/lit/ - Literature

every mischling piglet gets five free years of bein' cute in shithouse mirrors

then it's time for 50-75 years of T H E W A L L

>>21750453
modernity (started a couple of centuries ago, industrialization started to crack the bubble)

>>21750453
Jews and women.

>>21750453
Utilitarianism is simply hard to reject with reason. Killing 10 people to save 100 people? Most people will immediately agree with that.

>>21750475
But this leads to weird outcomes.

If you believe in the right to self defence numbers do not matter, if 1000 people unjustly attack someone he has the moral right to kill them all if he is able.

>>21750453

>>21750495
I disagree.

>>21750507
It’s okay to be wrong.

>>21750453
All of post-marginalist economics is built on Utilitarian ethics. What actual use do virtue ethics give? Or, rather, how can we actually improve society by promulgating virtue ethics other than trite exhortations to goodness which have never had any success throughout all history?

Because one works (kinda) and the other doesn't.

What could account for all subjective desires becoming expressible in an impersonal quantitative fungible form that must be continually maximising itself?

>>21750486
Not him, but I think he means that most people will agree in a kind of immediate, instinctive way as in a situation like where some people are certainly going to die there's a stronger, instinctive push saying "let's make it as few as possible" than there there necessarily is to regard other moral factors of a situation.

You yourself can kind of be seen to support this as you note that the weirdness is more at the outcome than at the stage of more immediate action. I'd imagine that the average person's response to your quandary would be to concede that there's a kind of dualism of practical reason and that neither their utilitarianism nor the the man's right to self-defence is better justified than the other. It'snot so much that utilitarianism as a philosophy if impervious to attack, but rather that it's founded in very strong intuitions.

>>21750599
>trite exhortations to goodness which have never had any success throughout all history
Isn't the point that it's not "trite exhortations to goodness" but investigations into goodness and elucidations of which behaviours/characteristics/etc. we find admirable in people and why? At the very least, on the individual and interpersonal level, virtue ethics is supreme. Show me a great artist or hero motivated primarily by utilitarianism?

>>21750599
It's the ultimate bugmen ethics

>>21750453
humanity was always enthralled in utilitarism, the only difference is that before the industrial revolution there where all kind of "spiritual mask" designed to hide this fact, if you really study history you'll see how most spiritual movements have money, war and geopolitical interest at the bottom, now we0re just more aware of that, but humanity was always deep on the nihilistic rabbit hole, going beyond utilitarism is something only a few people chose to do, now and in all periods of history

>>21750954
>humanity was always enthralled in utilitarism, the only difference is that before the industrial revolution there where all kind of "spiritual mask" designed to hide this fact
Not unfair. I question how much notions like divine reward and punishment were/are severed from a kind of utilitarian/consequentialist thinking in the minds of many (perhaps most) religious people (even philosophers).

>>21750453
angloids won completely. it's been over for a long time.

>>21751459
It is a tendency older than English language philosophy which does not uniformly accept and has never uniformly accepted it.

>utilitarianism
Utility for what?
>for the most of a moral good, defined as X
So really utilitarianism is just putting moralism first, something every moral person does by definition. Making it the most redundant philosophy ever.

>>21751511
>Utility for what?
Maybe you're on a higher level and seeing through something, but to my understanding it's generally understood that in this context "utility" refers to happiness, satisfaction, pleasure, etc.

>So really utilitarianism is just putting moralism first
See above on our potentially talking past each other, but it's generally understood more that it holds that the moral goodness of an action is derived from the utility produced by it. The emphasis is on consequences.

>>21750453
>families collapse
>institutions collapse
>religions collapse
>polities collapse
>any real idea of justice and righteous causes collapse
Utilitarianism is all that is left via method of elimination. Nothing else can serve to unite the people, even nominally, besides utilitarianism.

>>21750475
As I remember the ethical dilemma from philosophy class, it was "should you pull a lever which makes a train kill 1 person so that you can save 10", and 70-80% thought you shouldn't.

>>21751147
>notions like divine reward and punishment were/are severed from a kind of utilitarian/consequentialist thinking in the minds of many (perhaps most) religious people (even philosophers).
yes, that's the point Meister Rckhart was articulating when he talks about "the merchants at the temple" to him that was an symbol of how people want to "trade with God" prayers for benefits and devotion for an eternallife of pleasure in the afterlife
>The merchants are those who only guard against mortal sins. They strive to be good people who do their good deeds to the glory of God, such as fasting, watching, praying and the like – all of which are good – and yet do these things so that God will give them something in exchange. Their efforts are contingent upon God doing something they ardently want to have done.
so already in the middle ages Eckhart was denouncing some sort of spiritual utilitarism

>>21751635
you're onto something

>>21750453
Ultimately it comes down to the rejection of virtue ethics. We are at the stage typically known as "weak men create hard times."

>>21750609
Capitalism. Or really any economic system driven by money and finance.

>>21751627
>the emphasis is on consequences
Every philosophy needs this for me to take it seriously. Thanks for defining the moral good that utilitarians fetishize though. They're hedonists but "not selfish" and have all the problems that hedonists have plus the task of quantifiying and distributing Standardized Pleasure Points so its a pretty retarded philosophy if you give it real thought. In practice most "utilitarians" probably expand their actual list of moral goods to cope.

>>21751640
>so already in the middle ages Eckhart was denouncing some sort of spiritual utilitarism
Interesting. It's also interesting to me though that even thinkers as apparently devout as Pascal seem to be "mercantile" in this way at least with regards to dealing with non-believers. I wonder how deep the rot really goes.

Is it just mistaking pragmatism for utilitarianism?

>>21750453
Utilitarian is such a broad word that it basically means nothing on its own. De Maistre considered himself a utilitarian. You have specify what sort of utilitarianism you mean, in this case it seems you mean hedonistic, low-time-preference utilitarianism.

>>21750475
>>21750486
>>21751638
The trolley problem and similar scenarios actually require to think outside the box which most bugman can't because they are stuck with the quantification of good

All the other ethical systems get in the way of capitalism

>questions why everyone is a utilitarian when we live in a post industrial hellscape where an essential criterion of conceiving objects and their worth rests upon them possessing a dimension of ‘utility’

>In actuality no ‘thing’ could ever approach the ability to categorically actually ‘do’ something, no thing can possibly solve a problem in a permanent, absolute sense.

>gets ‘nother coca cola advertisement or brand jingle out of the blue any time they try to direct their mental will on a train of thought that becomes sufficiently complex as to cause strain or an existential affect

>heh what USE is all this thinking anyway aye

>camera pans away from anon, zooms out of the McDonald eatery and towards the cloud speckled blue sky

>post script reads; ignorance is bliss

>>21753363
>ethics precludes people owning private property

But ethics doesn't preclude using violence to steal peoples stuff then using more violence to prevent them freely trading their own labour, skills and goods?

>>21753420
It's much easier to do all that stuff if you stick to utilitarianism.
If stealing is wrong just because it's wrong, it's difficult to justify, but if it's only wrong if it fails some utility syllogism, you can do all kinds of stealing

>>21753441
That was my point, if capitalism is against most ethical systems socialism falls afoul of even more.

You're lagging. Ask yourself, what is this utilitarianism you speak of a reaction against? Maybe then you'll find your answer.