Peter Singer: "Everyone should give away all their excess money because there should be no reward for wisdom and no penalty for foolishness, and I'm not just lying through my teeth pretending to be a big dumb idiot."
-
-
Standard utilitarian calculations always seem to come out to be whatever the utilitarian wanted anyway.
-
utilitarian "calculations" are a joke, as are "utility functions" none of this can be calculated as any but the broadest of handwaves the entire concept is nothing but a smokescreen to make what the utilitarian wanted anyway look like the outcome of an objective process
-
You can calculate it in principle and have it tell you a fair amount. Have to assume a utility function, but it's not hard to assume some reasonable functions, work them all out, and then experimentally pick the least inaccurate.
-
However, you can immediately tell if someone's done this, because it will be novel. It will give weird and alien answers. Which is not what we see in practice.
-
Also if substance dualism is true (it is) then 'adding' utility is nonsense. Math does not apply to the mind.
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.