YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

Too stupid to debunk without resorting to bullying.

If you’re moral realist he’s even more wrong. Of the realist positions available this is closest to naturalism, but it denies the essential precepts of any moral realism viz. the mind-independence of moral truth. This “is-ought” “solution” is as old as Protagoras, “man is the measure of all things”, where “e/acc’s google-brained account of consciousness” stands in for “man”.

As a philosophical position they’re just doing relativism, and then as a historicised political project this is just late 19th century scientism(ific racism). And I emphasise that the premises (“evolutionary fitness”) reveal the sources reveal the political project.

Moral realists introduce an independent condition (mind-independence) which at least purports to save ethical principles from reducing to “might makes right”, this is just the latter window-dressed with talk of “post-selection” to implicitly let in some degree of ethical deliberation as constitutive of morality, making it incidentally also a cowardly way to propagandise racism.

“We have built the torment nexus” but for more literate morons who read Borges

Radioactive Wolf Twinks? My God, what have we done…

Highly recommended for a dissenting view, against the greatness of Sidgwick, is from another great (and personal fave) Bernard Williams, who has a longish essay criticising Sidgwick in particular (his critiques of utilitarianism and kantianism in general are much better known)

It’s very easy to get the impression reading the more surface material that Sidgwick is universally admired, even where his reasoning may go awry. Williams corrects that misapprehension.

yeah well since gawker god knows what people aren’t covering about thiel’s breeding programme

i’m gonna take a moment here to point out there seems to be a widespread historical error about bentham’s role

bentham was neither a “total” utilitarian, nor particularly hardcore about how to assess units of pleasure/pain - he believed (a) that what you want to do is work out in a practical fashion how to maximise pleasure and minimise pain of people who currently exist, and (b) that there were pretty impractical ways to do it

he was a legal mind, concerned with public policy and the rectification of injustice. the “total” view comes from sedgwick, who much later in the mid-19th century was the real formaliser of modern utilitarianism - it’s from him that the EA types get their incessant trade-offs and indeed specifically the view that future lives have, by parity of reason, to count. bentham by contrast was in many ways not a particularly philosophical thinker, and intended rather to apply a radically reduced psychological theory to social problem-solving - he also left behind very little finished work, inland this is a typical feature of his philosophical style

the “utility” reduction was something that had been floating around in british moral philosophy (then not distinguished from psychology) for some time, and bentham put it into action. by contrast, sidgwick was a later full time ethicist devoted to the academic study of the by then popular utilitarian system in the abstract

this idea of bentham the radical versus mill the moderate is justified, but seems to come, primarily, from mill’s aversion to bentham’s “pushpin is as good as poetry”, which permitted no weighting of the utilitarian scale in favour of “higher pleasures”

but it is easy to see in this light that bentham’s radicalism doesn’t give you the juice for an extension to EA, since the radicalism of EA is not in giving equal weight to all kinds of pleasure/pain

I don’t have the source article, my full title is all one quote from the latest issue of the London Review of Books. But I’ve seen it before multiple times - it’s out there and findable

“In 2022, Andreessen [owner of however many multi-multi-million $ properties] and his inveighed against building multi-family housing in their swanky Peninsula hometown of Atherton - average annual income $539,000, median home price $7.9 million - with an email to city government that read: ‘Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multi-family overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbours and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic’

Like there’s already the completely twisted economic logic of housing as a personal investment, propped up by too many governments everywhere who can’t afford to lose votes by pointing out that it’s been nonsensical and unsustainable for decades, but to then add to that the logic of doing it even when you don’t have any genuine perverse incentive to insist on making ROI from the resale value of your house

Just “I’m white as shit and this is what we do when we’re billionaires too”

You know, if you can remotely put aside the less-than-dogwhistling racism for a second

i had a moment and i wanted to share it with everybody

Well you make zero distinction between any of those things, most of which (BDS?!) aren’t even under discussion here, and your target is Ian Miles Cheong’s opinion-having about the US, particularly with respect to Oregon

What do you want me to do here?

Edit: let me rephrase that, what the hell do you want me to do here? Are you serious?