New Testingstan

the reason people use hypothetical scenarios in philosophy is that they are more clear-cut than most real situations

Furthermore, I love how you automatically disregard any method of measuring happiness besides averages. You realize that there are other statistics that people might find important, right? For instance, people analyze the happiness quotient of different nations because they are also interested in the distribution of happiness-- that way, we know where to direct our efforts to improve the world. Averaging together the whole world together can be useful, but you also lose large swaths of important information in the process.

huh.

i guess some people don't go for averages or total utility in deciding what's best -- they value equality as well as happiness, so they might pick an even distribution of welfare over one that has a slightly higher average but is highly inegalitarian. (the extreme version of this would be the maximin rule.) but although i might call that consequentialist (if you think that bringing about these good consequences is the only thing that matters), it's pretty far from what i would recognize as utilitarian. i guess i associate utilitarianism with total, aggregative approaches, or maybe with averages, but certainly not with maximin.

anyway, exactly none of this matters to the repugnant conclusion, where everyone has the same level of welfare.

i'm not even sure what starglider is on about

one thing that bothers me is that utility is almost impossible to measure in anything except a strictly comparative sense. like, you can say "my monday was better/happier/more valuable to me than my tuesday" but it's hard to know what it means to say "alice is twice as happy as bob" or "the happiness of cindy's life is equal to the happiness of daniel's life plus the happiness of eileen's life"

sometimes i really want to just bust out on sdn that any atheistic morality or metaphysics probably requires just as many basic assumptions about the universe as theistic ones do

hmm, i'm not sure i'd say that. unless i'm missing something, atheistic systems require one fewer gigantic assumption (i.e. that there is a god)

B-A-K-U-S-T-R-A wrote:
but if atheism isn't more correct than theism, why should people hold with it lol

i became a nihilist for the parties

i had a few funny answers for that post but had a hard time picking between them

here's another one

'sodomy'

Metatwaddle wrote:anyway, exactly none of this matters to the repugnant conclusion, where everyone has the same level of welfare.

i'm not even sure what starglider is on about

one thing that bothers me is that utility is almost impossible to measure in anything except a strictly comparative sense. like, you can say "my monday was better/happier/more valuable to me than my tuesday" but it's hard to know what it means to say "alice is twice as happy as bob" or "the happiness of cindy's life is equal to the happiness of daniel's life plus the happiness of eileen's life"

starglider is not very difficult to understand- he is simply unable to understand things except through the lens of computers and/or furrydom

i shall translate: "blahblah, all moral systems are utilitarian because you can plot them on a computer, blahblah ai, blahblah blah"

that's something that's pretty off-putting with respect to the "advantages" of utilitarianism- it's too arcane to really apply regularly, and the paucity of information, as nietzslime is consistently arguing in the teo thread, renders it difficult to apply period. of course, virtue and rules fail in their own ways too, i'm pretty sure, even if they account for consequences.

warning: we have reached peak formless

it's all downhill from here, folks

Gormless wrote:Wait, let me get this straight. If their basic welfare has been met... what is the problem, again?

Think about what you are saying. No famine. No lack of housing. No lack of access to healthcare, including mental health care. Education. Employment. Etc. We don't even have these things fully addressed in real life-- what you are proposing sounds like a socialist utopia, and everything after that is the icing on the cake. Okay, maybe they lack a few privileges, compared to their neighbors, but they aren't unhappy. Did you stop and think about how fucking nice these people in your hypothetical have it? Where is the problem? Purely in the comparison? Okay, comparatively they aren't as happy. But I fail to see how that is a critical weakness in utilitarianism.

literally sees nothing wrong with the repugnant conclusion

nothing

i'm dying over here

the funny thing is that ethics is one of the most interesting fields in philosophy, for my money

but the internet is more concerned with nineteenth-century attempts to apply the scientific method to every field of human endeavour

B-A-K-U-S-T-R-A wrote:but anyways, breaking news: purnell still thinks his armchair psychiatry is greater than actual psychiatry, and also doesn't read my posts, apparently. maybe i'll push the report button for the first time if he keeps it up

i think he reads everything but the text just sort of goes in through the one eye and out through the other

cause i mean

I wrote:Delusions or auditory hallucinations are present, but thought disorder, disorganized behavior, or affective flattening are not. Delusions are persecutory and/or grandiose, but in addition to these, other themes such as jealousy, religiosity, or somatization may also be present.

The delusions of paranoid schizophrenics usually involve thoughts of being persecuted or harmed by others or exaggerated opinions of their own importance, but may also reflect feelings of jealousy or excessive religiosity. The delusions are typically organized into a coherent framework. Paranoid schizophrenics function at a higher level than other subtypes, but are at risk for suicidal or violent behavior.

if psychiatrists say this man is schizo they must say other people who are similar in some respect are also schizo!!!

because

osama said the us are satans and that's clearly wrong

and revolutionaries think they have chance of changing society and that's clearly wroing

and violent schizos always invent their delusions out of thin air and are never affected by societal trends, cutting the dicks off our big structural critiques of terrists

"What's religion ever done to you?"

part of my dick was cut off!

Is anyone really surprised? The contempt TEO has for any field that doesn't require a calculator is palatable.

look, purnell read the dsm-iv, according to him and duchess, and believe me, he knows better than psychiatrists because osama bin laden and timothy mcveigh

formless update:

Gormless wrote:Heck, at least two methods of making these predictions easier have been stated in this thread-- Rule Utilitarianism and Virtue Ethics. What do you really think we need before such ethics are possible? And I do hope you manage to come up with a criticism that doesn't hamper all ethics pretty equally, though given your username I guess I can't be disappointed if you do.

virtue ethics are a branch of utilitarianism, you heard it ladies gentlemen

also, sick burn on your username nietzslime

the opinion of one random internet person you know is more valuable than the aggregate opinion of many anonymous internet persons possibly related to the field of inquiry

Zod wrote:"What's religion ever done to you?"

part of my dick was cut off!

look in america they don't even need religion for that they do it because of corn flakes

Dooey Jo wrote:the opinion of one random internet person you know is more valuable than the aggregate opinion of many anonymous internet persons possibly related to the field of inquiry

Zod wrote:"What's religion ever done to you?"

part of my dick was cut off!

look in america they don't even need religion for that they do it because of corn flakes

that doesn't mean religion's not responsible

who do you think they got the idea from?

B-A-K-U-S-T-R-A wrote:look, purnell read the dsm-iv, according to him and duchess, and believe me, he knows better than psychiatrists because osama bin laden and timothy mcveigh

formless update:

Gormless wrote:Heck, at least two methods of making these predictions easier have been stated in this thread-- Rule Utilitarianism and Virtue Ethics. What do you really think we need before such ethics are possible? And I do hope you manage to come up with a criticism that doesn't hamper all ethics pretty equally, though given your username I guess I can't be disappointed if you do.

virtue ethics are a branch of utilitarianism, you heard it ladies gentlemen

also, sick burn on your username nietzslime

Duchess, the one who hates the entire mental health field cause her father was a cock and has admitted to discarding whatever they say based on that?

internet people who self-diagnose habitually obviously think that's all their is to mental health

why woudlnt' they then diagnose others

dude zeon has admitted in the past to saying whatever she thinks is cool

Having been a mental health patient for 20 years I can safely say that 80% of it is horseshit.

*shrug* Mine earns every penny of her fee.

starku wrote:internet people who self-diagnose habitually obviously think that's all their is to mental health

why woudlnt' they then diagnose others

dude zeon has admitted in the past to saying whatever she thinks is cool

i used to know a guy online who thought that seeing a therapist for years for his severe mental problems made him qualified to diagnose

starku wrote:internet people who self-diagnose habitually obviously think that's all their is to mental health

why woudlnt' they then diagnose others

dude zeon has admitted in the past to saying whatever she thinks is cool

yeah but here's the quote

Zeon wrote:I also know as a fact from the very long years of serving as my father's personal assistant that only the accumulated wisdom of seeing lots of people is what makes an MHP different from any random person with the DSM-IV open in front of them. Is the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia really that different in Norway?

only practical experience makes a psychiatrist different from a dude with the DSM-IV and a sense of self-importance

Zeons a sociopath anyway. See what I did there?

Yeah, and seven fucking years of school.

She's so full of shit. Must be nice to be thick with the staff, you can say whatever the fuck you want. Worthless cunt.

It. BURN! Remember when Shep started calling her "it" and everyone got pissed off and yet did nothing (except make him a mod)?

Not really.

Was that a Senate thing?

It's funny cause you'd think the board would love medicine cause it's science

But they seem to hate it becashe it's more elite than engineering

And man that Seon quote is just what she's been saying for years

The laugh is people don't realize she's just a compulsive liar

Pathological even.

I base that on my years of experience working with liars.

Aaron wrote:Not really.

Was that a Senate thing?

yeah, it was a senate thing

starku wrote:It's funny cause you'd think the board would love medicine cause it's science

But they seem to hate it becashe it's more elite than engineering

And man that Seon quote is just what she's been saying for years

The laugh is people don't realize she's just a compulsive liar

it's probably, in the case of psychology and psychiatry, an inability to be fully materialist or dualist on their part as well