"I don't know how our support stalled!"
US 2024 Presidential Election
- Thread starter gorfias
- Start date
Bentham never applied any particular moral weight or reasoning to his hedonic calculus, thereby providing little consideration for distribution of outcome. The virtually limitless pleasure of Amazon's C-suite, board members, and major shareholders on the backs of a million employees is equally as justifiable under Benthamite utilitarianism, as prohibition of abortion, for even for that matter the Palestinian genocide. So long as pleasure outweighs pain in the aggregate, it's A-okay. Which is completely on-brand for the inadvertent founder and theoretical justifier of neoliberalism and the modern police state.
You gotta look to Mills, or more importantly Rawls, for any kind of consideration as to how outcomes might be morally distributed. It's no wonder why Mills matters little beyond his writings on women, or one may never hear of Rawls outside graduate-level philosophy and legal theory classes.
Well that explains a lot. When your campaign strategy is "Well hopefully it'll all work out!", you don't actually have to do anything to get people to vote for you.
Trunkage said abortion is the ONLY medical procedure not protected by the right to privacy and that's massively not true. 2 top NFL players in the last year had to go to Europe for procedures not allowed in the US. Abortion isn't the only procedure that can be banned in the US.
Don't worry, I don't feel any shame about this. I'm not Catholic, I dont know why you think shaming me now would work
Thanks for proving my point though. It's always about guilt trip.
I'll note, I am very conscious that Catholics do not see themselves as shame merchants until they get outside the bubble. It's not a you thing, nor is it a Bible or Jesus thing. It's a pope thing
Edit: I might make this a bit clearer. I'm not interested in them being Catholics or not. Some still are and some aren't. It's just the shame and suffering talk constantly like it's part of the Catholic identity when it shouldn't be.
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Is it time to point out that 2022 was a bit of a mirage. When socially progressive (including some Dems) people came out in 2021 over the last war in Gaza, APAC deliberately targeted them, trying to oust them from any power. It just took them a few years to change the course of the country. The exact same shit has been happening in Australia
The progressive wing in the DNC are on borrowed time
You know what's even funnier. I've been asking for four years: How many American needed to die to Covid before he thought lockdowns were necessary?
He never answered.... so you know what that means
A lot depends on how you weigh these things. Which is one of the core problems with making sense of it.
And it must be said that human pleasure is kind of limited, or at least suffers from diminishing marginal returns. The sensation of having a gazillion dollars (or whatever you might buy with it) is not a gazillion times better in any meaningful sense than the sensation of having or buying something with one dollar. Currency is not a measurement of pleasure. At best it is loosely correlated. It is quite plausible that distributing wealth equally is the way to go to satisfy a serious attempt at Benthamite moral calculation (rather than referencing Utilitarianism as a clumsy attempt to justify an exploitative economic system). Jeff Bezos only has one brain and it can only feel so good even if he somehow lives forever. It is much easier to multiply the number of people with less expensive pleasures. E.g. compare a cruise liner to Koru and Abeona. The cruise liner is way more efficient simply because it can carry vastly more people who, even if they have substantially less fun individually, are still going to outweigh the small number on the super-yacht.
Where I think Bentham's philosophy kind of falls apart is what happens when we ask how much pleasure can be derived by filming the torture of Jeff Bezos. A lot of (former and current) Amazon associates can watch that video, after all. And he's only one brain. Mill might reply that the quality of that sort of pleasure based on inflicting pain in revenge, even so widely distributed, is just not enough to justify torturing anyone over. He'd prefer it if all the Amazon associates were reading books and doing philosophy and getting elected to parliament like himself.
Mill would also have another angle to argue against such a thing in that normalizing taking pleasure from the viewing of torture, even if there were some specific times where it might seem to satisfy a utilitarian calculation, would have downstream effects (on pleasures and pains) such that it would be better in the long term to have a rule absolutely prohibiting such a thing. (Hence "rule utilitarianism" versus "act utilitarianism".)
When I attended college it was better about this than you're saying, although not by much. You'd encounter Political Liberalism and On Liberty in a 400 level social philosophy course.