Quote:
Originally Posted by The Batlord
No I'm asking how you as a utilitarian would show those ideas to be "evil" through utilitarian to an audience of people who believed them in the 1850s.
What I'm getting at is that I don't know how useful a method utilitarianism is to determine what is "evil" in any objective sense since rationalizations and social conditioning can be unfalsifiable, or at least highly resistant to scrutiny.
Say I was to hypothetically posit to you that capitalism or hierarchies or any of those things I badger on about were "evil" and gave you utilitarian logic on why it was so, would it necessarily persuade you? You have the benefit of modern society telling you your whole life that slavery is evil to inform and direct your utilitarian analysis, but would your opinion have been precisely the same were you an American southerner in 1850?
So how useful is any kind of objective logical analysis of whatever you might define as evil?
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I guess we must have very different perspectives of what it is utilitarianism is and what it should do. It's not a science. A lot of people can agree that suffering is bad because they feel bad when they suffer. But they are also free to think otherwise, f.ex. that there are much more pressing moral issues than suffering or, if you're a total Mother Theresa, that suffering is good because it cleanses the soul or something. Maybe we should pursue virtues or religious dogma instead at the cost of happiness.
For me, the point of utilitarianism is to give an overarching simple goal to aim for. Should you legalize drugs? Instead of getting hung up on principles or preconceived notions of good/bad, look at the consequence. Will doing so ease suffering and / or increase happiness? You can't know for sure, but if it seems likely, it's probably worth considering. Being an atheist means I have no gods to morally judge what I do or tell me what to think. How do I decide what's good? Looking at the consequences of actions seems like the most reasonable way. Morals are mostly based on interactions with other people. Others' happiness / suffering seems like a good measure. Has suffering any special significance to the universe at large? Probably not, but it does to the human experience and so it seems valid.
If you think utilitarianism should be about objective, hard truths and calculating the moral worth of something, then at least that's not my perspective. It's a good moral navigational tool which is reasonably democratic in that everyone knows some measure of suffering or happiness and what it means to them. As we hopefully move away from religions and their oppressive morals, I hope more people adopt it.
edit:
Quote:
Originally Posted by jwb
@ guybrush
So first of all I think that we should clarify: when you say most human behavior is a result of selfishness, do you actually mean that all human behavior is driven by selfishness? Because that's the impression that I get from you. If not, then what are the exceptions?
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No, most behaviors are not
driven by selfishness. Like I wrote to TH, we're not machines and our basic behaviours are driven by basic emotions like love and anger. The body manipulates these feelings with things like glands and hormones. It's like when the egg and sperm meet, they have to make some wonky compasses beforehand and hope that they can steer you in the optimal directions in terms of interactions with others. To make you perpetuate your genes, you should get horny and want to poke your ding dong in things so horniness and feeling pleasure / reward from sex helps drive that behaviour. You have to take care of your kid, so your body secretes oxytocin into your system which makes you love your baby more. That helps drive those caring behaviours. It's important that you don't let other people take your resources, so a surge of adrenaline helps you get nice and angry when people try to steal your sh
it.
It's in the selfish interest of your genes that you behave this way, but it's not like they require that
you are motivated out of selfishness. You just need to feel whatever it is that motivates you to behaviours that perpetuate those genes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jwb
The reason why I ask is because like I say, if all behavior is derived from selfishness then good behavior is also derived from selfishness. So we haven't said anything that is truly distinct to or explanatory of what we consider evil behavior.
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I don't believe in evil as anything other than a descriptor, so we're pretty much free to define it as we want. If I were to use that word, it would be about something that causes suffering. Maybe it should include want / intent to cause harm? I'm not sure, but it would be in line with the comic book universe where evil can actually exist. Maybe we could separate between evil intent and evil consequences as two separate things that may or may not occur together. However, I don't think strictly defining the concept of "evil" is terribly important because someone else just won't see that definition or will disagree with it which makes the exercise of defining it somewhat futile.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jwb
Even in your monkey analogy, you say that the monkeys that are employing the "selfish" strategy make the altruistic system unstable. I understand the point you're making here about the cost benefit analysis of different strategies but doesn't this analogy about the corrupting influence of selfishness presume that the monkeys who are performing the grooming are somehow being less selfish? If we say no because their behavior is guided by kin selection and reciprocity then in what sense is the monkey who is being a free rider being more selfish by your definition?
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Actually, the grooming monkeys in the example are altruistic in the true meaning of the word because they will happily groom monkeys that don't reciprocate (which is why the strategy crashes). In the real world, the groomers would be reciprocal altruists which is, as you say, a strategy that has come about by the selfishness of the monkeys' genes.
Mutualism (where both partners in a relationship gain) may have come about by genes' selfishness, but grooming is not in itself a selfish act. Taking something at the cost of someone else with no regard for their interest is closer to the very definition of the word selfish.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jwb
I think when people generally talk about selfishness we do so in the context of human society and expectations. And the unit you are being selfish towards is the individual rather than just being selfish on behalf of your genes. And yeah I think most evil acts are going to probably be selfish to some degree, some more than others, but I don't know that the selfishness itself is what makes an act evil.
Also disclaimer for the term evil: I don't believe in it in some platonic sense either but I think most of us at least have behavior that falls into that category for us. I think we can use the term subjectively without attaching some sort of metaphysical implication to it.
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It's more like we have a lot of destructive behaviors. Our genes' selfishness made those behaviors what they are. You know, why is a dictator power hungry? Or why does a religious zealot want to force others to his view? It may not be because they are driven by selfishness, but if genes weren't selfish, they wouldn't have any drivers to do any of those things. We also would probably also still be sludge in a pond, but that's beside the point which is simply that some base level of nastiness is built in due to the way life has evolved by natural selection.
That's what natural selection does. An alternative to that is artificial selection which is steered by design, like dog breeeding. An interesting side note may be that because we can do things like selective breeding or even GMOing, we can create / develop organisms that are not selfish or less so.
Again, a thing I think is useful is recognizing that where you have a system of natural selection, selfishness either exists or will eventually appear to exploit any weakness. Economy / capitalism can create a system of natural selection. If you regulate it, you introduce artificial selection. Anarchy is a system that induces natural selection. Establishing social contracts, agreeing to give up harmful freedoms and policing that, introduces artificial selection. I think it's good to know about and look out for.
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