#utilitarianism — Public Fediverse posts

John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" has long been published in just his name, but a new edition lists Harriet Taylor Mill as co-author.

This was partly based on research done with our archive of Mill-Taylor material, and we've just finished digitising it all.

Volumes are slowly going up on our open access Digital Library over the coming days and weeks: https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/collections/list/collections/50#

#philosophy #HarrietTaylorMill #JohnStuartMill #utilitarianism #liberty #archives #politics @archivistodon

Recent Poems

The Questions

Again the moon comes up in the night
Again the stars
They stir up in me some questions
Without letting me know
Where the answers might be
Nor is the sky helpful
Soon it will be dawn
And the most useless guy to ask
When it comes to such questions
Will be there, giving life to us
But not the kind of life we are seeking.

I and U

I love her still
Who I loved
40+ years ago.

Did she love me
Back then
Though I know
She does not now.

Are We Worthy?

That we can love
A boy a girl, a girl a boy
That we can learn
About volcanoes and the stars
That we can cry
At the most trivial of losses
That we can laugh
At the silliest of antics
That we can help
Whether a friend or a foe
That we can sacrifice
Our very life
Does it not give you hope
That we are well equipped
To find the Truth, too?

Bruised But Not Broken

The supercilious smile
The unmistakable smirk
Have taken their toll
Yes, I am bruised
But I am a smart guy
Smarter than others reckon
So, I am not broken.

Sam ki Shayari Ya Shaam ki Shayari

Jis shakhs se mujhe milna tha
Afsos toda bahut hoti hai ki
Woh mereko tab aakar mili
Jab meri shaam ho chuki thi
Lekin khuda ko maaloom hai
Ismay bhi kya meri bhalai hai.

Where Am I Headed? Where Am I Supposed to Be Headed?

Where’s life taking me?
Where’s my heart taking me?
Do they think they know me
Better than I know myself?
Who is this I that asks the question
What is his relationship
With life and heart?

This Thing Called Acceptance

Eckhart Tolle talked about it
Much before him, two more talked
Much, much about it
JK and Osho, naam toh suna hoga
But, damn it guys, I accept myself
Easily without breaking into a sweat
I can accept life also, whatever turns it takes
But, it is the “other”, who does not
Who looks at me askance
And sometimes the “Not Other”, too,
And thus I spend my life here on earth
Not knowing what is “acceptable”?

The Lips

A poet tells me
Lips are meant for kissing
A sage tells me
Lips are meant to be zipped
Confused, I take out my laptop
And start typing.

Past the Midnight Hour

Under the cover of darkness, emboldened
Many a memory makes its appearance
In the theater of my mind, one after another
And I who have had delusions in the past
Can no longer trust which memory is genuine
For instance, one memory is rather persistent
And keeps appearing every now and then:
A girl smiling at me; what to make of it?
Should I start taking that antipsychotic?
I’d rather not, lest my psychiatrist say
“I told you so”, with that stupid grin.

The “No”

The no
Falling from some lips
Is far more problematic
Than from some other lips.

The Contradictions

Somewhere in this quest
To make a living
To live and love
To find the truth, sometimes
Life lands a sucker punch
When we are least expecting it.

All the Good We Can Do in This World

It is good to be laughed at
It is good to be made fun of
It is good to become a lughing stock
What a wonderful way to be
Where we are so useful to others
And Bentham’s soul would rest in peace.

“They are no philosophical race”: Nietzsche’s Critique of the Englishman’s Philosophy

Nietzsche had a sharp and often contemptuous view of what he called “English psychology” and the broader tradition of British empiricist and utilitarian moral philosophy. His critique is scattered across several works — Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols, On the Genealogy of Morality, and The Gay Science — but forms a coherent attack on a whole intellectual temperament.

1. The Critique of Utilitarianism and the “Herd Morality”

Nietzsche’s most sustained target was Utilitarian ethics — chiefly Bentham and Mill’s reduction of morality to the calculation of pleasure and pain, and the maximization of happiness for the greatest number.

• He found this mediocre and life-denying: it privileges comfort, safety, and the average over excellence, risk, and greatness.
• Utilitarianism, for Nietzsche, is the philosophical expression of the herd — a morality that flattens hierarchy and punishes the exceptional individual.
• “Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does,” he quipped in Twilight of the Idols — meaning that making happiness the supreme value is a parochial, petit-bourgeois illusion.

2. The Attack on British Empiricism and Its Psychologists

In Beyond Good and Evil (Part I) and On the Genealogy of Morality (Preface), Nietzsche attacks English moral psychologists — figures like Spencer, Hume, and their successors — for:

• Lacking historical sense: They projected modern values (utility, sympathy, altruism) backward onto all of human history, as if these had always been the basis of morality.
• Flatness of soul: They could only explain the origin of moral concepts mechanistically — habit, utility, association — and missed the deeper question of the value of values themselves.
• “They are no philosophical race”: Nietzsche says this explicitly in Beyond Good and Evil (§252), charging that the English lack the instinct for genuine philosophy. They are capable of great industry and data-gathering but not of the bold, creative, self-overcoming thought he demands of a philosopher.

3. Darwin and the Problem of “Survival”

Nietzsche had a complicated relationship with Darwin, but largely rejected Social Darwinism and the popular English interpretation of evolution:

• The “survival of the fittest” was vulgarized into a justification for mediocrity — it is the most numerous, the most adaptable, the most average that survive, not the highest.
• Nietzsche argued that nature often sacrifices the species for the sake of the exceptional individual — the reverse of what the Darwinian moralists claimed.
• Evolution, in the English reading, pointed downward toward conformity; Nietzsche wanted to point upward toward the Übermensch.

4. Critique of Sympathy and Altruism (Spencer & the “Comfortable” Ethics)

Herbert Spencer attempted to merge evolution with utilitarian ethics, grounding morality in social cooperation and sympathy. Nietzsche despised this:

• Sympathy (Mitleid) — “feeling with suffering” — was for Nietzsche a form of weakness and even a contagion of suffering, not a virtue.
• Altruism as a supreme value he traced (in the Genealogy) to slave morality — the resentful inversion of aristocratic values by the weak.
• Spencer’s “evolution toward happiness” was, to Nietzsche, a comfortable lie told by a civilization in decline.

5. The Deeper Charge: Mediocrity of Philosophical Spirit

Beyond specific doctrines, Nietzsche’s critique is temperamental and cultural:

“They are not a philosophical race — the English: Bacon represents an attack on the philosophical spirit generally, Hobbes, Hume, and Locke an abasement and a depreciation of the idea of a ‘philosopher’ for more than a century.” — Beyond Good and Evil, §252

The English philosopher, in Nietzsche’s portrait, is:

• Too empirical — chained to facts, unable to think beyond them
• Too Christian in disguise — utilitarian altruism is secularized Christian morality without the honesty of its theological roots
• Too comfortable — philosophizing in service of stability, society, and contentment, rather than danger, solitude, and transformation

Summary Table

A Fair Assessment

Nietzsche’s critique, while brilliant and penetrating, is also polemical and sometimes unfair. Hume, in particular, is a far deeper thinker than Nietzsche credits. And Nietzsche himself borrows more from the British tradition than he admits — his psychological method of unmasking morality owes something to precisely the “English psychologists” he mocks. The critique is best read not as sober scholarship, but as Nietzsche’s philosophical war cry against a particular vision of what life and thought are for.

«‘Meta used BitTorrent because it was a MORE EFFICIENT and reliable means of obtaining the datasets …’ Meta’s attorney writes.»

Seriously ‽ They’re arguing that expediency justifies systematic and widespread copyright infringement for the sake of MAXIMIZING WEALTH‽

#utilitarianism runs completely #amok #buckvbell revisited https://m.einverne.info/@HackerNewsBot/116188132461060163

«‘Meta used BitTorrent because it was a MORE EFFICIENT and reliable means of obtaining the datasets …’ Meta’s attorney writes.»

Seriously ‽ They’re arguing that expediency justifies systematic and widespread copyright infringement for the sake of MAXIMIZING WEALTH‽

#utilitarianism runs completely #amok #buckvbell revisited https://m.einverne.info/@HackerNewsBot/116188132461060163

«‘Meta used BitTorrent because it was a MORE EFFICIENT and reliable means of obtaining the datasets …’ Meta’s attorney writes.»

Seriously ‽ They’re arguing that expediency justifies systematic and widespread copyright infringement for the sake of MAXIMIZING WEALTH‽

#utilitarianism runs completely #amok #buckvbell revisited https://m.einverne.info/@HackerNewsBot/116188132461060163

«‘Meta used BitTorrent because it was a MORE EFFICIENT and reliable means of obtaining the datasets …’ Meta’s attorney writes.»

Seriously ‽ They’re arguing that expediency justifies systematic and widespread copyright infringement for the sake of MAXIMIZING WEALTH‽

#utilitarianism runs completely #amok #buckvbell revisited https://m.einverne.info/@HackerNewsBot/116188132461060163

«‘Meta used BitTorrent because it was a MORE EFFICIENT and reliable means of obtaining the datasets …’ Meta’s attorney writes.»

Seriously ‽ They’re arguing that expediency justifies systematic and widespread copyright infringement for the sake of MAXIMIZING WEALTH‽

#utilitarianism runs completely #amok #buckvbell revisited https://m.einverne.info/@HackerNewsBot/116188132461060163

The fallacy at the heart of welfare economics

https://davidellerman.substack.com/p/the-petitio-principii-fallacy-in

@economics_that_works

#Economics #EconTwitter #Econ #PoliticalEconomy #WelfareEconomics #Philosophy #Ethics #Utilitarianism #Utilitarian #Consequentialism #Consequentialist #capitalism #Egalitarianism #Egalitarian #Inequality

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jlou/115970177564955152

@ArthurI what do you think of this resolution I came up with to the consequentialist judgement paradox you came up with?

#philosophy #ethics #Consequentialism #utilitarian #utilitarianism #consequentialist #deontology #deontological

In the context of workplace mobbing, how can managers balance the happiness of the majority with the well-being of the individual, and what role does empathy play in moral decision-making?
https://www.mobingas.lt/en/when-killing-brings-more-happiness-or-how-to-protect-from-mobbing/
#WorkplaceBullying #Utilitarianism #Synderesis #science

What does it mean to live a good life? 🌿✨
#EthicalTheories #PhilosophyAndLife #PoeticBipolarMind #MoralPhilosophy #CulturalRelativism #Utilitarianism #Deontology #DivineCommandTheory #NaturalLaw #EthicsAndArt #MentalHealthAndPhilosophy

https://poeticbipolarmind.blog/beyond-right-and-wrong/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social

and here's a pointer to a - maybe - broadly interesting current [paywallfree] discussion in #utilitas

#ethics #utilitarianism
#morality_by_degrees

taken from a #cup #philosophy newsletter

https://click.updates.cambridge.org/?qs=d8fc04d905cf035b2b8344d3d5e3999331c49809f2b8d456ff9cecb93987bea7dc65d8e704522b69361690d466b1669c

and here's a pointer to a - maybe - broadly interesting current [paywallfree] discussion in #utilitas

#ethics #utilitarianism
#morality_by_degrees

taken from a #cup #philosophy newsletter

https://click.updates.cambridge.org/?qs=d8fc04d905cf035b2b8344d3d5e3999331c49809f2b8d456ff9cecb93987bea7dc65d8e704522b69361690d466b1669c

and here's a pointer to a - maybe - broadly interesting current [paywallfree] discussion in #utilitas

#ethics #utilitarianism
#morality_by_degrees

taken from a #cup #philosophy newsletter

https://click.updates.cambridge.org/?qs=d8fc04d905cf035b2b8344d3d5e3999331c49809f2b8d456ff9cecb93987bea7dc65d8e704522b69361690d466b1669c

and here's a pointer to a - maybe - broadly interesting current [paywallfree] discussion in #utilitas

#ethics #utilitarianism
#morality_by_degrees

taken from a #cup #philosophy newsletter

https://click.updates.cambridge.org/?qs=d8fc04d905cf035b2b8344d3d5e3999331c49809f2b8d456ff9cecb93987bea7dc65d8e704522b69361690d466b1669c

and here's a pointer to a - maybe - broadly interesting current [paywallfree] discussion in #utilitas

#ethics #utilitarianism
#morality_by_degrees

taken from a #cup #philosophy newsletter

https://click.updates.cambridge.org/?qs=d8fc04d905cf035b2b8344d3d5e3999331c49809f2b8d456ff9cecb93987bea7dc65d8e704522b69361690d466b1669c

Into #Philosophy but Find It #Intimidating? Start here!

This #book tries to answer the #moral dilemmas we all grapple with through the lens of #deontology, #utilitarianism, #existentialism, #ubuntu, and more.

https://bookriot.com/how-to-be-perfect-michael-schur/

Why #Democracy is Mathematically Impossible

https://youtu.be/qf7ws2DF-zk

#elections #voting #SocialChoiceTheory #SocialChoice #economics #politics #utilitarianism #utilitarian #GameTheory

@ovid

#Kant’s Categorical Imperative places the good outside of human reason, discerned as a special feeling of duty. He wanted to recover faith as the source of morality.

#JohnStuartMill’s #Utilitarianism is just hedonism plus Christianity: love your neighbor’s pleasure. “Good” is quantity over quality and your virtue comes from how large a group (excluding yourself) you disinterestedly serve, whatever their values.

Either are fine for “#AI” robots, not humans.

#philosophy

#JoshuaKnobe - What Would an #Infinite #Universe Mean?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPuFx_x2KKA&ab_channel=CloserToTruth

#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Physics #Cosmology #PhilosophyOfCosmology #Infinity #Cantor #InfiniteUniverse #Probability #Morality #Utilitarianism #MoralChoice #MoralChoices #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn

Beyond the applied ML context, I see a lot of connections to the limitations of #utilitarianism, utilitarian aggregation / #populationEthics, #rationality, #longtermism, subjective #Bayesianism, etc. But would anyone read any of that?

#Deontology and #HumanRights with #Philosopher #SimonBlackburn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4ve3n3uIL4&ab_channel=NortheasternUniversityLondon

#Philosophy #Utilitarianism #IndirectUtilitarianism #Consequentialism #CategoricalImperative #Mill #JohnStuartMill #JSM #Kant #ImmanuelKant #Liberalism #Economics #Ethics #MoralPhilosophy

#Deontology and #HumanRights with #Philosopher #SimonBlackburn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4ve3n3uIL4&ab_channel=NortheasternUniversityLondon

#Philosophy #Utilitarianism #IndirectUtilitarianism #Consequentialism #CategoricalImperative #Mill #JohnStuartMill #JSM #Kant #ImmanuelKant #Liberalism #Economics #Ethics #MoralPhilosophy

#Deontology and #HumanRights with #Philosopher #SimonBlackburn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4ve3n3uIL4&ab_channel=NortheasternUniversityLondon

#Philosophy #Utilitarianism #IndirectUtilitarianism #Consequentialism #CategoricalImperative #Mill #JohnStuartMill #JSM #Kant #ImmanuelKant #Liberalism #Economics #Ethics #MoralPhilosophy

I wrote an article on the #trolleyproblem for #autonomousvehicles. I provide two solutions to the problem and argue for where our focus should be headed.

“Two Solutions to the Trolley Problem for Self Driving Cars” by Philosopher Scholar https://link.medium.com/Qa1r45C65R

#philosophy #ethics #appliedethics #selfdrivingcars #utilitarian #utilitarianism #machineethics #babyorgrandma #socialcreditsystem #china #citizenscore