what is valuable. And for example the value of another underdeveloped npc that needs charity money can be set to 0. In this case we would use donate to Wikipedia or to Charter Cities, and not to nets against malaria for extending the miserable and passionless lives of someone.
I'm reading Edward Said's "Orientalism" right now, and the continental philosophy (Foucault, Gramsci, etc) of it is so insufferable. I'll take analytic philosophy over it any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Normal people would not be willing to read the complete bullshit emitted by the continentals. I host some of Max Stirner's writings on my own tripod site, but Stirner is explicit that he's just writing for his own benefit.
Generalizing from fictional evidence is logical fallacy, which you would care about if you cared about truth. In order to establish what the arc of history bends toward, you need more evidence than an animated children's movie.
> Back when I majored in it a little over a decade ago, all my professors would do irritating shit exactly like this—basically assume that the tenets of their liberal worldview are true, and then boisterously assert the self-evidence of these tenets using the covert ad baculum of institutional power / social prestige / status bullying.
I obviously think that the positions I hold are correct, because otherwise I'd hold different positions, but I'm not so arrogant as to think that the positions I currently hold are the only positions that could *possibly be* correct.
> "I mean, I guess maybe you wouldn’t do this, but if so you are weird."
I mean, do I at least get to know who the strangers are, first? Because you say this but in reality my mom is actually a lot like the woman in the photo.
I majored in accounting so I could get a job and not starve to death. Dropped out of highschool as soon as legally able. Never took the SAT, and it never mattered. My GPA didn't matter either cause I landed a job with a large national firm before my Senior year. Now I work for a farm, where I began my working career as a young outcast farmhand, and still could care less about this ballfanning intellectualism.
Speaking of absurd utilitarianism: If offered a choice between saving one's own child and one random child from wherever, can a true Singerian choose his own or does he have to flip a coin?
Coming in here as the cringe libertarian that I am to say that combining a rejection of slave morality with the NAP does a lot to get to a society that I'd like to live in. On BB's post imploring us to shut up about slave morality, there were some snide scenarios like killing babies which someone might think of as a slam dunk against those wholly rejecting slave morality, but as soon as you add in something like the NAP, you've patched the issue. Similar to the positive vs. negative rights distinction, the whole point of rejecting slave morality it because it obligates people to do things which we consider to be absurd if taken to its logical conclusion. We simply demand that people not willfully damage person or property, which is a requirement of non-interference, but beyond that there are no obligations outside of those which your social groups impose on you — often communicated via moral principles. And the thirst for war and competition which gives vitality to society can be channeled through non-violent means to avoid the cataclysms that we all (virtually) unanimously reject.
Not really on topic, but I can never resist the urge to history sperg on this subject when the opportunity arises: studying how the Great Society actually worked in practice is one of the biggest redpills imaginable. You're a nice left-wing college kid who wants to know about the heroic freedom fighters of the 1960s, and you're reading the biography of some right-on antipoverty activist building people power to fight the Man, and you're thinking "damn, what a shame that Nixon and Reagan (in cahoots with Satan himself and the ghost of Hitler) shut this brother down" -- but then you get a handle on the tangle of organizational acronyms and it suddenly clicks that this person was actually a *government employee* whose job was to enroll more people in the welfare system and was using it to spread cash around his own little patronage network.
Dunno if that's the case for the woman in the picture, but if you do a little digging in primary sources, it's true again and again of a lot of Sixties "organizers."
As a fellow philosophy major, I see the appeal of utilitarianism and other rational articulations of OCD, but it's worth noting how much of an aberration they are from the ethics found throughout most of the history of philosophy. Epicurus and Lucretius didn't write about the immorality of anything whose opportunity cost is not reallocating resources to those most in need. It's only post-Enlightenment thinkers who've embraced this abstract, OCD-induced ethics designed for everyone and useful for no one. Confucians conceived of moral obligations in terms of concentric circles and five relationships, each of which had a governing principle, because they realized that we only exist as persons in relation to each other. Hence, In Japanese and Korean first- and second-person pronouns change according to the relationship the speaker has with the interlocutor. The moral dimension of human nature is our ability to relate to each other as agents with the appearance of free will and, consequently, to recognize obligation and take responsibility. None of this makes sense when it's detached from the reality we inhabit, which comes with involuntary associations whose demands can't be weighed on a universal scale given that we exist in relation to each other.
Throughout most of college I wanted to become a philosophy professor, but I eventually realized the futility of most of the field (with some exceptions; philosophy of mind seems to encounter new issues that require new theories). You could dedicate a lifetime to scrutinizing one premise within one argument for one position, and it'll remain unresolved. I concluded you have to just know your priors and empirics, then go out and act on your knowledge. This is, of course, a philosophic position, but I'm not going to spend the remainder of my life scrutinizing its merits at the cost of participating in society and its institutions as they exist. Philosophy has value, of course, but nobody has infinite time to know every argument about even a single philosophic issue-- let alone the time to read multiple books on every issue-- so you have to find a philosophy that articulates your instincts and priors and that can actually affect you. It's unsurprising, therefore, that so many people read the ancients and so few indulge in the writings of GE Moore or AJ Ayer.
I remember once reading a short essay in a Peter Singer book answering the question of whether moral progress is real, and his answer was basically "yes, b/c the world's less racist and sexist." Of all the advancements since the Scientific Revolution, the one this great philosopher cited as the most pertinent to the discussion is whether people are judged prejudicially. Nonetheless, his wacky conclusions serve a useful purpose by making us question our priors.
>I remember once reading a short essay in a Peter Singer book answering the question of whether moral progress is real, and his answer was basically "yes, b/c the world's less racist and sexist.
This is why I hate philosophy professors. They all say something like that at some point in the semester.
But philosophy majors are def the highest overall quality people, I can always tell a former philosophy major right way.
I'm not much of a historian of thought, but _qualitative_ arguments of the kind are found at least since Seneca and the Bible. As for quantitative, is it really surprising that people only started using quality math post-Enlightenment, just like in physics?
Great thoughts. Also enjoyed Walt's. I'm really here for the takedowns of utilitarianism ("rational articulation of OCD"), which I've always hated viscerally since first encountering it in high school, but I'm not the best at articulating why. Maybe blame my decision to major in Econ. It makes sense that some level of studying philosophy gives you the potential to acquire good tools for thinking, but dedicating your life to its academic study is a waste. Many such cases.
>It's only post-Enlightenment thinkers who've embraced this abstract, OCD-induced ethics designed for everyone and useful for no one.
I'm a Christian, but my take is that, per your very point, a secular moral philosophy ought to be useful and practical. Imposing a quasi-religious and frequently counterintuitive mandate on everyone, "just because", never made any kind of sense to me. But that's how I've always perceived utilitarianism.
I go back to Pascal: "It is certain that the mortality or the immortality of the soul must make an entire difference to morality. Yet the philosophers construct their ethics independent of this."
//You should want to not be a racist, for instance, because racists care about things that obviously don’t matter.
Don’t matter to whom, BB? Analytic philosophy professors? Liberal college students?//
Well, I know you're not a moral realist, but I am and have spent quite a long time arguing for it. In short, then, the question doesn't have an answer. Things can matter without mattering to any particular person. Even if everyone approved of torturing babies, for instance, it would still be wrong. https://benthams.substack.com/p/moral-realism-is-true
Most people have a preference for nonarbitrariness. They want the things they care about to make some degree of sense. They also care about morality in some sense beyond social convention. Most people want to be the types of people to oppose slavery even if society tolerates it. Even if one isn't a moral realist, that can be tapped into.
//Shall we really play this childish game, BB? Because my own readers have an average IQ of 125 and a mean openness at the 90th percentile relative to the general public, and I would predict that Spencer’s audience is similarly erudite.//
I win! Mine have a higher SAT score if converted to IQ--coming in at 143 with a SD of 15. I don't deny that a lot of Spencer fans are decently smart, but I think they are poor at thinking. This was also my impression of Spencer when I interacted with him. I suspect I'd think something similar about much of your audience, full disclosure, though I think most people are bad at thinking, so this isn't unique to you (analytic philosophers, I think, tend to be way less confused than average, though I agree they're annoyingly intolerant to various ideas, as are most people).
//My family is more important than someone else’s family. My countrymen are more important than foreigners. My cat is more important than a chicken in a factory farm.//
But that's caring about things other than distance. If the thing you care about is nationality, well, we can make the drowning child case involve a foreign immigrant child and you still are obviously obligated to care about them. Note I wasn't saying it's obvious that there aren't special obligations, though I do hold that view and have argued for it at length https://benthams.substack.com/p/believers-in-special-obligations?utm_source=publication-search
//any ethical system that in practice will never be adopted by a psychologically normal human being is a weak paradigm that people will promptly discard the moment it’s inconvenient//
I don't really care about what other people will adopt. I care about what is actually true morally. Even if I wasn't a moral realist, I'd value some sort of nonarbitrariness.
//You know who is actually evil? The obese welfare scrounger who kills the space program agitating for food stamps. The middle aged woman who leeches off disability benefits claiming Long Covid or Fibromyalgia and gradually makes everyone in her life a little lazier and less agentic. The pedantic schoolmarm who resents her brightest students and kills their intellectual passion with pointless busywork.//
Can you elaborate on this claim? What do you mean when you say it's evil? Earlier you seemed to suggest that values can't be wrong or mistaken but just diverge from yours. Do you think a person who does that is genuinely going wrong?
//Utilitarianism is the real evil facing our society, not right wing tribalism or vitalism.
Util maximization will invariably result in Wall-E, because whenever you don’t have a painful crisis emerge to reset everyone’s hedonic treadmills and shake things up, the desire to make people happy interfaces in a very dangerous way with advanced technology and basically ensures the arc of history bends towards Honey Boo Boo. Our hyper-optimized Skinner Boxes are just getting too strong.//
LOL, there are like 5 utilitarians and they're all tech nerds and philosophy professors. Utilitarians have reason to oppose things that leave people miserable and unfulfilled because they don't make people happy in the long run--not to mention not being conducive to other things of value like relationships.
>Well, I know you're not a moral realist, but I am and have spent quite a long time arguing for it. In short, then, the question doesn't have an answer. Things can matter without mattering to any particular person. Even if everyone approved of torturing babies, for instance, it would still be wrong. https://benthams.substack.com/p/moral-realism-is-true
I guess you can maintain that all you want but:
1) power acts how it wants independent of morality
2) your own moral intuitions are obviously very distinct from those of the average person, so you aren't likely to incite a grassroots revolt against the power structure
3) it follows inductively from 1) and 2) that you are unlikely to accomplish your goals under a utilitarian framework
But I think your *actual goal* is to have fun arguing with other high IQ disagreeable autistic guys on the internet, which was also my goal at your age. Obviously I still cared about things, but I was just some random kid so there was no incentive to adopt a practical ideology or ethical framework that could help me actually secure power vs something LARPy that put me in a position to stretch my rhetorical and intellectual muscles (for me it was communism / veganism -> extreme ancapism and Austrian economics - > white nationalism).
Utilitarianism / EA kind of has a similar cultural niche for zoomers that libertarianism had for millennials so I think this is kind of a fun thing for you to do right now but by the time you're 30 you will prob be somewhere else, because as u note "there are like 5 utilitarians".
>Most people have a preference for nonarbitrariness
Race is one of the least arbitrary markers of identity there is lol, at least in America
>I win! Mine have a higher SAT score if converted to IQ--coming in at 143 with a SD of 15.
lmfao maybe if your subs are all boomers! But modern SAT doesn't map to IQ nearly as well as it did in the 90s and before. Anyway go take the danish mensa test on my page and tell me how you stack up ;)
>I don't really care about what other people will adopt. I care about what is actually true morally. Even if I wasn't a moral realist, I'd value some sort of nonarbitrariness.
I guess my attitude is tree falling in the forest etc. If nobody knows or accepts this "truth" does it even exist in a meaningful way?
>Can you elaborate on this claim? What do you mean when you say it's evil? Earlier you seemed to suggest that values can't be wrong or mistaken but just diverge from yours. Do you think a person who does that is genuinely going wrong?
Sure, I was being poetic. I think these people are parasites and socially destructive in a way that's obviously worse than an edgy Nietzsche-loving theater kid like me or RS who is clearly a good productive member of society who inspires their younger followers to more agentic and masculine standard of behavior.
>LOL, there are like 5 utilitarians and they're all tech nerds and philosophy professors. Utilitarians have reason to oppose things that leave people miserable and unfulfilled because they don't make people happy in the long run--not to mention not being conducive to other things of value like relationships.
Alright but once you start talking about long term vs short term utility, different types of happiness, instrumental utility, etc., Utilitarianism just becomes a framework for arguing literally anything. You could make weird accelerationist arguments for starting a nuclear war, you have to start thinking hyper-probabilistically about everything, etc. Eventually it collapses into a game of elaborate Talmudic debate where two guys at our IQ level could literally argue that *any position* is or is not utility maximizing. It goes nowhere. Same things happens in anarcho-capitalism with whether various kinds of stateless society are ackchully just a state.
My point is that it's a bad mindset to think happiness = good. I think a better heuristic is that meaningful struggle and a good story = good.
Let's just talk about this on the pod.
Actually, fuck it, I have nothing better to do.
//I guess you can maintain that all you want but:
1) power acts how it wants independent of morality
2) your own moral intuitions are obviously very distinct from those of the average person, so you aren't likely to incite a grassroots revolt against the power structure
3) it follows inductively from 1) and 2) that you are unlikely to accomplish your goals under a utilitarian framework//
I sometimes hear people say this and it just seems like they don't get what morality is. First of all, your moral view is not necessarily likely to be accomplished. It could be that some action is very immoral but I can't accomplish anything to stop it. Second, the fact that few people have some moral view doesn't imply that you're unlikely to achieve your aims under that moral view. E.g. suppose my moral view was that the only good thing came from moving my arms. I could do that even if no one else would be on board. Of course, this means it would be hard to make a flourishing political movement where everyone is on board with it, but that's obviously not what I'm trying to do. I don't think that's what you're trying to do either. The things we writers produce is ideas that hopefully move people in the right direction. We're unlikely to move the world.
//But I think your *actual goal* is to have fun arguing with other high IQ disagreeable autistic guys on the internet, which was also my goal at your age. //
That's one of my goals but not the only one. I'm glad, for example, that I have gotten quite a few people to donate quite a bit of money to effective charities! I'm also glad I got people to be vegan. I don't just have a single goal. My blog is mostly something I do for fun, rather than to maximize impact.
//Utilitarianism / EA kind of has a similar cultural niche for zoomers that libertarianism had for millennials so I think this is kind of a fun thing for you to do right now but by the time you're 30 you will prob be somewhere else, because as u note "there are like 5 utilitarians".//
This is a staggering claim. EA is very much not about pointless debates on the internet but actually doing good stuff that helps others effectively. So far, the movement despite being comprised of a small number of nerds has saved a few hundred thousand lives, about 50,000 a year. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective?utm_source=publication-search
Part 1 of 2. Sending this comment now because I'll get majorly tilted if I accidentally hit cancel and it's deleted.
//>Most people have a preference for nonarbitrariness
Race is one of the least arbitrary markers of identity there is lol, at least in America//
One can care about things that correlate with race but caring about race for its own sake is stupid and arbitrary. It's like caring about hair color.
//lmfao maybe if your subs are all boomers! But modern SAT doesn't map to IQ nearly as well as it did in the 90s and before. Anyway go take the danish mensa test on my page and tell me how you stack up ;)//
Yeah, yeah. Poll yours on their SAT, I'll bet mine are higher!
//Sure, I was being poetic. I think these people are parasites and socially destructive in a way that's obviously worse than an edgy Nietzsche-loving theater kid like me or RS who is clearly a good productive member of society who inspires their younger followers to more agentic and masculine standard of behavior.//
But on you're view, when you say they're parasites, you just mean their values are out of accordance with yours, right? A person who cares more about school lunches than the space program isn't making an error of any sort?
//>I don't really care about what other people will adopt. I care about what is actually true morally. Even if I wasn't a moral realist, I'd value some sort of nonarbitrariness.
I guess my attitude is tree falling in the forest etc. If nobody knows or accepts this "truth" does it even exist in a meaningful way?//
Yes! This is just the thesis of moral realism, that things matter even if people don't care about them. We might all be mistaken about some moral issue--maybe wild animal suffering or abortion is really important, for example. Similarly, if there were underground torture chambers that tortured mentally disabled people without moral beliefs, that would be bad! Also, many people do, in fact, care about morality.
//Alright but once you start talking about long term vs short term utility, different types of happiness, instrumental utility, etc., Utilitarianism just becomes a framework for arguing literally anything. You could make weird accelerationist arguments for starting a nuclear war, you have to start thinking hyper-probabilistically about everything, etc. Eventually it collapses into a game of elaborate Talmudic debate where two guys at our IQ level could literally argue that *any position* is or is not utility maximizing. It goes nowhere. Same things happens in anarcho-capitalism with whether various kinds of stateless society are ackchully just a state.//
You can make arguments for anything but some arguments are braindead and unconvincing. It's not like there are huge numbers of EAs arguing for giving money to blind people to have guide dogs. Most of the time the verdict of utilitarianism is obvious. For example, it's obvious that factory farming is deeply terrible.
Talking about long-term vs short term utility is literally just what utilitarianism is. There is not, to my knowledge, a single utilitarian in the history of ever who hasd advocated only taking into account short term utility.
>One can care about things that correlate with race but caring about race for its own sake is stupid and arbitrary. It's like caring about hair color.<
I don't think there is anybody who cares about race purely for its own sake, without believing that it correlates heavy with lots of other things. Would you expect a racist not to believe that whatever race they dislike has a bunch of inferior traits?
People can care about race (and hair colour) for its own sake.
People care about the colour of the car they buy. People care about the aesthetics of the architecture in their city.
Ultimately, this does all go back to what it correlates to, but so does everything your senses tell you.
What’s cool is we multiplied the amount of impoverished diabetics by like 1000 x and then hired the the direct descendant of a guy who colonized their continent of origin just to get back into space.
History doesn’t rhyme. It bark.
I'll leave a second more substantive comment, but first, a very short one: happy to come on the pod again and discuss this!
yeah this would be great content for sure, will DM you
This blog is way more autistic than Objectivism could ever hope to be.
>And this is precisely why I don’t take Analytic Philosophy seriously anymore. Back when I majored in it a little over a decade ago, all my professors would do irritating shit exactly like this—basically assume that the tenets of their liberal worldview are true, and then boisterously assert the self-evidence of these tenets using the covert ad baculum of institutional power / social prestige / status bullying.
Uh, I have some bad news for you about continental philosophy. Please see Professor Butler in her office after class.
Foucault has some cool stuff tho
And Nietzsche is obv continental
Mostly just a shitpost about the grass not being greener on the other side of the fence, as far as institutional academic incentives go. (I did lit theory, so I'm bitter.) That said, it's interesting that there are right-wing readers of Foucault now. That potential reading is present in his work, but it definitely wasn't being talked about when I was a student.
hell I am kind of a right wing dworkinite lmao
Stephen Williams once created the imaginary intellectual right-wing version of Paul Krugman: https://newmonetarism.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-right-wing-anti-krugman.html The point of the exercise was that such modeling was indeterminate and depended heavily on the assumptions of the modeler. Similarly, if one can create arbitrary variants on Foucault, that suggests his philosophy doesn't carve reality at the joints.
Foucault was a bullshitter.
Nietzche is atypical among continentals in being relatively clear. The bulk of them try to sound profound while being incomprehensible.
I don't care what your IQ is, or his SAT score. I could fit you both into the same locker, but I'd settle for adjacent lockers so you can have this pointless discussion without bothering normal people.
I agree with BB that much of the disagreement here appears downstream of diverging beliefs about moral realism, and you seemingly conflate moral proximity with physical proximity at times. Also, the notion that continental philosophy is superior to (or more relevant than) analytic philosophy because of its more normie-friendly rhetorical style is a wild take.
You can be utilitarian and attach value to let's say Faustian spirit (for example I could sacrifice the life of someone that I care if I could save someone that I am sure has this high proxy). Obviously this shows that utilitarianism does not give you a clear response on what is of value, and I agree, utilitarianism is a meta principle to order your preferences. Our readings give us ideas on what is valuable. And for example the value of another underdeveloped npc that needs charity money can be set to 0. In this case we would use donate to Wikipedia or to Charter Cities, and not to nets against malaria for extending the miserable and passionless lives of someone.
I'm reading Edward Said's "Orientalism" right now, and the continental philosophy (Foucault, Gramsci, etc) of it is so insufferable. I'll take analytic philosophy over it any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Normal people would not be willing to read the complete bullshit emitted by the continentals. I host some of Max Stirner's writings on my own tripod site, but Stirner is explicit that he's just writing for his own benefit.
Generalizing from fictional evidence is logical fallacy, which you would care about if you cared about truth. In order to establish what the arc of history bends toward, you need more evidence than an animated children's movie.
Ah yes, this.
> Back when I majored in it a little over a decade ago, all my professors would do irritating shit exactly like this—basically assume that the tenets of their liberal worldview are true, and then boisterously assert the self-evidence of these tenets using the covert ad baculum of institutional power / social prestige / status bullying.
I obviously think that the positions I hold are correct, because otherwise I'd hold different positions, but I'm not so arrogant as to think that the positions I currently hold are the only positions that could *possibly be* correct.
> "I mean, I guess maybe you wouldn’t do this, but if so you are weird."
I mean, do I at least get to know who the strangers are, first? Because you say this but in reality my mom is actually a lot like the woman in the photo.
On the flip side, I am, in fact, weird.
BB is very prone to assuming WEIRD values are the only true values, but I don't see what that's got to do with the analical approach.
I majored in accounting so I could get a job and not starve to death. Dropped out of highschool as soon as legally able. Never took the SAT, and it never mattered. My GPA didn't matter either cause I landed a job with a large national firm before my Senior year. Now I work for a farm, where I began my working career as a young outcast farmhand, and still could care less about this ballfanning intellectualism.
Speaking of absurd utilitarianism: If offered a choice between saving one's own child and one random child from wherever, can a true Singerian choose his own or does he have to flip a coin?
Coming in here as the cringe libertarian that I am to say that combining a rejection of slave morality with the NAP does a lot to get to a society that I'd like to live in. On BB's post imploring us to shut up about slave morality, there were some snide scenarios like killing babies which someone might think of as a slam dunk against those wholly rejecting slave morality, but as soon as you add in something like the NAP, you've patched the issue. Similar to the positive vs. negative rights distinction, the whole point of rejecting slave morality it because it obligates people to do things which we consider to be absurd if taken to its logical conclusion. We simply demand that people not willfully damage person or property, which is a requirement of non-interference, but beyond that there are no obligations outside of those which your social groups impose on you — often communicated via moral principles. And the thirst for war and competition which gives vitality to society can be channeled through non-violent means to avoid the cataclysms that we all (virtually) unanimously reject.
Not really on topic, but I can never resist the urge to history sperg on this subject when the opportunity arises: studying how the Great Society actually worked in practice is one of the biggest redpills imaginable. You're a nice left-wing college kid who wants to know about the heroic freedom fighters of the 1960s, and you're reading the biography of some right-on antipoverty activist building people power to fight the Man, and you're thinking "damn, what a shame that Nixon and Reagan (in cahoots with Satan himself and the ghost of Hitler) shut this brother down" -- but then you get a handle on the tangle of organizational acronyms and it suddenly clicks that this person was actually a *government employee* whose job was to enroll more people in the welfare system and was using it to spread cash around his own little patronage network.
Dunno if that's the case for the woman in the picture, but if you do a little digging in primary sources, it's true again and again of a lot of Sixties "organizers."