maxium comfort for maxium people , sounds good ?
― anthony, Wednesday, 6 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)
ultitarians
Anthony, you make my Word Power grow and grow and grow...
― Brian MacDonald, Thursday, 7 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)
1st problem: define comfort/happiness/whatever else is used in the
first half of the sentence.
2nd problem: how to balance the maxima.
― RickyT, Thursday, 7 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)
it can justify things that most would consider immoral - it would be
quite alright to bump off a rich grandma so that a few people can get
her ineritance... things like that. so whats the best for all may not
be right.
consequences, as well - you can never tell what they can be, you'd
sit around for ever and never do anything except think about the
consequences (a tad stupid of course but i can see the point) - can
there ever be a truely utilitarian act?
social relations as well - you'd rather save yr father or mother than
a random doctor who had the cure for aids.. surely he could save more
people, but most people go for their father, most people are
generally quite selfish and utilitarianism needs selflessness. and
its hard to define happiness.
i wrote an essay on that kinda stuff recently, thats all i can
remember off the top of my head
― fran, Thursday, 7 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)
i think there's a difference between saying that people are selfish
and saying that rational people just don't think in utilitarian terms
when they make moral decisions ... of coise the very notion of
morality is rather un-ultitarian and that's where my beef lies - even
without religion there is still a point of Good with capital G
(otherwise we, um, wouldn't really have much of a problem with
death), and the degree to which the utilitarian ignores the idea of
Good is proportional to the degree to which he/she offers a
decontextualized and useless notion of "the existential will"
ben franklin, john rawls, pete singer = modern ways of rehashing
kant, trying to recover a perspective from which one can conceive of
a categorical imperative .. a perspective generally detached from
social context and solidarity
― Nick B., Thursday, 7 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)
Ok, so i've only read 'animal liberation' and some shorter articles
of his, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that Singer's notions
of happiness/desire/pleasure and ultimately utility are any different
from JS Mill's ... and the way I understand Mill's project is as the
attempt to reduce some irreducibly heterogeneous aspects of human
experience (i.e. the way that we come to desire certain objects) to
quantifiable and summable form.
If this kind of reduction is absurd, and I hope that it is, then the
notion of utility that Mill et al can recover from its objects, all
of which he believes can be characterized as either pleasurable or
not-pleasurable, is a totally unclear notion. To treat utility as if
it were a clear concept, as if it could provide us with a rational
criterion in a decision-making process, is thus to resort to a moral
fiction.
And hence the Kant connection - in the attempt to treat a moral
fiction (in Kant's case, the notion that his particular vision of
societal morality - his parents' protestantism? - was timeless and
transcendental) as if it were an objective and impersonal criterion.
If Singer would just leave the idea of natural rights alone, accept
is as a necessary fiction, then I think he'd be much more
convincing. But no ... he needs to philosophically prove why it's
bad to kill things! Give me the bible any day, thanks.
― Nick B., Saturday, 9 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)
one year passes...
like ricky t sez, you have to define comfort but that would be comfort to YOU => the way things 'ought to be'.
if you ever get out of that then i have probs with 'maximum' => means a minority will get left out.
so it doesn't sound good.
― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Sunday, 8 June 2003 12:42 (twenty-two years ago)