I don’t consider myself a utilitarian anymore but back when I did, this wasn’t a good description of my motivations. Rather it felt like the opposite, that utilitarianism was the thing that made the most internal sense to me and I had a strong conviction in it, and would often strongly argue for it when most other people disagreed with it.
im just going to say a few things without thinking much about them
I believe that a natural healthy reaction to shoulds is to flinch away (should signal something going wrong, something you think you need to do but you don’t actually want to) and lack of it signals either strong tendency to take things very literally and a strong sense of purpose or idk like how long one can go at it? it’s literally painful why keep doing it, what’s the reason to follow shoulds until you are depressed? why does one get stuck looking at the world through stiff binary lens of good and bad? This is only one way to relate to the world. Why keep doing this of not due to wanting to overwrite your own free will?
I don’t consider myself a utilitarian anymore but back when I did, this wasn’t a good description of my motivations. Rather it felt like the opposite, that utilitarianism was the thing that made the most internal sense to me and I had a strong conviction in it, and would often strongly argue for it when most other people disagreed with it.
what made you stop considering yourself to be utilitarian
This post documents some of my reasons at the time.
im just going to say a few things without thinking much about them
I believe that a natural healthy reaction to shoulds is to flinch away (should signal something going wrong, something you think you need to do but you don’t actually want to) and lack of it signals either strong tendency to take things very literally and a strong sense of purpose or idk like how long one can go at it? it’s literally painful why keep doing it, what’s the reason to follow shoulds until you are depressed? why does one get stuck looking at the world through stiff binary lens of good and bad? This is only one way to relate to the world. Why keep doing this of not due to wanting to overwrite your own free will?