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More realistically it was written by someone who once as a bored undergraduate (apparently at Princeton) sat through a philosophy course where he read Bentham a
by jacobolus 7y ago
More realistically it was written by someone who once as a bored undergraduate (apparently at Princeton) sat through a philosophy course where he read Bentham and Mill (and also Hegel and Kant), thought that the differences between Bentham and Mill were a bit blown out of proportion, and had an amusing idea about how to write a satirical letter where this got taken to an extreme.
- paggle 7y agoSo you choose the totally literal reading. Not what I’d choose, but also an understandable choice given that this is a technology and programming-oriented website. I won’t say that the allegorical reading is more “correct,” but if you’d like some clues leading to it, look for the breadcrumbs like this: “And, even though Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are ideologically similar, I refuse to let my son believe in Bentham’s very-slightly-different version of ethics.”