NaevaTheRat

All the best, thanks for running this while you have.

It seems like lemmy mostly brought you stress and misery so I hope you find something more rewarding to do.

I'm not seeing the reasoning behind your assertions.

You say:

As an individual? Probably not, no. But countries and organizations ought to determine their laws and/or policies based on utilitarianism, yes.

Individuals will probably follow the moral codes of their communities, and only actually use utilitarian principles when it’s time to evaluate whether the rules are working as intended.

Which is a statement of your beliefs near as I can tell, but not the reasons for them. I assume you hold the opinion:

countries and organizations ought to determine their laws and/or policies based on utilitarianism, yes.

In relations to the idea that this is more grounded and or coherent. Which you believe to be true despite it being essentially impossible to actually do the nuts and bolts thing of utilitarianism because of the enormous complexity of the world and the difficulty in predicting the future; the criticism I gestured at.

But, why? You say later that it's closer to good than deontological or virtue ethics based approaches (the other 2 major ones). Well actually you say all but lets focus on the big 3 to avoid getting lost in the weeds.

Again, I'm quite sympathetic personally to consequentialist ethics and utiliarianism but you haven't really given any reasons why it's better or more reliable or closer to actual moral facts or whatever your reason for believing in it is. I'll note, referencing my comment again, that philosphers are really evenly split between the big 3 frameworks.

Why is it that you believe it is more reliable, and should be used on a societal level, despite the difficulties in actually using it?

As I said in my comment I have leanings towards utilitarianism but the notion that utilitarian values/analysis is more grounded than other systems is a bit funny. Like one of the primary good criticisms against utilitarianism is that you cannot actually practice it and instead end up implementing some other ethics system on a day to day basis.

How do you calculate the utilons of any decision? Like seriously how?

I can understand being skeezed out by people who flirt with justification for murder. Weird cults like zizians and so on. Murderous rage and arrogant paternalism are pretty disgusting tendencies that lead to bad places.

Wanting to police the means by which people reach the conclusion we should care for everyone on the planet seems unnecessary to me.

Like does it bother you that I think the way I can have the largest positive impact in my life that is practicable is by being vegan, instead of believing that idk avoidiing violence is virtuous therefore I should? I've met lots of people with the latter belief who just make others do the killing, Buddhist monks failing at their own standard of ahimsa for example.

It's not clear to me that the virtue ethics framework leads to more consistent results given that almost everyone who follows it is a murderous monster willfully pursuing their own pleasure at the expense of thousands of meaningful beings.

I think laying out the consensus you wish to arrive at sort of undermines the idea of reaching a consensus.

I have strong leanings towards utilitarianism but recognise that it is, at least at this point, incalulable and therefore extremely open to bias. That said I am unconvinced that virtue ethics is not open to exactly the same problems. Many people who do awful shit follow that too. My conclusion thusfar is that making grand statements of ethics is an insane thing to do and if you're ever faced with a bunch of screaming people while you're "doing the right thing" maybe you're not and you should chill.

I think an ethics that ignores that an enormous amount of suffering is experienced by living beings is naive. There is a lot of agony in the world. If you conclude from that the idea that we currently are ready to play god well then you're a bit stupid. While it's nice to imagine a form of life where motivations are determined by gradients of pleasure (the usual goal of serious negative ethics systems) humans will more than likely never be capable of doing this.

I don't think you can really claim leftism is pro life so much as pro people. If people exist we should take care of them. I don't thing this has any particular valence towards or against making more humans. Many humans desire to make more humans, but this isn't really a good argument for making more humans. It's essentially the same argument for breeding animals for pets.

I have no way of assessing whether the average human life has negative or positive moral valence and I am deeply sceptical of anyone who claims they can determine that.

Edit: I want to add a source which is a survey of philosphers, it has this interesting table of results.

Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?

• Other 558 / 1803 (30.9%)
• Accept or lean toward: consequentialism 435 / 1803 (24.1%)
• Accept or lean toward: virtue ethics 406 / 1803 (22.5%)
• Accept or lean toward: deontology 404 / 1803 (22.4%)

from: https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=Philosophy+faculty+or+PhD&areas0=0&areas_max=1&grain=coarse

As we can see professional bigly thinkies are quite split. I would caution against wholesale adoption of rejection of any particular system of ethics.

I dunno how many lagoons there are in the mountains here but costally yeah.

The pfas is attached to a conservation project where they make these floating islands to protect turtles and waterbirds from cats/foxes and they're like "well since we're growing these plants maybe we can do remediation". So it's in the school of conservation and the group does fine stuff like photograph wildlife to assess effectiveness. And also murder, to look for verticle transfer of contaminants like pfas.

I am leaning towards that project if I can keep my distance from the killing. It seems less depressing than enumerating all the ways we're fucked.

Chattin' to some academics re Mres.

Got a couple of cool looking options:

1- assessing local rushes for pfas nomming (airfarce base has heavily contaminated local environment) 2- assessing how local peatlands react to the climate change.

Both seem to have a good amount of chill field work. I fucking love vegetated swails so I'm leaning towards the first for future work but a bit warey of the fucked up ethics of conservation ecology. 2 is using more of my physics skills, but maybe more boring and less paddling about lakes and watching grass grow.

Winter is upon us, still very warm (holy warming Batman) but below the condensation point of depression so I'm resisting the urge to crawl into a hole and hibernate till spring.

Thanks, I do too. He's far from perfect but he is a good man and he brings a lot to the world. It's crap to see him struggling so much and in such dire straights because of a brief interruption of his ability to improve the profits of shareholders.

I was handing out propaganda with an academic, and apparently I made an impression as he sent me an extremely helpful email today with a variety of positions on offer. That is defs a confidence boost and it's great to have help there.

I'll be right, they are the ones that have to go through the hard shit. People you love nearly dying does tend to make a lot of stuff just seem not important though.

Also a massive stressor preceding this was the tech ai layoffs to eviction pipeline so I've ended up even more angry at landlords and other capitalists. Like this shit is playing out everywhere so some dickhead can get more spare homes. I don't even know if the rich are human in a recognisable way.

My ex/close friend necked himself. Didn't die cause his wife found him in time and being a med school dropout has advantages.

Been reevaluating a lot of shit since then. I think I'm going back to grad school, I realised if I lost him (and you don't go from trying to kill yourself to life being peachy. It's still very day by day) I would have basically no regular contact with people smarter than me which is just depressing.

Who knows if I'll succeed this time, life is in a better place but my body is a complete unreliable wreck. Still we shall see.

In other news evaluating the risk of moving my ulnar nerves surgically. Very small risk of paralysis, large (~10% risk) of needing salvage surgeries. Scary stuff, expensive too. OTOH being able to hold a book again would be cool.

I haven't had much time for it but it's fun. Coax your brain, it's good to have people to learn with.

1. Bobotie (SA casserole) was a big hit at a family gathering.

2. Idk if trying to unfuck my arms is a hobby but the keyboard is coming along. One side nearly done, the other keycap set is printed but it still needs the microcontroller wired in.

Other than that learning gamedev in my free time.