Which one of them was it that unironically agreed that reducing humanity to a bunch of vegetables on morphine drips might be an optimal utilitarian outcome?
Another once agreed that early human extinction might be preferable since, in a theoretically indefinite perpetuation of human existence, which mathematically indicates both infinite pleasure and suffering, the infinite suffering would be greater than the infinite pleasure due to inevitable dwindling resources.
Utilitarianism is a logical trap for midwit minds. Best characterized by the trolley problem, which is probably why they resort to it so often and with such enthusiasm. It's a perfect example of left-brained thinking: a highly abstract and constrained model with an inescapable and counterintuitive conclusion and no real-life application (although like a man with only a hammer sees everything as a nail, they inappropriately apply it all the time). This shit is like crack for midwits and TED talks and reddit are their corner boys.
Plus, I’ll finish the joke about the Zen monk who said to the hot dog vendor “make me one with everything”. After he got his hot dog, he handed the vendor a twenty dollar bill. The vendor did not give him any change, so the Zen monk said, “Hey, where is my change?” The vendor simply turns to him and says, “Change comes from within.”
A solid essay. I feel many Christians (including myself) have been and are confused regarding the Christian ethic. Utilitarianism has been inserted into a lot of Christian ideals without anyone noticing. I remember children's books that perverted to the story of the Good Samaritan and taught that we are all neighbors.
Christians today often weaponize compassion against each other. I could write a book on this - so I'll stop here.
Pure equality, communism, and even wide open borders fail to meet the values of utilitarianism if looked at in a long enough time window.
A dollar's worth of stuff is worth more to the bum than to the billionaire, so ceteris paribus, wealth transfer increases overall utility.
However, the bum consumes all his wealth whereas the billionaire invests most of his wealth. We have a capital intensive society. Consuming all our wealth would lower overall utility catastrophically. So utilitarian premises justify capitalism softened by charity and/or some kind of social safety net.
But let's turn to immigration. Yes, millions of people from shthole nations can economically benefit from coming here more than they hurt us in the short term. But if people get to shop for governments without paying, good government gets under-produced. Why overthrow a tyrant when you can just leave? Why pledge your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor unless it is for the benefit of your progeny?
And when people get to arbitrage countries without price, it becomes hard to tell which system of government/society is superior. That which works gets arbitraged away. When the world sees, crime, homelessness, and ever increasing debt in the United States, they smell our stinking city on a hill and look for another model of governance.
BTW, most of your arguments against utilitarianism still stand even after my bit of steelmanning. We are supposed to suffer and struggle a bit, and so forth. The emotion called happiness is often the result of overcoming some difficulty. (Happy and sad originally referred to situations, not emotions.)
One of your best pieces, in my opinion. Being able to put a succint label onto the ethos/behavior that's destroying society is very helpful. It would be a victory indeed to have more people associate negative connotations with utilitarianism.
Atheists are like vegans. You only have to wait a minute or two and they'll start telling you about all the wonders of their newfound religion. So much enlightened!
Yes and utilitarianism from Bentham and Mills is at the root of the "classical liberalism," way too many on the right fall for. Classical liberalism is the direct route to decadence and Jew rent seeking and usury stripping ordinary people of their assets. In fact the decadence is probably a reaction to this financial Jew crime.
must everything be judged in relationship to christian faith? they do not own ethical behavior, in fact history tell us quite the reverse. It is the excuse for power over other faiths.
Thanks to the picture that LP Koch shared (the stolen cat), I saw that in myself; one word, still. I could swear I went utilitarian after facing too much trauma. I needed to go on and this strategy was a way to cope.
I understand how it's somehow not the "best way" to go but it helps to cope.
The difference seems to be that somehow, the guy from the comic strip fully accepts to dissolve the objective wrongdoing in preference of something different. I suppose that what I have been trough is willing to keep track of the traumatic event, and as well all the consequences. In my way, the cat eater is not forgiven, and he's being granted some "I won't act as I should, against you, cup is full". Along, there is as well a strong will of "may the sky write down what just happened".
This is a bit difficult to explain as there surely is some "I will walk past the whole story and not care".
I will take a very harsh example; let's imagine there are people intending to make you "die of sorrow". Those are intending to kill you slowly in hurting your "love" as much as they can, systematically affect your love and all tied to it.
If you know about this being in motion, the first matter becomes to counter this. Whatever the loss, the cats stolen, there is only one way to escape: it's not caring too much ie "not dying of sorrow", first. And this is strategical, as to be able, one day, to benefit from some "Russians arrived!". How would this translate?
The only coin side is that things keep accumulating inside. Traumas are not treated. If Russians arrive "in time", there is a chance. In such framework there is no time to "bury the deads", it's just an in-interrupted succesion of trauma and hits.
The other option is to stand the trauma as it happens. But if there are people intending to make you die of sorrow, one month of it and you sink in depression. One month of it amounts to irrecoverable losses.
But it's true that such utilitarian coping amounts to being framed into a pain/pleasure conjecture. What's the road, then?
The Devil THEY worship is much older, culturally speaking, than any Abrahamic faith. So encouraging the eating of God’s flesh and drinking His blood on the weekend probably isn’t helping any of your causes. Pretty sure that has been a Cabal ritual this whole 1300+ years.
I love the thinking behind anti-Utilitarianism but cannot get behind churches, which objectively churn out Betas and confused drones. Christianity is very powerful. Christians, not so much. By design.
Can we simply simplify all this; nice people, bad people, in a freedom with the free will to choose. One rides soullessly on opinion/choice/thought; the other souly on its "self"; understanding what we are then becomes the battle ground, in particular how to define that word self. In reality, it refers to its reality, with its being self. Our self, our awarness is connected to the energy that drives our body, we term the spirit. There is a separation and the proof is this: ask an older person how they feel inside; they are always feel younger than their body.
Agreed. Utilitarianism is fundamentally wrong because it takes *a* good and makes it *the* good. But the utilitarian calculus can still provide a helpful framing for one aspect of decision-making (just not the ultimate one).
Which one of them was it that unironically agreed that reducing humanity to a bunch of vegetables on morphine drips might be an optimal utilitarian outcome?
Another once agreed that early human extinction might be preferable since, in a theoretically indefinite perpetuation of human existence, which mathematically indicates both infinite pleasure and suffering, the infinite suffering would be greater than the infinite pleasure due to inevitable dwindling resources.
Utilitarianism is a logical trap for midwit minds. Best characterized by the trolley problem, which is probably why they resort to it so often and with such enthusiasm. It's a perfect example of left-brained thinking: a highly abstract and constrained model with an inescapable and counterintuitive conclusion and no real-life application (although like a man with only a hammer sees everything as a nail, they inappropriately apply it all the time). This shit is like crack for midwits and TED talks and reddit are their corner boys.
Plus, I’ll finish the joke about the Zen monk who said to the hot dog vendor “make me one with everything”. After he got his hot dog, he handed the vendor a twenty dollar bill. The vendor did not give him any change, so the Zen monk said, “Hey, where is my change?” The vendor simply turns to him and says, “Change comes from within.”
A solid essay. I feel many Christians (including myself) have been and are confused regarding the Christian ethic. Utilitarianism has been inserted into a lot of Christian ideals without anyone noticing. I remember children's books that perverted to the story of the Good Samaritan and taught that we are all neighbors.
Christians today often weaponize compassion against each other. I could write a book on this - so I'll stop here.
Thanks! That sounds like a book for our times. You should write it
Thank you for this. Reading it was worth the time.
That’s what I wanted to write. So, I’ll second your comment.
Many thanks to both of you!
Pure equality, communism, and even wide open borders fail to meet the values of utilitarianism if looked at in a long enough time window.
A dollar's worth of stuff is worth more to the bum than to the billionaire, so ceteris paribus, wealth transfer increases overall utility.
However, the bum consumes all his wealth whereas the billionaire invests most of his wealth. We have a capital intensive society. Consuming all our wealth would lower overall utility catastrophically. So utilitarian premises justify capitalism softened by charity and/or some kind of social safety net.
But let's turn to immigration. Yes, millions of people from shthole nations can economically benefit from coming here more than they hurt us in the short term. But if people get to shop for governments without paying, good government gets under-produced. Why overthrow a tyrant when you can just leave? Why pledge your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor unless it is for the benefit of your progeny?
And when people get to arbitrage countries without price, it becomes hard to tell which system of government/society is superior. That which works gets arbitraged away. When the world sees, crime, homelessness, and ever increasing debt in the United States, they smell our stinking city on a hill and look for another model of governance.
Well put!
BTW, most of your arguments against utilitarianism still stand even after my bit of steelmanning. We are supposed to suffer and struggle a bit, and so forth. The emotion called happiness is often the result of overcoming some difficulty. (Happy and sad originally referred to situations, not emotions.)
One of your best pieces, in my opinion. Being able to put a succint label onto the ethos/behavior that's destroying society is very helpful. It would be a victory indeed to have more people associate negative connotations with utilitarianism.
Thank you, sir!
Atheists are like vegans. You only have to wait a minute or two and they'll start telling you about all the wonders of their newfound religion. So much enlightened!
Definitely. I still enjoy listening to Morrissey/The Smiths, but he definitely embodies that religious-fundamentalist zeal for veganism!
Reaping the consequences of making short-term dopamine your god.
This!
Yes and utilitarianism from Bentham and Mills is at the root of the "classical liberalism," way too many on the right fall for. Classical liberalism is the direct route to decadence and Jew rent seeking and usury stripping ordinary people of their assets. In fact the decadence is probably a reaction to this financial Jew crime.
must everything be judged in relationship to christian faith? they do not own ethical behavior, in fact history tell us quite the reverse. It is the excuse for power over other faiths.
Thanks to the picture that LP Koch shared (the stolen cat), I saw that in myself; one word, still. I could swear I went utilitarian after facing too much trauma. I needed to go on and this strategy was a way to cope.
I understand how it's somehow not the "best way" to go but it helps to cope.
The difference seems to be that somehow, the guy from the comic strip fully accepts to dissolve the objective wrongdoing in preference of something different. I suppose that what I have been trough is willing to keep track of the traumatic event, and as well all the consequences. In my way, the cat eater is not forgiven, and he's being granted some "I won't act as I should, against you, cup is full". Along, there is as well a strong will of "may the sky write down what just happened".
This is a bit difficult to explain as there surely is some "I will walk past the whole story and not care".
I will take a very harsh example; let's imagine there are people intending to make you "die of sorrow". Those are intending to kill you slowly in hurting your "love" as much as they can, systematically affect your love and all tied to it.
If you know about this being in motion, the first matter becomes to counter this. Whatever the loss, the cats stolen, there is only one way to escape: it's not caring too much ie "not dying of sorrow", first. And this is strategical, as to be able, one day, to benefit from some "Russians arrived!". How would this translate?
The only coin side is that things keep accumulating inside. Traumas are not treated. If Russians arrive "in time", there is a chance. In such framework there is no time to "bury the deads", it's just an in-interrupted succesion of trauma and hits.
The other option is to stand the trauma as it happens. But if there are people intending to make you die of sorrow, one month of it and you sink in depression. One month of it amounts to irrecoverable losses.
But it's true that such utilitarian coping amounts to being framed into a pain/pleasure conjecture. What's the road, then?
The Devil THEY worship is much older, culturally speaking, than any Abrahamic faith. So encouraging the eating of God’s flesh and drinking His blood on the weekend probably isn’t helping any of your causes. Pretty sure that has been a Cabal ritual this whole 1300+ years.
I love the thinking behind anti-Utilitarianism but cannot get behind churches, which objectively churn out Betas and confused drones. Christianity is very powerful. Christians, not so much. By design.
Can we simply simplify all this; nice people, bad people, in a freedom with the free will to choose. One rides soullessly on opinion/choice/thought; the other souly on its "self"; understanding what we are then becomes the battle ground, in particular how to define that word self. In reality, it refers to its reality, with its being self. Our self, our awarness is connected to the energy that drives our body, we term the spirit. There is a separation and the proof is this: ask an older person how they feel inside; they are always feel younger than their body.
It has it's place. Between two morally neutral or equal options it's ok to decide based on utilitarian principles.
Agreed. Utilitarianism is fundamentally wrong because it takes *a* good and makes it *the* good. But the utilitarian calculus can still provide a helpful framing for one aspect of decision-making (just not the ultimate one).
It's not wrong, it's just incomplete I would say