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Not claiming to 'know' anything, but I do have a view. I think unfortunately the post-modernist view is ultimately correct. We can have ever more sophisticated

Not claiming to 'know' anything, but I do have a view. I think unfortunately the post-modernist view is ultimately correct. We can have ever more sophisticated debates but the same arguments made by 18 year old philosophy students are ultimately unassailable. Similar to the way a 10 year olds athiest (as great as Richard Dawkings is) holds all the key arguments about the non-existence of god. Utilitarianism is fundamentally rooted in the human as a platonic ideal and not just some clever animal. Once you invite other animals on to the continuum, what do we do? Bulldoze all the natural habitat to prevent predation and cruelty (whilst softly euthanasing all the animals)? Do we want to live in a (totalitarian) world with zero suffering? Is there a value on genuine diversity of thought? Do we diversity of thought - to have a robust society? i.e. past a point does utilitarianism itself provide disutility? Utilitarianism like all ethical systems isn't wrong, it is just a limited perspective more a rule of thumb or a model that only works between certain parameters. That is it is a good system for determining train ticket prices or infrastructure planning, but less useful as a complete life philosophy. The same could be said for libertarianism. Great idea ... but you still need property laws ... and police ... and so on. Philosophy is in many cases just a kind of intellectual accessory. One version may be right in the same sense that a certain pair of jeans look great. I think if you truly care about the truth and not social status ... etc. the valid scope of philosophy is greatly reduced. The further you look at it our true norms come practical realities and from what we grow up believing. The same lense can be applied to programming philosophies (Waterfall, Agile ... etc.). I think as programmers (at least the experienced ones amongst us) we do eventually learn that things are never as simple as just that and so we instinctively know to moderate our observance of platonic ways of thinking. This extends to ethical systems.

jdietrich 9y ago
>Utilitarianism is fundamentally rooted in the human as a platonic ideal and not just some clever animal. Once you invite other animals on to the continuum, what do we do? No, it really isn't. Peter Singer is both the leading utilitarian philosopher of our age and our most eloquent advocate for animal welfare. A utilitarian calculus that includes animal welfare really isn't very complex. You simply expand "the greatest good to the greatest number of people" to include all animals. That might lead to a lot of uncomfortable and counter-intuitive conclusions, but it's not some sort of moral alchemy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer
- lsd5you 9y ago
  In which case it doesn't seem to allow for animals in the wild and seems to make phasing out of nature (rain forests and all that - well at least the fauna) a necessity.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    That depends on the definition of well being, good and utility. Will you save whole ecosystems? Who gets the axe, insects? Which and how many? Essentially the argument is problematic due to lack of omniscience. The typical solution to this is to adopt a stable yet flexible enough strategy (also known as a robust solution). It is almost never too simple a strategy if you start from a complex optimization problem like this. (Compare expectation maximization to robust decision making. Or maximin to minimax to simple optimization approaches. None win.) Currently there is no algorithm for solving general decision problems on a global scale. Even genetic algorithms (constrained innovation and permutation) can and do produce solutions too late to matter, especially when selective pressure is low. Human intelligence easily gets caught in local maxima too, not to mention its fallibility. (I'd call it lossy heuristic approach with memory. Heuristics are transmitted over generations in a strongly lossy way both in number and count. New ones take the place of the old ones with only relatively low bar of improvement to pass. Actor attempts to reconstruct the heuristic by observing behaviour of other actors given its capabilities.)

jdietrich 9y ago

>Utilitarianism is fundamentally rooted in the human as a platonic ideal and not just some clever animal. Once you invite other animals on to the continuum, what do we do? No, it really isn't. Peter Singer is both the leading utilitarian philosopher of our age and our most eloquent advocate for animal welfare. A utilitarian calculus that includes animal welfare really isn't very complex. You simply expand "the greatest good to the greatest number of people" to include all animals. That might lead to a lot of uncomfortable and counter-intuitive conclusions, but it's not some sort of moral alchemy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer

lsd5you 9y ago
In which case it doesn't seem to allow for animals in the wild and seems to make phasing out of nature (rain forests and all that - well at least the fauna) a necessity.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  That depends on the definition of well being, good and utility. Will you save whole ecosystems? Who gets the axe, insects? Which and how many? Essentially the argument is problematic due to lack of omniscience. The typical solution to this is to adopt a stable yet flexible enough strategy (also known as a robust solution). It is almost never too simple a strategy if you start from a complex optimization problem like this. (Compare expectation maximization to robust decision making. Or maximin to minimax to simple optimization approaches. None win.) Currently there is no algorithm for solving general decision problems on a global scale. Even genetic algorithms (constrained innovation and permutation) can and do produce solutions too late to matter, especially when selective pressure is low. Human intelligence easily gets caught in local maxima too, not to mention its fallibility. (I'd call it lossy heuristic approach with memory. Heuristics are transmitted over generations in a strongly lossy way both in number and count. New ones take the place of the old ones with only relatively low bar of improvement to pass. Actor attempts to reconstruct the heuristic by observing behaviour of other actors given its capabilities.)