/lit/ - Literature

>>8949960
>and now he is literary canon

>>8935217
>everyone who doesn't agree with me is /pol9k/

>>7040167
Not to mention,
>>7040148
>the famous "And but so but"
>"Ensuite"

>>6678568
>The only way anybody can pretend to logically justify their culture is through moral utilitarianism.

People can "logically" defend their culture through any moral system that's self-consistent, although emotional intuition and socially conditioned attitudes are what most people people really use to judge ethics. According to strict utilitarian ethics, a country that contained 51% of the world's population could inflict whatever slavery or violence they want on the other 49% of the world, so long as the material wealth and sadistic pleasure it provided was rated sufficiently high relative to the suffering of the minority.

Well-being, pleasure and happiness are not experienced the same way by all people. You can't just reduce complicated longstanding sentiment and mental states into a one-dimensional meter like the morality system of the Fable series IRL.

>All else is self-delusion.

Talk about having a confirmation bias.

>>6678577
>What else ought the purpose of a culture to be then?

Culture, for the most part, is not created or sustained by lone individuals. It has a multitude of participants, and therefore a multitude of designs regarding its purpose and interpretation.

>It's not to hold silly little festivals and ritual beheadings of perpetrators against conformity.

It's easy to belittle those kinds of old customs when you live in the modern era. For a farmer living in the ages where the seeds planted to grain harvested yield was 1:2 instead of 1:30, the temptation of a ritual being able to bring rain was much greater than it seems today. Likewise, criminal punishments were harsher in the past because violence and theft were much higher and they couldn't afford to feed a bloated prison population. The causes of natural disasters like plagues weren't understood, so they were often blamed on people in a desperate attempt to stop them. Think about how important wells were for having access to drinking water, and how mistrusted and dehumanized minority groups like Jews were. This would seem like a perfectly utilitarian argument in the Middle Ages.

Things almost always make sense when you grew up with them - fish do not believe in water, so to speak. However, in the year 3000, the same kind of disparaging attitude towards alien cultures would probably make your behavior in everyday life reminiscent of a superstitious peasant. Wisdom, whether individual or collective, only comes in retrospect.

>I'll tell you that.

I hate to break it to you, but you're not the supreme, unbiased arbitrator of all cultural norms that have come and gone in all places across all of history. You're probably not even familiar with 1% of them.

>>6678627

Considering the prevalent attitude towards free will and emphasis on individualism in the modern west, I'd say deontology makes much more sense than utilitarianism. Communism is basically utilitarianism taken to extremes and it was an abject failure.

>he intoned
>he declared
>he averred
>he yawned
>he spat
>he snarled
>he growled
>he deduced
>he questioned
>he proclaimed
>he explained
>he stated
>he implied

>>6073202

Except he's a faggot hack that doesn't produce his own artwork.

Schopenhauer said it best: the origin of morality is simple empathy. Anybody of any religious alignment (or lack thereof) can have empathy. I don't think this is objective, it inherently relates to living things as subjects and the personal experiences of pain and deprivation they have, but it seems to be a thread running through all societies. Avoiding malicious acts because you fear punishment in hell/prison does not make you a good person, it's pure self-interest.