well what could be wrong with maximising happiness?This was rhetorical but yes treating people as pawns is one major problem, as is the fact that happiness, or whatever your unit of utility is, is not the kind of thing that you can do calculations with. One hundred and one people who are all one percent happy is not at all a better state of affairs than one person who is one hundred percent happy. (Not that there isn't a place for e.g. quality adjusted life years calculations in certain institutional settings.)
― ledge, Tuesday, 6 September 2022 18:59 (one year ago) link
Which is just a fancier way of saying "the end justifies the means". But your chosen formulation of it immediately suggested the thought that consequences are open-ended, extending into all futurity, and therefore are impossible to measureI think "the end justifies the means" is a bit more slippery - it's often used to weigh one set of consequences more heavily than another, e.g. bombing hiroshima to end the war. And, well we're talking about human actions and human consequences, I think its fair to restrcit it to humanly measurable ones.
― ledge, Tuesday, 6 September 2022 19:12 (one year ago) link
Even human consequences extend indefinitely. Identifying an end point is an arbitrary imposition upon a ceaseless flow, the rough equivalent of ending a story with "and they all lived happily ever after".
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, 6 September 2022 20:11 (one year ago) link
so do you never consider the consequences of your actions or do you have trouble getting up in the morning?
― ledge, Tuesday, 6 September 2022 20:43 (one year ago) link
I am not engaged in a program of identifying a universal moral framework based upon the consequences of my actions when I get up in the morning, which certainly makes it easier to choose what to wear.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, 6 September 2022 20:47 (one year ago) link
touche!
― ledge, Tuesday, 6 September 2022 21:08 (one year ago) link
This is the ideal utilitarian form. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like pic.twitter.com/uHvCp2Cq7y— MHR (@SpacedOutMatt) September 16, 2022
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Saturday, 17 September 2022 16:30 (one year ago) link
incredible
― death generator (lukas), Sunday, 25 September 2022 23:20 (one year ago) link
Read this a few days ago. As AI burns through staggering amounts of money with no reasonable use case so far, all your fave fascist tech moguls are gonna hitch themselves to a government gravy train under a Trump administration (gift link): https://wapo.st/3wllikQ
― Are you addicted to struggling with your horse? (Boring, Maryland), Sunday, 5 May 2024 14:35 (four weeks ago) link