that's pretty terrible.

Do you think a random person would be justified in choosing an animal over you? How about someone you love? Someone you respect? Someone awesome?

no im just saying, i think if presented with the choice, i would often choose to save a seal or a bear or a possum over saving some stranger that i don't know.

i guess i need to define this more:

if someoen said to me: this baby seal is going to die. you can snap your fingers and someone across the planet that you don't know and will never meet will die in its place. well, i would likely snap my fingers.

EDIT: and also, like atak, i have days where i don't feel this complete lack of caring for humanity. today i don't care. so i snap my fingers and save the seal bc i think it needs saving

The person is a concious being with responsibilities and friends/family.

If a seal died, the other seals wouldn't care less.

I think thats a pretty selfish stance

Me versus an animal? It would depend on that person's values. If he shared mine, then maybe so. I value average happiness, and I think more people tends to decrease happiness on average (thus the importance that it be a random person). Unfortunately, it's hard to calculate because there are major happiness differences between taking away an existing person, hwho will usually have people who will be saddened by the death, and simply causing a potential new person not to exist. That's why it's a tough one.

Once you identify the particular person, the judgmenst change completely. there are some people the existence of whom tends greatly to increase others' happiness, so I would keep that in mind.

By the way — yes, the happiness of the raccoon matters too, but not nearly as much because I think it can't appreciate things in nearly as complex and therefore important way.

utilitarianism died in the 1850s atak, and for good reason

I'm behind the times in a lot of ways, so that's not new. And I absolutely am a utilitarian, wrt most important decisions.

i know it is. im not defending it really. it's not a stance that i incorporate into my daily life.

im not a total misanthrope. idk. maybe im just having a bad day today.

this. you would kill a person that is usually going to be good, prolly ruin the lives of those close to them, just to save a seal because you think it's cute?

i dont see why the person being across the world makes a difference in this.

would you want a random person from your work to die? how is it any different?

The argument that the random person has connections that are likely to be net positive probably swings it. So on a day when I'm not depressed, I guess I'd probably save the person.

Inconsistent, maybe, I don't know.

I too am utilitarian, it's funny because i independently came up with a very similar philosophy before learning about utilitarianism this year.
And I disagree, the average happiness per person might decline a TINY bit from the addition of 1 person to the world, but the total happiness is going to way more than make up for that decline.

(Ie, I wouldn't want 1 billion people to be alive globally instead of.....some higher, but manageable number(so not like 20 billion)), just because those 1 billion people might be happier on average in their little eutopia lands.




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what's wrong?

This is problematic for me. To balance total happiness versus average, you have to decide whether happiness is usually or always positive, and I don't know how to do that. I don't think adding another person who would be, say, sort of happy, while leaving unchanged everyone else's happiness, is necessarily a good thing; in fact, I think it's pretty much a wash. But to go further into it requires comparing how it feels to live a certain kind of life with how it "feels" not to live at all, and I am confident that neither I nor anyone else can do that.

I can't prove that it's right, but to me it feels like average is the important metric.

so, if you could have 1 small little town of 100 stoked individuals, that would be better than earth today?

And that's where it breaks down, because something feels wrong about that too. So the answer is maybe, yeah, but I admit I'm uneasy about it. I have a lot easier time saying that I'd prefer 100 million to what we have.

more people=more possibilities, more inventions, more unique stuff, higher possible (but mostly not attained) level of happiness.

i don't think more people equal any of that. i think more people are a burden in general. what's so great about a bunch of humans?

(omg, negative day talking again....)

Well, I'm abstracting from that, and so (implicitly) were you in your hypothetical. Clearly there is some critical level below which major economic changes, some deleterious, would be required, for example. That's one reason for my 100 million figure, which I am confident would be enough to sustain an economy that looks very much like what we have, but that's not the only reason. Once the numbers get really small, as I said, the whole exercise gets uncomfortable, but I don't know a solution.

Run it the other direction: how happy is positive happiness? Would you choose the world we have today, or a quintillion people who weren't starving or anything like that but never had anything interesting to do? What if they were sort of starving? What if they were in mild to medium pain? What if they were in anguish?

What life is better than none at all? You have at least to answer that one before you can comfortably go adding people to increase aggregate happiness.


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And I'm leaving alone the issue of possibility versus attained in your post. It seems clear to me that if it is "possible" for people to be happy, but in practice they aren't, that possibility is irrelevant in a utility calculation.

do you think there's anything wrong with genocide? (how bout if they killed them really gently)


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there's a point at which life wouldn't be worth adding, i don't think we're close to it yet. (the point is right above when the average life is considered not worth living/ or "eh, i dont care" about living)

lol wer, don't mix ethical philosophy with economic theory

but i dont even know anything about economic theory yet

i will after i finish my macro econ class though!

of course not.

tomorrow i'll take back everything i said ITT. but tonight i save the goddamn seal. !!

I think Alice just needs a hug

20% more attractive. I am too smart for my own good already

exercise i guess? Well if i was married the answer would definitely be exercise i think

the frozen thing has 2 many question marks. Id choice the unlimited wealth thing, enjoy life, and hope there is an awesome afterlife

with a gun

spend more time with kids in my high school. I had so much fun at my reunion, but i barely spoke to these people in school. I had plenty of friends, but not from my school

I see we have a whole bunch of fun hypotheticals that got going while I wasn't reading.

Bring on the misanthropes!

Since Addict is on pause for a bit:

1) I think I were 20% smarter my brain would explode, so attractive
2) Alcohol. Eeeeeez choice
3) 5 years. 500 years time i wouldn't know anyone, and they'd probably kill me for being weird.
4) Find a gun. Or, failing that, a swift, sharp rock on the head. Though, read into this what you will, my initial thought was throwing it off a roof.
5) I'd learn to keep friends better.

go sigmund gogogo