/lit/ - Literature

>>6434972
>Master Duns Scotus

The word "dunce" comes from John Duns Scotus[1] (c.1266–1308), the Scottish Franciscan scholar who, with Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, was one of the leading Scholastic philosopher-theologians of the High Middle Ages. Duns Scotus wrote treatises on theology, grammar, logic, and metaphysics which were widely influential throughout Western Europe, earning Duns the papal accolade Doctor Subtilis (Subtle Teacher). (Duns remains highly esteemed in the Roman Catholic Church, and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1993.) However, with the advent of the Renaissance and the New Learning, and then the Protestant Reformation, many of Duns's theories and methods (which were considered hair-splitting) were challenged or rejected by Humanist and Protestant scholars, who used the term "Dunsman" or "Dunce" in a pejorative sense to denote those who foolishly clung on to outmoded doctrine. (The form "Dunce" reflects the medieval pronunciation of "Duns".) Gradually "dunsman" or "dunce" was used more widely for anyone stupid or dull-witted.

Duns Scotus is just begging to become a meme.

>>6093111
Utilitarianism is fucked. Some poor fuckers always gotta eat shit for the majority. For the sake of argument that fucker is you.

You gotta unjustly die for the good of the all the people on earth. Your dead. Everyone else is stoked. How do you like utilitarianism?

What character do you think perfectly sums up each board?
I think Tom Buchanan is a worthy contender for the position of /pol/. What do you think?

Consequentialism is the ethics of caring about other people.

Any step away from consequentialism is step away from caring about other people, and towards caring more about one's self.

Examples:

- "Doing harm is worse than allowing harm."
If you'd rather not have a me-caused-harm than a greater not-me-caused-harm, you are caring more about your own self than the people who are actually harmed.

- "I'd rather keep a promise than maximize well-being."
You are failing to care about people who didn't have the fortune of being in a position to have you make them a promise.

-"You can't put a value on human life."
I'll quote my bro Eliezer for this one (in the character of Harry Potter from "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"):

>Every time you spend money in order to save a life with some probability, you establish a lower bound on the monetary value of a life. Every time you refuse to spend money to save a life with some probability, you establish an upper bound on the monetary value of life. If your upper bounds and lower bounds are inconsistent, it means you could move money from one place to another, and save more lives at the same cost. So if you want to use a bounded amount of money to save as many lives as possible, your choices must be consistent with some monetary value assigned to a human life; if not then you could reshuffle the same money and do better. How very sad, how very hollow the indignation, of those who refuse to say that money and life can ever be compared, when all they're doing is forbidding the strategy that saves the most people, for the sake of pretentious moral grandstanding...

Obviously we're incapable of caring about other people completely, all the time. But just be aware of what you are doing whenever you take a step away from consequentialism.