Michael Schur

When Have We Actually ‘Achieved’ These Virtues

My happiness is no more special than anyone else’s, they said, which essentially eliminates the concept of elitism

The utilitarian focus on total amounts of pleasure or pain makes us think about the potentially massive differences among the people who are experiencing the pleasure and pain.

Consequentialists give us the comfort of knowing that what we did was good or bad, because the answer lies in verifiable results; it’s an attempt to take morality out of the abstract and make it more like math, or chemistry

So, Bentham invented one. He came up with seven scales we should use to measure the pleasure created by anything we do

This thought experiment and its many variations (which we’ll get to shortly) are collectively called “the Trolley Problem

We have now arrived at the second of our three main Western philosophical schools: utilitarianism, most famously developed by British philosophers Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), two deeply weird dudes.

When we think only of religious “sins” as the ultimate bad stuff we want to avoid, we end up manufacturing justifications for horrible atrocities; her example is the European conquerors coming to the “New World,” encountering its Indigenous peoples, and rationalizing genocide as the will of a Christian God.

Often we do things whose consequences we can’t determine for a long time. Sometimes we can’t tell the difference between causation—we did this thing, which caused that result—and correlation—we did this thing, and also that other thing happened, but they’re not related.

What becomes of a man who was out for a nice walk and then stumbled into a situation where he was forced to murder an innocent person in cold blood, simply to achieve some kind of maximal hedon/dolor ratio? How does Jim just go back to his normal life?