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Spouting Thomas's avatar

YES! I'm saving this to go in my folder of explanations for why utilitarianism is bad.

I'm not very good at explaining why I hate utilitarianism. I think you covered almost everything I dislike about it in one fell swoop.

Maybe this part gets me the most:

>In practice, people who hold this view, in their efforts to avoid bias, tend to embrace absurd views simply because they are absurd.

Right! If your logic causes you to think it's important to donate to shrimp charities, your logic is clearly busted and needs to be checked and re-checked until you find the obviously correct answer which you have known intuitively your entire life: shrimp are bugs and bug feelings don't matter. I'm clearly not a philosopher, but I should think that philosophy is more useful when it's unwrapping the reasons why obviously correct things are correct, and not so useful when it's constructing flimsy towers of nonsense about why obviously false things might actually be true.

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Bardamu's avatar

I appreciate that Bentham’s Bulldog’s obsession with the Shrimp Welfare Society has driven people to come up with actual explanations of animal vs human welfare.

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