• riley
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    deleted by creator

    • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      When I was a grad student, my advisor used to respond to any question that started "Imagine a possible world in which..." by just saying "No, I'd rather not." :gigachad:

    • Animasta [any]
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      3 years ago

      I don't know too much about utilitarianism, but I guess the experiment illustrates the impossibility to figure out the utility to other beings.

      This issue occasionally rears it's head in vegan discussions when people try to "rank" various animals.

      • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]
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        edit-2
        3 years ago

        Right, Utilitarianism (correctly so oftentimes) gets lambasted because it can quickly go from "greater good" thinking to "How many lives can be measurably improved by stealing redistributing this homeless person's organs?"

      • eduardog3000 [he/him]
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        edit-2
        3 years ago

        How does failing to accept some shitty impossible thought experiment designed to dismiss ideas of maximizing human happiness make someone a sociopath?

        • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
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          edit-2
          3 years ago

          I don't think it's a shitty impossible thought experiment, I think it's very accurate critique on how utilitarian philosophy gets used IRL by rich "philanthropists" and the US state department in order to hide and justify unethical behaviour.

          • eduardog3000 [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Claiming something maximizes utility != that thing actually maximizing utility.

            Rich "philanthropists" and the State Department might say they are maximizing utility, but that doesn't mean it's true.

              • eduardog3000 [he/him]
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                3 years ago

                "If we measure your idea using the completely nonsensical metric of 'because I said so', your idea is nonsensical."

                • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
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                  3 years ago

                  Why is it a nonsensical metric to measure an idea based on the consequences of the key object of the idea? I mean utility is a quantity that we can in principle measure in any way we'd like.

          • NomadicWarMachine [any]
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            3 years ago

            Utilitarianism, like most ethical philosophies, is a framework for thinking about the concept of ethics and as such two people using the same framework can come to wildly different conclusions. There’s communist and AnCap utilitarians who lay out the logic behind their beliefs in a (technically) sound fashion. I don’t really get people labeling themselves “utilitarians” to be honest.

            And it should be noted I don’t really think there’s ANY ethical philosophy that doesn’t have some weird hypothetical situation someone could dream up where the logic of the framework can be used to justify bizarre and/or horrible things. It’s really a question of how likely such a situation would be to ever actually occur.

            I find this shit interesting but I think as materialists we shouldn’t waste too much energy one. People don’t do bad things cuz they haven’t been presented a totally coherent moral philosophy yet, they generally do bad things for material reasons. Some tech bro billionaires being utilitarians isn’t the reason their amoral bone heads.

            • catposter [comrade/them]
              hexagon
              ·
              3 years ago

              but we SHOULD be concerned about this, much less unrealistic thought experiment: https://medium.com/@AmericanPublicU/drowning-child-scenario-exposes-moral-hypocrisy-part-i-4b308e36b1d5 https://medium.com/@AmericanPublicU/drowning-child-scenario-exposes-moral-hypocrisy-part-ii-257e1e9e5475

              as in, i am and i am having a mental breakdown

              • NomadicWarMachine [any]
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                3 years ago

                I would encourage you to log off if this philosophy debate is causing you mental anguish.

                I’m just saying I don’t think convincing Elon Musk to be a deontologist is going to make him shut down his child labor lithium mines.

                • catposter [comrade/them]
                  hexagon
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  i can't log off from my brain though, knowing im using energy and resources and everything that could be given to those in need. every time i eat food that i don't strictly need or turn on a computer or draw or write or do anything that requires extra calories i'm failing millions of people

                  • NomadicWarMachine [any]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    Okay, I’m telling you now you need to log off, and stop reading philosophy dork blogs online, those weirdos are pure ideology and basically treat trying to write themselves into weird logical boxes as some kind of sport. Be a materialist not an idealist.

                    You personally eating slightly more than your body needs doesn’t affect world hunger at all, it’s not like if you bought less groceries Safeway would FedEx the left overs to some village in Africa. They’d just throw it out. There’s enough food for everyone and then some in the world right now it’s just not being distributed properly, this is the materialist way to think about this. Personal asceticism doesn’t help the suffering in anyway, what will is a restriction of society, something with you doodling or writing poems has no effect on.

              • flowernet [none/use name]
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                3 years ago

                So if you did indeed answer “yes” to every question in the scenario, the only conclusion is that you should be offering every resource at your disposal to help children dying around the world,

                Yes, that would be very moral. People who donate lots of money their money and take vows of poverty are recognized by soceity as having done a good thing. the fact that you don't donate every resource you have except for those which sustain your life and allow you to keep gathering more resources means you are not the most moral, perfect, unreproachable being on the planet, which must come as a shock to you, and people that donate more than you are more good than you.

                • catposter [comrade/them]
                  hexagon
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                  edit-2
                  3 years ago

                  i mean i already knew that

                  it's not that i'm worse than someone else, but that from an opportunity cost perspective, the failure to help a child in need is the same as killing them. so i'm basically killing dozens/thousands/however much the 20$ i could have made mowing lawns when i'm drawing makes

                  arguably the same could be said about energy bills and time so if you spend 30 minutes on this site in your free time instead of organizing or sigma grindsetting for extra money you're killing twice as many people

                • catposter [comrade/them]
                  hexagon
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  do YOU spend everything except your bare minimum resources in selfless endeavours?

                  • Sotalsta [they/them]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    That's the point. None of us are perfectly or even maximally moral. The idea is to be more moral when you can. By trying to make this an all-or-nothing question, you are setting yourself up to give up on morality as a whole, and become entirely self interested.

                    I won't debate this with you on philosophical grounds, but I will say that my advice on the most moral thing you could do right now is to stop fixating on this topic. Take a gentle, gradual approach, and ask yourself what small and simple things you could do to improve the lives of the people you care about. Somewhere down the road, you can start to broaden your scope.

          • flowernet [none/use name]
            ·
            3 years ago

            it's not a good critique because everyone already uses the logic that organisms which can feel more have more moral significance. We will kill the thousands of individual organisms in an ant-hill because the pleasure we get from not having an ant-hill outweighs the anguish the ants feel.

            • catposter [comrade/them]
              hexagon
              ·
              3 years ago

              this ignores veganism as a concept, pretty much. most vegans don't support killing insects

                • p_sharikov [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  Vegans generally still believe in self defense, which applies to parasites. You're not morally obligated to degrade your health for another animal, you're just not supposed to kill for frivolous reasons like personal taste preferences, because that's no different than killing for sport.

              • flowernet [none/use name]
                ·
                3 years ago

                Vegans avoid killing animals where it is possible and practical. They do not relocate every invertebrate in the soil when they need to build a new house. they certainly still apply different moral weights to different animals.

      • ZZ_SloppyTop [he/him]
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        3 years ago

        I do not accept the validity of hypotheticals and thought experiments. I’m fully empirical-pilled

    • UlyssesT
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      3 months ago

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      • riley
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        1 year ago

        deleted by creator

        • UlyssesT
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          3 months ago

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          • riley
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            edit-2
            1 year ago

            deleted by creator

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
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      3 years ago

      The utility monster does exist though, the utility monster is NGOs ran by billionaires, it's the US state department, it exists in justifying more drilling permits. There are lots of examples in the real world that sort of operate on exactly this logic. It's not justified as "pleasure", but lots of evil gets justified essentially as providing more utility than it costs in suffering.

      • riley
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        edit-2
        1 year ago

        deleted by creator

        • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          yeah that would be bad under utilitarianism as utilitiarianism does have the advantage or saying you have to think about other people

      • Sotalsta [they/them]
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        3 years ago

        For me a core part of taking the utility monster argument in good faith is that the monster isn't just lying. It has to genuinely get more utility, not just be a regular guy with a propaganda industry. For USAID or similar to be a utility monster, the good they do by giving out food would have to outweigh the harm the cause by furthering US imperialism. If I believed that, I wouldn't be on this website. It doesn't matter how they justify it, their actual actions are a net harm, so the utilitarian thing to do is to starve them of resources.