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I find it interesting how people on HN are decidedly non-Utilitarian. I don't know, but for some reason I expected software engineers to be utilitarian. Not exa

• Jedd 7y ago
  Not everyone, in any given community, are located at the same place on the rationality spectrum. Not everyone, in the HN community, is a software engineer.
  • mcguire 7y ago
    Is Utilitarianism associated with rationality? (Quick reference to "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" before I forget the name again.)
• toasterlovin 7y ago
  Perhaps the Utilitarian view is actually that freedom of speech leads to the best outcome for the most people, even with all of its negative side effects.
• thaumasiotes 7y ago
  Utilitarianism does not induce a stable steady state. It thinks of everyone as having a set of wants (of some cardinal magnitude), and says you should arrange the world so that the total magnitude of satisfied wants is maximized. The immediate implication is that, in order to get something, the right approach is to want it more. This produces no benefit to anyone, but it lets you appropriate things that used to be assigned to other people. I would prefer to relabel "wants" as "demands", admit they do indeed have different magnitudes, but also assign a quantity measuring the reasonableness of the demand. The mere fact that you want something isn't evidence that you should have it.