Phillip Huggan: “Denis, are you claiming there is no way to commit acts that make others happy?”
Why the obsession with making other people happy?
Phillip Huggan: “Or are you claiming such an act is always out of self-interest?”
Such acts are. Stuff just is. Real reasons are often unknowable; and if known, would be trivial, technical, mundane.
In general, I wouldn’t say self-interest. It is not in your self interest to cut off your penis and eat it, for example. But some people desire it and act on it.
Desire. Not necessarily logical. Does not necessarily make sense. But drives people’s actions.
Reasons for desire? Unknowable.
And if known?
Trivial. Technical. Mundane.
Phillip Huggan: “The former position is absurd, the latter runs into the problem that people who jump on grenades, die.”
I can write a program that will erase itself.
Doesn’t mean that there’s an overarching morality of what programs should and should not do.
People who jump on grenades do so due to an impulse. That impulse comes from cached emotions and thoughts. You prime yourself that it’s romantic to jump on a grenade, you jump on a grenade. Poof.
Stuff is. Fitting stuff that happens into a moral framework? A hopeless endeavor for misguided individuals seeking to fulfil the romantic notion that things should make sense.
Phillip Huggan: “A middle class western individual, all else equal, is morally better by donating conspicious consumption income to charity, than by exercising the Libertarian market behaviour of buying luxury goods.”
Give me a break. You gonna contribute to a charity to take care of all the squid in the ocean? The only justification not to is if you invent an excuse why they are not worth caring about. And if not the squid, how about gorillas, then? Baboons, and chimpanzees?
If we’re going to intervene because a child in Africa is dying of malaria or hunger—both thoroughly natural causes of death—then should we not also intervene when a lion kills an antelope, or a tribe of chimpanzees is slaughtered by their neighbors?
You have to draw a line somewhere, or else your efforts are hopeless. Most people draw the line at homo sapiens. I say that line is arbitrary. I draw it where it makes sense. With people in my environment.
Phillip Huggan: “Denis, are you claiming there is no way to commit acts that make others happy?”
Why the obsession with making other people happy?
Phillip Huggan: “Or are you claiming such an act is always out of self-interest?”
Such acts are. Stuff just is. Real reasons are often unknowable; and if known, would be trivial, technical, mundane.
In general, I wouldn’t say self-interest. It is not in your self interest to cut off your penis and eat it, for example. But some people desire it and act on it.
Desire. Not necessarily logical. Does not necessarily make sense. But drives people’s actions.
Reasons for desire? Unknowable.
And if known?
Trivial. Technical. Mundane.
Phillip Huggan: “The former position is absurd, the latter runs into the problem that people who jump on grenades, die.”
I can write a program that will erase itself.
Doesn’t mean that there’s an overarching morality of what programs should and should not do.
People who jump on grenades do so due to an impulse. That impulse comes from cached emotions and thoughts. You prime yourself that it’s romantic to jump on a grenade, you jump on a grenade. Poof.
Stuff is. Fitting stuff that happens into a moral framework? A hopeless endeavor for misguided individuals seeking to fulfil the romantic notion that things should make sense.
Phillip Huggan: “A middle class western individual, all else equal, is morally better by donating conspicious consumption income to charity, than by exercising the Libertarian market behaviour of buying luxury goods.”
Give me a break. You gonna contribute to a charity to take care of all the squid in the ocean? The only justification not to is if you invent an excuse why they are not worth caring about. And if not the squid, how about gorillas, then? Baboons, and chimpanzees?
If we’re going to intervene because a child in Africa is dying of malaria or hunger—both thoroughly natural causes of death—then should we not also intervene when a lion kills an antelope, or a tribe of chimpanzees is slaughtered by their neighbors?
You have to draw a line somewhere, or else your efforts are hopeless. Most people draw the line at homo sapiens. I say that line is arbitrary. I draw it where it makes sense. With people in my environment.