Utilitarianism

their lineage, their group as a whole.

Now, important to emphasize with that, that it is not that, insofar as guilt is deontological, shame is not necessarily utilitarian.

Utilitarian is about the common good.

Shame is about the common sense of belonging.

of shared values.

Logic right and for the world to agree with our views.

We want to be efficient with our time productive Utilitarian you mentioned effective altruism for example But simultaneously we want to be unpredictable.

We want to smell the flowers which grow in sort of random surprising ways, right? Which is the magic of it? So the dichotomy is within us Our need for extreme predictability pushes us to impress Others with predictive KPIs, sales funnels, accurate revenue projections, and those depend on making everyone else predictable, since everyone else is your customer.

Or perhaps with some sort of Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, where as we need to bring food to the table, so once we are part of a business, we dehumanize the others, Right? We're ruthless.

Very utilitarian.

Yes.

Utilitarian, that's exactly the word.

That's exactly how he talked to me, and, like, talking to him probably made me a bit more glib, a bit better at, like, creating charm.

Um-

It was in the winter of 1822-3 that I formed the plan of a little society to be composed of young men agreeing in fundamental principles, acknowledging utility as their standard in ethics and politics, and a certain number of the principal corollaries drawn from it in the philosophy I had accepted, and meeting once a fortnight to read essays and discuss questions comfortably to the premises thus agreed on.

The fact would hardly be worth mentioning, but for the circumstance that the name I gave to the society I had planned was the Utilitarian Society.

It was the first time that anyone had taken the title of Utilitarian, and the term made its way into the language from this humble source.

I did not invent the word, but found it in one of Galt's novels, The Annals of the Parish, in which the Scottish clergyman, for whom the book is a supposed autobiography, is represented as warning his parishioners not to leave the gospel and become utilitarians.

With a boy's fondness for a name and a banner, I seized on the word, and for some years called myself and others by it as a sectarian appellation, and it came to be occasionally used by some others holding the opinions which I was intended to designate.

The idea occurred to us of carrying on, by reading and conversation, a joint study of several of the branches of science which we wished to be masters of.

We assembled to the number of a dozen or more.

Mr. Grote let a room in his house in Threadneedle Street for the purpose, and his partner, Prescott, one of the three original members of the Utilitarian Society, made one among us.

In 1857 were published two volumes of the Dissertations and Discussions, consisting solely of printed articles, the famous Essay on Liberty and the Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform.

Considerations on Representative Government appeared in 1861, Utilitarianism in 1863, Auguste Comte and Positivism and the Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy in 1865.

After that, besides the very welcome inaugural address at St. Andrews in 1867, his only work of importance was The Subjection of Women, published in 1869.

A fitting conclusion to his more serious literary labors appeared also in 1869 in his annotated edition of his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind.

This is the reason why so many persons have been unable to understand him as the prophet of utilitarianism.

A man of such exquisite feeling, of such pure conscientiousness, of such self-denying life, must surely be an advocate of what is called absolute morality.

Utilitarianism is the proper creed of hard, unemotional natures, who do not respond to the more subtle moral influences, such as the view natural to those who cannot dissociate the word utilitarianism from the narrow meaning of utility, as contrasted with the pleasures of art.

The infirmity of human language excuses such errors.

That On Liberty was expanded into the now well-known work bearing the same title.

Those On Justice and Utility were afterwards incorporated, with some alterations and additions, into one, and published under the name of Utilitarianism.

The remaining two, On Nature and On the Utility of Religion, are now given to the public, with the addition of a third, On Theism, which was produced at a much later period.

In these two first essays, indications may easily be found of the date at which they were composed.

Berkeley mentions him once in his Al Saffron along with Spinoza and Vanini as a typical atheist.

Though Warburton, with his usual love for paradox, prided himself on having been the first person to discover the real strength of Hobbes's position, real appreciation of his merits in England begins with the Utilitarians.

of the early 19th century, Austin, Grote, and Molesworth, to the last of whom we owe the only approach as yet made to a complete edition of Hobbes' works.

Down to their time, Hobbes' chief influence on English thought lay in the stimulus his ethical theories afforded to a profounder moral analysis and a deeper study of human nature on the part of antagonists who sought to vindicate the originality of disinterested action and to base morality upon grounds independent of positive law.

We care about what we desire, and by definition, what we care about is what we value.

John Stuart Mill adopted this strategy when he declared in Utilitarianism, eighteen sixty-three, that "The sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is that people do actually desire it." For that, he has been convicted of committing the naturalistic fallacy by equivocating on the meaning of desirable.

Does it mean worthy of being desired, or does it mean capable of being desired? The fact that something is desired trivially proves that it can be, but it fails to establish that it should be, for not all that we desire is worthy of desire.

Nevertheless, even if no factual evidence can ever count as proof of a claim about value, some claims sound more reasonable than others.