> Utilitarianism is bullshit.
Why? FYI, I don't have an opinion here. The anectode about Bentham doesn't make it easier for the to understand your point here, feels like an ad hominem fallacy (again, I'm definitely missing something obvious here.)
Why? FYI, I don't have an opinion here. The anectode about Bentham doesn't make it easier for the to understand your point here, feels like an ad hominem fallacy (again, I'm definitely missing something obvious here.)
*Everybody* understands that when the founder of a Thing does something as daffy as Having Themselves Mummified in Victorian England the rest of their thinking is automatically suspect.
It's the kind of informal heuristic which is almost never wrong. We should not ignore it.
When we're on a web forum, sitting in a comfortable chair, drinking coffee and not in any kind of hurry to decide one way or another whether something is a good idea, heuristics are harmful and prevent us from reaching correct conclusions.
Heuristics are also for when you have too much information to handle in one thought process.
I think it's bad because it comes across as someone discovering basic numeracy as an adult and going "what happens if we treat happiness as a countable object and do basic adding up on it?", and then never gets past either of two major stumbling blocks: (1) how do you compare the happiness of two different people, and (2) there's a lot more to maths than adding things up, important maths at that, such as "when is it OK to treat discrete things as continuums and when is this a bad idea?" and "do you really want to say that m people who are n happy is the same value as one person who is m*n happy, or is there some kind of discounting for bigger values like there seems to be with the utility of money going down as people get richer?"
> *Everybody* understands that when the founder of a Thing does something as daffy as Having Themselves Mummified in Victorian England the rest of their thinking is automatically suspect.
The main thing with Rationalists is that they recognise everyone's thinking is suspect.
> It's the kind of informal heuristic which is almost never wrong. We should not ignore it.
I grew up in the UK, with a prime minister who promoted what she thought were "Victorian Values". Amongst other various things, when she went to see Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, she was informed of Mozart's scatological humour and is reported to have responded thusly:
"""She was not pleased. In her best headmistress style, she gave me a severe wigging for putting on a play that depicted Mozart as a scatological imp with a love of four-letter words. It was inconceivable, she said, that a man who wrote such exquisite and elegant music could be so foul-mouthed. I said that Mozart's letters proved he was just that: he had an extraordinarily infantile sense of humour ... "I don't think you heard what I said", replied the Prime Minister. "He couldn't have been like that". I offered (and sent) a copy of Mozart's letters to Number Ten the next day; I was even thanked by the appropriate Private Secretary. But it was useless: the Prime Minister said I was wrong, so wrong I was.""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_scatology
Lord Byron is also famous both for his poetry and for bringing a pet bear to his university accommodation to spite the rules about no dogs.
There's weird anecdotes about virtually every famous figure, 'cause humans are weird.
Once you see that in his life the result of Utilitarianism was mummification in an era where that was batshit there's kind of a long pause and a "recheck everything" and oooh look its full of utility monsters and all sorts of other naive garbage which somehow we are expected to take seriously.
Point and laugh is the right response.
Not 600 page rebuttals.
are specifically a criticism of utilitarianism, the people taking them seriously are doing so to say "and therefore utilitarianism is wrong".
Also, did you… fail to notice that I was also describing utilitarianism as naive, just without using that specific word? Because I was.
> mummification in an era where that was batshit
It was also an era when being gay or an atheist or supporting equal rights for women or ending slavery was "batshit".
And today we have Elon Musk, who many regard as batshit, but hey, SpaceX exists and probably wouldn't have gotten this far without him (it's not like the other billionaires in the new space race did any better than the old rocket companies they're trying to displace).
"Batshit" is a trivial, playground, insult. Even when it's true, it doesn't count for much, because it's so broad.
That is seriously enough to recheck everything because it seems to have blown up the founder. And if it does this to him, what's it gonna do to us?
It does not need to be more complicated than this.
> And if it does this to him, what’s it going to do to us?
Is this serious? It did him no harm.
Without any variant of the phrases "it's weird" or "just because", why exactly do you feel so strongly about mummification after death, regardless of what motived him?
I don't care what happens to my body after death, because I won't be using any more. Do you expect to keep using yours after you die, or something?
Also, rereading your earlier comments: what exactly is your belief about the brown M&Ms story? Why do you think Van Halen asked for M&Ms with the brown ones removed in the first place?
> That is seriously enough to recheck everything because it seems to have blown up the founder.
It was rechecked, and popularised, by John Stuart Mill.
My issues with utilitarianism survive this new person, because they aren't ad hominem attacks on eccentric personalities.
Nope. Not doing it. Pointing and laughing is the right response, not trying to figure out why mummification in the Victorian era is a bad code smell for the mindset that produces it.
I guess I can empathise — when I don't get enough sleep or if I drink too much caffeine my emotions can overwhelm my ability to reason.
And that one time a heart transplant was shown explicitly on a TV documentary. As a mere memory that's fine, but at the moment the heart came out of the chest on TV? Nopenopenope.
Likewise the existence of horror as a genre. The mere adverts for the Saw franchise left me disgusted at humanity, so obviously I never watched the films.
Irony, you write as if rationality throws away something that we need, but I think you've lost something…
The heart pumps. The heart is not a pump. There is neural tissue all over the place, hormones by glands which affect decision making and so on.
You will not easily categorise kinds of thinking in any objectively measurable way.
Type One thinking may have 72 subtypes once we get good brain imaging technology. They may decide the original category was wrong And So On.
You cannot use those concepts, like type one thinking, except as heuristics.
They are not true like “the sun is mostly hydrogen” is true.
I've observed people who believe themselves rational use "reason" to lead themselves astray. Because "reason" is supposedly more reliable than "emotion", they tend to think whatever "reason" leads them to must be true, despite it disagreeing with "emotion". Kind of like giving oneself enough rope to hang oneself with.
Personally I'd be quite suspect of any conclusion where "reason" and "emotion" does not converge. The former is more useful in convincing other people to agree with your views, but to be really honest, the scant few things I already know about utilitarianism smells enough that when GP brings up the mummy story, I'm not going to read a dozen books and academic papers on utilitarianism before I decide to agree with him...
You'd be right.
Emotion tells us what we want, reason (when we don't mess up, which most do at least as much as ChatGPT) only tells us how to get what we want and what the consequences might be.
The imperfections of human rationality is another reason to not use utilitarianism, as it is far too easy to just be wrong about what maximises utility, no matter how simple or complex you define that concept.
The only two cases where I disagree with this, where I think one should be suspicious of the emotion, are:
(1) you have two choices, A feels good and B feels bad, and reason tells you that choosing A will ultimately lead to a new condition you are disgusted/repulsed by/hate/etc. even more than you dislike choice B.
But even then, distrust the reasoning also.
(2) when you can't even figure out why you don't like something.
The reason I care about that, includes homophobes and transphobes violently attacking people and using their emotions as the justification.
But again, that you don't know the answer doesn't mean there isn't one — Old Testament law about shellfish and pork make a lot of sense once microscopes lead to germ theory.
I'd put "has weird request for disposal of their corpse" in their W&T in the second category. Would I do what he did? No! But I'd also not specifically ask for my organs to get donated… because having to think about it makes me shiver a bit, not because I have any reason (including emotional responses!) to object.
> The former is more useful in convincing other people to agree with your views
Depends on the person, I think.
This is why I think it's important to show the reason why I don't accept utilitarianism: the people who got there by reason will only change their mind by reason.
> the scant few things I already know about utilitarianism smells enough that when GP brings up the mummy story, I'm not going to read a dozen books and academic papers on utilitarianism before I decide to agree with him...
This is good!
Nobody has time to do deep analyses of everything. Having quick shortcuts is fine — there are commenters on here that I've learned to skim past as they only make me angry or annoyed, so I don't get to even see any of their attempts at justification by reason.
(And that lack of time is again a reason against utilitarianism…)
But as I don't share your inner experience, nor anyone else's, I still have no idea which emotion either of you is experiencing. The other commenter is just acting like it's obvious. Is it empathy because you imagine yourself stuck forever motionless in that body, or disgust because it's a corpse and those should be hidden, or is it a violation of the sanctity of the human form (an emotion I don't have but which people discuss so I assume others do have)? Or something else?
Having sex with his sister also raised an eyebrow or two.
Fortunately you and I live in an age where we dispose of each other's dead meat by incinerating it, which is absolutely sane and logical.
Thinking should always be automatically suspect. Wetware isn't very good at it. That's why heuristics are a good idea: if we reason about whether or not someone's opus is correct, we can end up confidently wrong.
Oh, but it was. Wearing a starched collar in Victorian England did not make you a weirdo by the standard of the times, while having yourself mummified did.
I personally like people who are a little weird, but I don't pretend that they're not weird.
And yes, a lot of human behavior seems weird when seen from a distance.