I think what’s going on is you’re getting annoyed by naive applications of utilitarian reasoning such as Yvain’s in the offense thread, then improperly generalizing that annoyance to even sophisticated applications.
On the contrary, it is the “sophisticated” applications that annoy me the most.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to get annoyed by people’s opinions expressed in purely intellectual debates such as those we have here, as long as they are argued politely, honestly, and intelligently. However, out there in the real world, among the people who wield power, influence, and status, there is a great deal of hubristic and pernicious utilitarian ideas, which are dangerous exactly because they have the public image of high status and sophistication. They go under all sorts of different monikers, and can be found in all major ideological camps (their distribution is of course not random, but let’s not go there). What they all have in common is this seemingly smart, sophisticated, and scientific, but in fact spectacularly delusional attitude that things can be planned and regulated on a society-wide (or even world-wide) scale by some supposedly scientific methods for maximizing various measures of aggregate welfare.
The most insane and dangerous of such ideas, namely the old-school economic central planning, is fortunately no longer widely popular (though a sizable part of the world had to be wrecked before its craziness finally became undeniable). The ones that are flourishing today are less destructive, at least in the short to medium run, but they are at the same time more difficult to counter, since the evidence of their failure is less obvious and easier to rationalize away. Unfortunately, here I would have to get into sensitive ideological issues to provide more concrete analysis and examples.
I think what’s going on is you’re getting annoyed by naive applications of utilitarian reasoning such as Yvain’s in the offense thread, then improperly generalizing that annoyance to even sophisticated applications.
On the contrary, it is the “sophisticated” applications that annoy me the most.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to get annoyed by people’s opinions expressed in purely intellectual debates such as those we have here, as long as they are argued politely, honestly, and intelligently. However, out there in the real world, among the people who wield power, influence, and status, there is a great deal of hubristic and pernicious utilitarian ideas, which are dangerous exactly because they have the public image of high status and sophistication. They go under all sorts of different monikers, and can be found in all major ideological camps (their distribution is of course not random, but let’s not go there). What they all have in common is this seemingly smart, sophisticated, and scientific, but in fact spectacularly delusional attitude that things can be planned and regulated on a society-wide (or even world-wide) scale by some supposedly scientific methods for maximizing various measures of aggregate welfare.
The most insane and dangerous of such ideas, namely the old-school economic central planning, is fortunately no longer widely popular (though a sizable part of the world had to be wrecked before its craziness finally became undeniable). The ones that are flourishing today are less destructive, at least in the short to medium run, but they are at the same time more difficult to counter, since the evidence of their failure is less obvious and easier to rationalize away. Unfortunately, here I would have to get into sensitive ideological issues to provide more concrete analysis and examples.