YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

It’s a horrific tragedy that John Locke should have become America’s (made up) philosopher king after Reconstruction, when Thomas Hobbes was right there

I like some people who have written for Jacobin, sometimes I even enjoy an article here and there, but the magazine as a whole remains utterly unbeaten in the “will walk the length of Manhattan in a “GIANT RUBE” sandwich board for clicks” stakes

Edit: I should here add that “utility” as Hume understands it is not yet the full-fledged utility of “utilitarianism” or “utilons”, which innovation is due to Bentham (only a few decades later). For Hume, “utility” is just what you’d expect from normal language, i.e. “use”, or “usefulness”. The utility of things, including principles, is in their being good or bad for us, i.e. not formally in the sense of a hedonic calculus or the satisfaction of preferences (we don’t “count up” either of these things to get an account of Humean utility).

Hume isn’t an anti-realist! The notorious “is-ought” passage in Treatise which people often take for an expression of anti-realism only goes so far as to point out what it says: that evaluative conclusions cannot logically follow merely from fact premises, so that to conclude “eating grapes is good” we also need some evaluative premise “grapes are good” alongside “grapes are red” and “grapes are edible”, or whatever.

Contemporary accounts of Hume are muddled by his long and undeserved reputation as a thoroughgoing radical sceptic, but his philosophy has two sides: the destructive and the reconstructive, where the latter is perfectly comfortable with drawing all sorts of conclusions so long as they are limited by an awareness of the limits of our powers of judgement.

For morality, Hume finds its source in our “sentiments”, but indeed not totally unlike our friend over there, he does not think that this is cause to think our sentiments don’t have force. Again not unlike our friend, he thinks sentiments may be compared for their “utility”. However, his arguments (a) unlike those of our friend, do not attempt to bridge the essentially logical gap he has merely pointed out, (b) unlike the anti-realist, take reflective judgements about utility to have force, alongside the force of those sentiments we reflect on, of an essentially real character.

Insofar as there is a resemblance, the important distinction between what Hume is doing and what our guy is doing is that Hume doesn’t try to find any master-category (implicitly, “the species” above, although e/accs place this underneath another category “consciousness”) which would ground fact judgements in science to give them force. Rather, (a) he basically asks us what else do you plan on doing, if you don’t intend to prefer good things over bad? (b) identifies the particular sources of goodness and badness in real life, and then evaluates them. By contrast, the e/acc view attempts to argue that whatever our cultural judgements are, then they are good, insofar as they are refined evolutionarily/memetically - Hume thinks culture frequently gets these wrong, frequently gets them right, that culture is a flux, not a progressive development, and he discovers the essential truth in looking at individuals, not at group level “selection” over a set of competing propositions.

Hume isn’t tied to the inherent conservatism of a pseudo-Bayesian model. Curiously enough he is a political conservative, which is arguably what makes it possible for him to (lightly) rest his semi-realist account on what he takes to be a relatively stable human sentimental substrate. But this only gives him further cause to take a genial view of the stakes of what we now call “realism vs anti-realism”: it isn’t as important as trying to be nice.

Too stupid to debunk without resorting to bullying.

If you’re moral realist he’s even more wrong. Of the realist positions available this is closest to naturalism, but it denies the essential precepts of any moral realism viz. the mind-independence of moral truth. This “is-ought” “solution” is as old as Protagoras, “man is the measure of all things”, where “e/acc’s google-brained account of consciousness” stands in for “man”.

As a philosophical position they’re just doing relativism, and then as a historicised political project this is just late 19th century scientism(ific racism). And I emphasise that the premises (“evolutionary fitness”) reveal the sources reveal the political project.

Moral realists introduce an independent condition (mind-independence) which at least purports to save ethical principles from reducing to “might makes right”, this is just the latter window-dressed with talk of “post-selection” to implicitly let in some degree of ethical deliberation as constitutive of morality, making it incidentally also a cowardly way to propagandise racism.

“We have built the torment nexus” but for more literate morons who read Borges

Radioactive Wolf Twinks? My God, what have we done…

Highly recommended for a dissenting view, against the greatness of Sidgwick, is from another great (and personal fave) Bernard Williams, who has a longish essay criticising Sidgwick in particular (his critiques of utilitarianism and kantianism in general are much better known)

It’s very easy to get the impression reading the more surface material that Sidgwick is universally admired, even where his reasoning may go awry. Williams corrects that misapprehension.

yeah well since gawker god knows what people aren’t covering about thiel’s breeding programme

i’m gonna take a moment here to point out there seems to be a widespread historical error about bentham’s role

bentham was neither a “total” utilitarian, nor particularly hardcore about how to assess units of pleasure/pain - he believed (a) that what you want to do is work out in a practical fashion how to maximise pleasure and minimise pain of people who currently exist, and (b) that there were pretty impractical ways to do it

he was a legal mind, concerned with public policy and the rectification of injustice. the “total” view comes from sedgwick, who much later in the mid-19th century was the real formaliser of modern utilitarianism - it’s from him that the EA types get their incessant trade-offs and indeed specifically the view that future lives have, by parity of reason, to count. bentham by contrast was in many ways not a particularly philosophical thinker, and intended rather to apply a radically reduced psychological theory to social problem-solving - he also left behind very little finished work, inland this is a typical feature of his philosophical style

the “utility” reduction was something that had been floating around in british moral philosophy (then not distinguished from psychology) for some time, and bentham put it into action. by contrast, sidgwick was a later full time ethicist devoted to the academic study of the by then popular utilitarian system in the abstract

this idea of bentham the radical versus mill the moderate is justified, but seems to come, primarily, from mill’s aversion to bentham’s “pushpin is as good as poetry”, which permitted no weighting of the utilitarian scale in favour of “higher pleasures”

but it is easy to see in this light that bentham’s radicalism doesn’t give you the juice for an extension to EA, since the radicalism of EA is not in giving equal weight to all kinds of pleasure/pain

I don’t have the source article, my full title is all one quote from the latest issue of the London Review of Books. But I’ve seen it before multiple times - it’s out there and findable