What books are good for me to read as i get into utilitarianism? bentham and mills writings? Im not going to read 20 books most likely but i definitely feel like i should do some reading.
I think utilitarianism.net is the best place to go for resources. In terms of books, I like the Point of View of the Universe a lot. I also think the blog philosophyetc has lots of good arguments for utilitarianism.
The hedonism assumption seems to just be tacitly assumed at the outright. It's just stated that 'pleasure is good and pain is bad'. Not only is this merely an assumption, but it doesn't even really map onto the phenomenology of things. We use feelings of pain and pleasure (emotions generically) to induce value through experience, but values are not ideas about the effect of our actions on our emotions. Emotions evolved to drive action, not to be the object or purpose of action. Value can be viewed as a relationship between the action of a subject and the outcomes in the world, not outcomes in my brain. There's an a priori assumption that emotions are value in these arguments.
@@deliberationunderidealcond5105 If you could put a timestamp for where the claims that pleasure is positive value and pain is negative value are examined and argued for, I'd appreciate it. I only heard it assumed and it seems assumed in the paper that you have linked in the description. The arguments necessarily fail because they attempt to lay an objective basis for morality. To do so, it attempts to discover objective value in pain and pleasure. Objective value is an oxymoron. Value cannot be objective; it is perspective dependent.
@@parse.thoughtspace The entire video is Neil walking through the two arguments for hedonism, as he also does in the paper. Objective value is not an oxymoron; it may be a substantive claim that you disagree with, but it's believed by most philosophers and is certainly not oxymoronic.
@@deliberationunderidealcond5105 I'm not concerned with what most philosophers think. I'm convinced that philosophy is a very confused field. Most philosophers have been stuck trying to solve non-problems for a very long time now. Perhaps I'll just do a video critique of the essay. I prefer to read the essay because I live in a rural area and my internet service is not sufficient to watch the video without buffering every 30 seconds. I'm not sure which side of the argument you come down on, but if you come down on the side that believes that values and morality are objective and that they can only be about emotions then I would ask that you explain how that is the case. I can and did explain my case in short form in the first comment.
3:00 The Canaanites practiced incest, bestiality, and child torture, among other things. They would sacrifice babies to "Molech" by heating up a metal statue with fire and placing the children on the arms of the statue to sizzle alive. The drummers would play their drums loudly to drown out the screams of the children as they died. One archaeological dig uncovered the remains of more than 20,000 infants that had been sacrificed to Molech. It sounds like Neil needs to learn more about the historical context of what he's talking about because this passage certainly isn't glorifying genocide. The bible clearly states that the Canaanites were doing "all the abominations that Adonai hates". Also, I think there's a great fallacy Neil is missing in his reasoning. It doesn't follow that getting something wrong implies insufficiency in our faculties as humans to get things right. If you gave everyone in the world a math question you would get radically different answers. Considering there are 7 billion people who don't understand Calculus, most of those answers would probably be wrong. Does this imply that Calculus is unsolvable? Does it imply that "there's no way for our mathematical judgement process to be reliable"? Of course not. So how can he argue from the moral disagreements that there's no way for our moral faculties to be reliable? Furthermore, he says you can know pleasure is good and pain is bad by "looking inward" and "using similar faculties to that of knowing you're experiencing a sound or a color". But that implies that moral faculties ARE reliable and moral truths CAN be known. You might argue that only the simplest moral truths can be known and anything beyond what's immediately perceivable is outside the domain of our faculties, but then THIS VERY FACT would be a proposition outside the purview of our immediate perception, and therefore would be unknowable! In other words, the notion that "complex moral truths are unknowable" is a complex moral proposition (allegedly true). If complex moral truths can't be known, then how can you know this complex moral truth?
Thanks for this!
Hope you have Lance and Neil again when Lance has read through the stuff.
What books are good for me to read as i get into utilitarianism? bentham and mills writings? Im not going to read 20 books most likely but i definitely feel like i should do some reading.
I think utilitarianism.net is the best place to go for resources. In terms of books, I like the Point of View of the Universe a lot. I also think the blog philosophyetc has lots of good arguments for utilitarianism.
Link to paper is broken :(
The hedonism assumption seems to just be tacitly assumed at the outright. It's just stated that 'pleasure is good and pain is bad'. Not only is this merely an assumption, but it doesn't even really map onto the phenomenology of things. We use feelings of pain and pleasure (emotions generically) to induce value through experience, but values are not ideas about the effect of our actions on our emotions. Emotions evolved to drive action, not to be the object or purpose of action. Value can be viewed as a relationship between the action of a subject and the outcomes in the world, not outcomes in my brain. There's an a priori assumption that emotions are value in these arguments.
It was argued for, not assumed.
@@deliberationunderidealcond5105 If you could put a timestamp for where the claims that pleasure is positive value and pain is negative value are examined and argued for, I'd appreciate it. I only heard it assumed and it seems assumed in the paper that you have linked in the description. The arguments necessarily fail because they attempt to lay an objective basis for morality. To do so, it attempts to discover objective value in pain and pleasure. Objective value is an oxymoron. Value cannot be objective; it is perspective dependent.
@@parse.thoughtspace The entire video is Neil walking through the two arguments for hedonism, as he also does in the paper. Objective value is not an oxymoron; it may be a substantive claim that you disagree with, but it's believed by most philosophers and is certainly not oxymoronic.
@@deliberationunderidealcond5105 I'm not concerned with what most philosophers think. I'm convinced that philosophy is a very confused field. Most philosophers have been stuck trying to solve non-problems for a very long time now. Perhaps I'll just do a video critique of the essay. I prefer to read the essay because I live in a rural area and my internet service is not sufficient to watch the video without buffering every 30 seconds. I'm not sure which side of the argument you come down on, but if you come down on the side that believes that values and morality are objective and that they can only be about emotions then I would ask that you explain how that is the case. I can and did explain my case in short form in the first comment.
@@parse.thoughtspace What details do you find confusing about objective morality? How is it the case is too vague of a question.
3:00 The Canaanites practiced incest, bestiality, and child torture, among other things. They would sacrifice babies to "Molech" by heating up a metal statue with fire and placing the children on the arms of the statue to sizzle alive. The drummers would play their drums loudly to drown out the screams of the children as they died. One archaeological dig uncovered the remains of more than 20,000 infants that had been sacrificed to Molech. It sounds like Neil needs to learn more about the historical context of what he's talking about because this passage certainly isn't glorifying genocide. The bible clearly states that the Canaanites were doing "all the abominations that Adonai hates".
Also, I think there's a great fallacy Neil is missing in his reasoning. It doesn't follow that getting something wrong implies insufficiency in our faculties as humans to get things right. If you gave everyone in the world a math question you would get radically different answers. Considering there are 7 billion people who don't understand Calculus, most of those answers would probably be wrong. Does this imply that Calculus is unsolvable? Does it imply that "there's no way for our mathematical judgement process to be reliable"? Of course not. So how can he argue from the moral disagreements that there's no way for our moral faculties to be reliable?
Furthermore, he says you can know pleasure is good and pain is bad by "looking inward" and "using similar faculties to that of knowing you're experiencing a sound or a color". But that implies that moral faculties ARE reliable and moral truths CAN be known. You might argue that only the simplest moral truths can be known and anything beyond what's immediately perceivable is outside the domain of our faculties, but then THIS VERY FACT would be a proposition outside the purview of our immediate perception, and therefore would be unknowable! In other words, the notion that "complex moral truths are unknowable" is a complex moral proposition (allegedly true). If complex moral truths can't be known, then how can you know this complex moral truth?