Felicifia is an online community for all things related to the utilitarianism ethics system. See the tag list for catergories.
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(This is an important discussion as we move forward. - promoted by Seth Baum)
Seth has suggested I take the lead on creating a Felicifia forum. I'm willing in principle, though somewhat daunted. I'd been planning to abuse from the sidelines rather than stick my head in the noose...
If anyone competent wants to take up the project, I'll happily cede it to the, but failing that I need to quickly figure out the basics of forum software etc., so am seeking advice.
Various questions then, for anyone who feels competent enough to answer them:
(Another nice new discussion. - promoted by Seth Baum)
I've just read an interesting article on the political philosophy of John Rawls (http://tinyurl.com/578ba5). The article states that Rawls wrote his most famous work, A Theory of Justice, to overcome some of the problems of Utilitarianism. The example given in the article: "Suppose executing the Danish cartoonists will appease a Muslim mob, and that doing so increases total satisfaction. A utilitarian would have to endorse the execution."
This criticism of Utilitarianism, and all those of the same class, seem, in my opinion, to be fallacious. They arise because the criticisms often assume a sudden introduction and widespread acceptance of Utilitarianism by society at large, i.e, Instant Utilitarianism.
It contrasts how the drug companies works out the price it wants to sell a drug at, with how the British medical establishment works out the price it wants to buy a drug at.
NICE (a body who decides on behalf of the medical establishment whether a drug is good value or not) use as their measure how much would have to be spent buying the drug for a patient to gain (on average) one additional quality-adjusted life-year. If the cost would be more than £30,000 then NICE decides the drug is poor value for money.
Companies, on the other hand, look at the length of time remaining on a product's patent, the number of competing drugs, the size of the market - and what they think that market can bear, elsewhere as well as in Britain.
My question is: How, as a Utilitarian, do you think drug prices should be determined?
Felicifia has been quiet recently. Real quiet. Looking forward, we've got some options:
1 Keep the site as is and let it be as quiet or loud as we want it to be.
2 Re-launch the site in a different community platform, possibly a forum.
3 Replace the community site with static content.
4 Take the site down entirely.
5 Other?
Further discussion below.
(An interesting discussion. - promoted by Seth Baum)
That the interests of non-human animals ought to be given the same amount of consideration as the interests of humans is a given for most utilitarians. One thing that follows from this is obvious: people ought to adopt a vegetarian (vegan) diet.
But why should our obligations to animals end here? In the wild, animals will often die gruesome and painful deaths at the hands of their predators, or mother nature.
In the case of animals used for food, it is the hope of the utilitarian that her boycott of the livestock industry will mean that less animals are bred to be slaughtered. She would rather an animal not live at all, than live a life of inevitable suffering.
Shouldn't we then adopt the same stance in the case of wild animals, animals which will undoubtedly suffer just as much (arguably more) than food-animals? The vegan utilitarian seems to be committed to endorsing the painless extinction of all animals that will suffer inevitably.
Am I wrong? Thoughts?
This example seems to lead to deeper questions about utilitarianism. When is a potential life "not worth living?" for instance.
In a previous post, the question was raised as to how much charitable donations to one cause take away from donations to other causes. The topic can be extended to "charitable activities" more generally: Do people have a fixed "charity budget" of money and energy, such that after they've spent some amount of that budget, they feel relieved of further obligations? Or is charitableness more variable, such that small amounts of charity might snowball into bigger amounts of charity that wouldn't have otherwise occurred?
The world's first In Vitro Meat Symposium is being held in Norway, 9-11 April, 2008.
http://invitromeat.org/
It is sponsored by Norwegian University of Life Sciences / Norwegian Food Research Institute.
I'd very strongly encourage utilitarians - or simply anyone who believes in the possibility of a cruelty-free world - to attend.
There is also now a Facebook event for the symposium for all those who would like to express their support.
As electoral campaigns dominate the news, it seems to me that two essential questions are raised for utilitarians: First, should a utilitarian vote, or perhaps, when should a utilitarian vote? Second, how do we decide who to vote for?
A recent New York Timesarticle publicized the Boltzmann brain paradox, which states that if low-entropy universes are created out of random fluctuations, then it's vastly more probable that we--highly organized collections of atoms making observations--are isolated brain fluctuations than it is that we're entire bodies contained in an entire ordered universe. Below I'll raise the question of what implications, if any, such a hypothesis has for utilitarians.
