Well, yeah, that's the fundamental failure of utilitarianism: it's so abstract as to say nothing meaningful, because it explicitly delegates the entire definiti

Well, yeah, that's the fundamental failure of utilitarianism: it's so abstract as to say nothing meaningful, because it explicitly delegates the entire definition of what actually is ethical to the utility function, and nothing past that is distinct from any other ethical theory. Again I grant this varies from Bentham's definition, but Bentham has been dead a long time now. Modern utilitarianism has been defined by Singer, for better or for worse - mostly worse - and Singerism is what I describe. In any case, Bentham's version still bears the flaw; 'good' can stretch with sufficient cleverness to cover all the virtue or deontology in the world. > It's a HN thing. I doubt that; this and your prior comment are the second and third time I've seen it in eleven years of active participation here. Are you using some kind of extension or script to augment the UI? If so, I strongly suspect that is causing it.