Utilitarianism

[@diodio520]

Thank you for putting this out here. These lectures are precious. 🤗

[@PhiloofAlexandria]

Glad you like them!

[@philipvlnst]

Fantastic Lecture and great sound system. Clear. I love your lectures but other lectures had a bad sound system, but this was is perfect! And thank you for the last slide of the house of Milton, Bentham, Mill, and Hazlitt.

[@soufyaneghe5819]

Greetings to you, thank you for this rich information

[@extendedclips]

Another Great Lecture! 📚✨👏🏽

[@PhiloofAlexandria]

Thank you!

[@stoodmars]

Great video! Really enjoying this new series, good to see some of the older topics being discussed. I hope you’ll be discussing the ideas of Iris Murdoch soon, would be great to see a video dedicated to her works!

[@PhiloofAlexandria]

Thanks! Will do! She's a favorite of mine. I often assign Under the Net in my Ideas of the Twentieth Century course. And Metaphysics as.a Guide to Morals is utterly brilliant, in my view.

[@stoodmars]

@@PhiloofAlexandria Fantastic! I finished reading The Sea, the Sea last night, I've never come across anything quite like it. Looking forward to the video!

[@barbaradonohue4822]

You’re such a good professor.

[@alonsoviton8278]

Professor, what do you think about the moral of Doctor House, he would be a kind of utilitarian? Or he doesn't have any moral theory behind his acts?

[@PhiloofAlexandria]

That's an interesting question. I see him as a kind of utilitarian, yes. What about the other characters? More broadly, many works of literature, and many TV series, can be understood as built around clashes between different ethical perspectives. One of my favorite student papers of all time analyzed Buffy the Vampire Slayer this way. Buffy is a Kantian. Giles is a utilitarian. Xander represents common sense ethics. And Willow is an Aristotelian virtue ethicist. Faith, not discussed in that paper, is in my view a Hobbesian.

[@statmech4u]

thanks, very nice talk. i will admit that I do not understand the field of philosophy that well. But still i had to chuckle a little learning about utilitarism. How should anyone know what the consequences of their actions are? And on what timescale it should work out to be good or bad? These kind of questions could grind the largest supercomputers in the world to halt :) In material science, we like to look at potential energy surfaces where lower spots on the surface are better. In most situations, there is an unfavorable barrier in the way of getting to a better place on the surface. My point being that utilitarism seems near sighted, and to make any real decisions with these ideas (by that I mean, non-trivial real world choices), the consequences would just be predictions that include all of our intuition, biases, fears, irrational things.

[@statmech4u]

BTW, related to calculation time, there is a nice discussion of Act vs Rule styles by Prof Bonevac in a recent video. Basically to leverage some secondary principles that act like pre-calculated answers. Of course there are still alot of challenges when the principles are in conflict or when to break principles based on the consequences. But at least there are empirical ideas folded in instead of trying to logic through everything.

[@michaelpisciarino5348]

I am not a utilitarian, but it doesn’t mean I don’t practice cost-benefit analysis

[@RebNegru]

Danke!!!!

[@rodolfo9916]

If there's an infinite amount of pleasure and an infinite amount of suffering in the universe (or multiverse) , would that be problematic for utilitarianism?

[@pj2345-v4x]

Let’s maximize cat joint mobility rather than pleasure/pain, honestly.

[@pj2345-v4x]

@Lucas Sierra what if the cat received more loft and affection while injured? Maybe as a general rule mobility is good for well being but is it in this instance?

[@yossared901]

The idea that happiness can be measured is ludicrous.

[@_sarpa]

go bang your head against the wall to see if it's impossible to measure the consequences of actions and their effects on well-being

[@soufyaneghe5819]

Machiavellianism, the forest justifies the means, and the interest is above the other,

[@JohnGeometresMaximos]

Make the world a better place for whom though? 🙄

[@JamesAndrewMacGlashanTaylor]

Bentham argues against conscience and for good reason. But it does not seem as though he has ultimately escaped from under its thumb. The predicates, 'better' and 'worse', are intrinsically value laden (im probably using that phrase inappropriately but i trust you know wht i mean). No? And value is subjective. I suppose it is possible that Bentham might have an 'objective' method for determining what is better and worse, but just like i may have an objective method for determining vanilla icecream from chocolate icecream. But at the end of the day if i simply prefer chocolate to vanilla then i have not circumvented my conscience, so to speak, by objectively dinstinguishing chocolate from vanilla. Am I thinking clearly? I have not read bentham so it is entirely possible that he resolves all of this with a snap of his fingers. Anyway, these would be my concerns thus far.

[@PhiloofAlexandria]

I think Bentham's theory is in one sense subjective, in another objective. Here's what I mean. The entire edifice rests on pleasure and pain as sources of value. They're states of mind, and thus subjective. It's important for him that they are; he wants something at the foundation of the theory that's epistemically accessible (unlike, in his opinion, the commands of God, rights, or the good). And, yes, they can vary from person to person. But I think he holds that the theory is nonetheless in some sense objective. There are generalizations we can make about what people find pleasurable or painful. Quantities are objectively measurable and can be compared from person to person, he believes. He doesn't argue for this explicitly, but I think he views pleasure and pain as neurophysiological phenomena, ultimately, that could in principle be measured neurally.

[@gustavoarosemena4933]

I am perplexed at the idea that utilitarianism can resolve moral conflicts when there are 1000 versions of the doctrine, with minor changes leading to wildly different conclusions (ie sum versus average utilitarianism). A utilitarian argument can be made to justify anything. They are made post-hoc to justify what people already want.

[@Jacob-jg6cd]

What a strange individual. (I’m referring to Bentham of course)