Free will skepticism has impacted, for better or worse, some of my personal relationships. I’m sure the same is true of others.
I also think the charge of “no demonstrable real-world impact, at least as practiced today in the court of law” is a bit unfair to lay at free will’s feet. That’s got to be true of 99% of philosophy and almost all of academia generally.
give me less about meaning.
you need more meaning in less.
your poetry stinks.
Omg I’ve listened to that course in total more than once. Ty!
Pauwl, delighted to meet a fellow Kagan fan.
Interesting video related to the OP
Jeremy Bentham. Thoughts?
My core principles are probably nearly 100% based on utilitarianism, but this philosophy can often result in ethical or moral conundrums presented to me that I don’t really know how to argue my way out of.
He just came to my attention because I saw a quote from him and expected it to be a New Age Hippie and was surprised it was from the 19th Century.
Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, --will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, --or to diminish something of their pains.
Emphatically echoed by Lee Smolin in this interview:
I believe I have seen this one, and it is how I try to live my life. It has largely been true and is a good quote. Even if it’s something small like giving $5 out of my pocket to a homeless dude, there’s always opportunities to make people around you a little less miserable, that cost almost nothing to yourself.
The amount of times people are presented with situations where they could add pleasure and/or reduce pain, and take the selfish or misery-inducing option, never fails to perplex me. Like getting cut off for zero reason in traffic, or people who intentionally cause grief in video games. Why did you decide to do that? What benefit does it bring anyone?
But like I said I view my relationship to the world in a utilitarian way, when our culture views their relationships to the world in a predominantly egoistic way. This difference has caused me a significant amount of pain in my life, if I were to trace it.
I know there’s some hippie quote out there about how making other people happy is what makes one happy though. Not true for everyone of course. Some people are legit sociopaths. Some are just unhappy and their causing pain is self-destructive as well.
We should build more panopticons.
Do you mean more of them to be used as prisons? Or more of those types of structures in general?
I ask because our lives both online and IRL are lived in a kind of Panopticon. The less your work life resembles a panopticon, the more freedom you have.
From reading his wiki, it’s interesting that he wrote in favor of womens rights, animal rights and against slavery. Which makes me curious to know what his arguments were in his work “Defence of Usury”. I’ll try to find the text if I have time.
I haven’t read any contemporaneous criticisms of the Declaration of Independence, so this caught my eye as well.
From wikipedia:
When the American colonies published their Declaration of Independence in July 1776, the British government did not issue any official response but instead secretly commissioned London lawyer and pamphleteer John Lind to publish a rebuttal.[22] His 130-page tract was distributed in the colonies and contained an essay titled “Short Review of the Declaration” written by Bentham, a friend of Lind, which attacked and mocked the Americans’ political philosophy.
It was a bit of a snarky comment, but I’ve wondered whether building prisons using the concept of the panopticon would cut down on prison rape.
I would consider putting body cameras on cops a way of making their work life more resemble a panopticon. More freedom is not always better.
I think of this in terms of degrees of freedom. Ideally, we want our preferred methods to lead to our preferred outcomes, but these are not independent variables. Our methods influence our outcomes. So, we have to choose: would we rather have our preferred methods, even if they lead to outcomes we don’t like, or would we rather prioritize outcomes, even if we have to resort to less-than-ideal means. So, basically the deontology vs consequentialism debate (aka the trolley problem).
You just have to choose which “error” you are more willing to tolerate and accept that “mistakes” will be made. We can’t build a 100% efficient, perfect society.
Within utilitarianism, this might be an argument between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism.
The economics section of his wiki interested me too, so I had a quick look. It seems to be that he defends it from the point of view of liberty and opportunity.
First, in an orderly manner replete with concrete examples he covers every possible objection to the regulation of usury (charging of interest rates that are apparently above the market rate), from religious restrictions that tainted the connotation of the word, to the economics of risk premiums. Second, throughout the work he champions those who are marginalized by society. He tears apart anti-Jewish bigotry. He argues strongly for the rights of the poor and even the feeble-minded to make their own choices in life. His emphasis on the ability of individuals to be the best judges of their own particular circumstances, and their right to use their own best methods for the pursuit of happiness, became the basis of modern utility theory.
In general I’ve always thought of Bentham as politically very good for his day, despite my general dislike from classical liberalism as a philosophy for now, (though it’s a long time since I read what little of his work that I have). I guess it’s a fairly commonplace historical point that something which was a progressive force some time ago has now become part of the toolbox to maintain the status quo.