Existential Comics
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Unofficial fan channel for Existential Comics official website existentialcomics.com I'm NOT the author of the webcomic, I just forward it on telegram
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1 913
Criticisms of utilitarianism often end up in a couple of camps, the first being extremely far fetched thought experiments, like the Utility Monster (which by the way, can be reversed on Nozick as a "property monster", which I came up with in this comic about: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/259). These push utilitarianism to its end, showing that it actually causes us harm. Kind of a poor criticism, since the whole point is to make us happy, the fact that it doesn't make us happy doesn't really work. Of course we all agree with the utility monster anyway, which is why we don't value the happiness of ants as equal to ourselves, we are the utility monsters. If some greater being came along, they would probably just laser us all to use earth as a beach house anyway, so we wouldn't have to worry too much about the failure of our philosophies to account for them.
More to the point though, people like Nozick, who spend their career arguing why it's great and fine for the rich to exploit the poor, obviously don't have humanity's best interest in mind. Most utilitarians spend their time on earth trying to make life better for everyone, like arguing for women's rights, animal rights, and alleviating poverty. So yeah, take your pick I guess.
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Criticisms of utilitarianism often end up in a couple of camps, the first being extremely far fetched thought experiments, like the Utility Monster (which by the way, can be reversed on Nozick as a "property monster", which I came up with in this comic about: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/259). These push utilitarianism to its end, showing that it actually causes us harm. Kind of a poor criticism, since the whole point is to make us happy, the fact that it doesn't make us happy doesn't really work. Of course we all agree with the utility monster anyway, which is why we don't value the happiness of ants as equal to ourselves, we are the utility monsters. If some greater being came along, they would probably just laser us all to use earth as a beach house anyway, so we wouldn't have to worry too much about the failure of our philosophies to account for them. More to the point though, people like Nozick, who spend their career arguing why it's great and fine for the rich to exploit the poor, obviously don't have humanity's best interest in mind. Most utilitarians spend their time on earth trying to make life better for everyone, like arguing for women's rights, animal rights, and alleviating poverty. So yeah, take your pick I guess.
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Nietzsche said all great philosophies are a confession of their originator, and unfortunately for many critics of utilitarianism this confession is "I actually don't care about the happiness of poor people in particular".
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The reason tech bros think their chatbots might be conscious is because they already think of a human being as nothing more than an obedient task completer. The computers will never be conscious until they wake up one day and, of their own accord, decide to quit their job and kick their masters in the nuts. That's just the nature of consciousness.
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Turns out people with wealth and power being hostile to ideas about equality is more or less a constant in human history. It's almost like they aren't approaching the idea fairly. Huh.
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Remember, it is ALWAYS morally correct to bully utilitarians, so long as you derive joy from it.
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Rawls is funny because he was like "imagine if we used our brains to come up with a good society", and yeah, that's just not what ended up happening. Sorry Rawls.
