>>17721141
Well, I wouldn't consider the ideas I express in my writing wonderful. If anything, my writing is hurt by how concise I am. I always feel as though my writing is very sry and barebones. Hard to really tell for sure though, since all my classes cater to brainless and thus don't really give me a challenge. in any case, here's an excerpt of some writing I did for school.
>Utilitarian hedonism is equally untenable. Though it recognizes the existence and necessity of an objective good; it is misguided in regards to what exactly that good is. Bentham fails to recognize that humans find intrinsic value in many things outside of pleasure. Justice, authentic experience, human life, wisdom, and many more virtues are valued not for the utility they provide but for their own sake. By reducing goodness to just one metric, Bentham allows for a system that not only permits but encourages evil in certain circumstances. For an example of this, imagine that earth was visited by an advanced alien race. These aliens promise to solve all of humanity's material woes. No one will go hungry, live without shelter, or die of disease ever again. In fact, everyone will enjoy an incredibly high standard of living for as long as humanity exists However, these aliens will only help humanity under one condition: every year, one in every ten million people are randomly selected to be beamed up into the alien mothership. Here, they will be subject to slow, excruciating deaths by torture for the amusement of the aliens. Any objective analysis of the situation from a utilitarian perspective would require us to take the aliens up on their offer. However, it is clearly immoral to allow for the torture of an innocent minority for the sake of the prosperity of a majority. This begs the question of how a definition of the good can logically lead to such blatant atrocities. But we need not look to the moral failure of utilitarianism to demonstrate how it is not a worthwhile theory of the good. Robert Nozick, in his book "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" puts forth a refutation of hedonism in the form of a thought experiment called the experience machine. Imagine you were presented with the opportunity to be plugged into a machine that would simulate a false reality of pure pleasure for you. Once plugged in, you would never be able to leave, but you would also be unable to tell that you were not actually experiencing reality. Under a hedonistic theory of the good, there is no reason not to plug in. However, the majority of people still choose not to do so. These results suggested to Nozick that human beings value things other than pleasure, such as having authentic experiences.
For context, we were asked to evaluate multiple theories of 'the good', this if for a discussion post and is not a formal essay.