Long Ball Larry
Footballguy
I don't know why I am posting this. Just something I have been batting around this week and now I am a little drunk and letting it flow.
I was recently listening to an episode of Very Bad Wizards called Utilitarianism and Moral Identity (https://verybadwizards.fireside.fm/135). In said episode, they discussed an essay from the 70s (I think) called Consequentialism and Identity (https://s3.amazonaws.com/peezer/Williams_Consequentialism+and+Integrity.pdf).
It struck a chord with me because I was heavily influenced by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham after having read them in high school and always have considered myself a utilitarian, perpetually weighing costs and benefits and outcomes as the drivers of what I think is right. While in many ways, this has been advantageous, I have sometimes considered it a hindrance because I often cannot acquire enough information to make the correct decision and therefore have a hard time knowing how to act. In How We Decide (Lehrer), he describes a patient who developed a brain tumor completely incapacitating his emotional decision making.
"Damasio described what it was like trying to set up an appointment with one of these emotionless patients: I suggested two alternative dates, both in the coming month and just a few days apart from each other. The patient pulled out his appointment book and began consulting the calendar. The behavior that ensued, which was witnessed by several investigators, was remarkable. For the better part of a half hour, the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two dates: previous engagements, proximity to other engagements, possible meteorological conditions, virtually anything that one could reasonably think about concerning a simple date. .. . He was now walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis, an endless outlining and fruitless comparison of options and possible consequences. It took enormous discipline to listen to all of this without pounding on the table and telling him to stop."
In the essay linked in the first paragraph, Williams describes how utilitarianism fundamentally wrecks a human's "integrity", a term which doesn't mean moral consistency, but more the cohesion of the self.
"It is absurd to demand of such a man, when the sums come in from the utility network which theprojects of others have in part determined, that he should just step aside from his own project and decision and acknowledge the decision which utilitarian calculation requires. It is to alienate him in a real sense from his actions and the source of his action in his own convictions. Itis to make him into a channel between the input of everyone's projects, including his own, and an output of optimific decision; but this is to neglect the extent to which his actions and his decisions have to been as the actions and decisions which flow form the projects and attitudes with which he is most closely identified. It is thus, in the most literal sense, an attack on his integrity."
I guess that I read some Kant at some point, but I have very little recollection of it. Probably because I read some like the following, and was rather turned off as a staunch individualist and anti-establishmentarian: "Because humans are not perfectly rational (they partly act by instinct), Kant believed that humans must conform their subjective will with objective rational laws, which he called conformity obligation."
But I now I look at these categorical imperatives and think that maybe it does make more sense, at least in having some kind of a cogent worldview and something to hang one's hat on, so to speak, as opposed to this post-modern moral relativist malaise. In particular, I see the straight line from Kant's universailizability to Rawls' Theory of Justice, which I have always held in high regard, so maybe Kantian ethics really are the way to go, even though they feel too conservative to me.
I was recently listening to an episode of Very Bad Wizards called Utilitarianism and Moral Identity (https://verybadwizards.fireside.fm/135). In said episode, they discussed an essay from the 70s (I think) called Consequentialism and Identity (https://s3.amazonaws.com/peezer/Williams_Consequentialism+and+Integrity.pdf).
It struck a chord with me because I was heavily influenced by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham after having read them in high school and always have considered myself a utilitarian, perpetually weighing costs and benefits and outcomes as the drivers of what I think is right. While in many ways, this has been advantageous, I have sometimes considered it a hindrance because I often cannot acquire enough information to make the correct decision and therefore have a hard time knowing how to act. In How We Decide (Lehrer), he describes a patient who developed a brain tumor completely incapacitating his emotional decision making.
"Damasio described what it was like trying to set up an appointment with one of these emotionless patients: I suggested two alternative dates, both in the coming month and just a few days apart from each other. The patient pulled out his appointment book and began consulting the calendar. The behavior that ensued, which was witnessed by several investigators, was remarkable. For the better part of a half hour, the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two dates: previous engagements, proximity to other engagements, possible meteorological conditions, virtually anything that one could reasonably think about concerning a simple date. .. . He was now walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis, an endless outlining and fruitless comparison of options and possible consequences. It took enormous discipline to listen to all of this without pounding on the table and telling him to stop."
In the essay linked in the first paragraph, Williams describes how utilitarianism fundamentally wrecks a human's "integrity", a term which doesn't mean moral consistency, but more the cohesion of the self.
"It is absurd to demand of such a man, when the sums come in from the utility network which theprojects of others have in part determined, that he should just step aside from his own project and decision and acknowledge the decision which utilitarian calculation requires. It is to alienate him in a real sense from his actions and the source of his action in his own convictions. Itis to make him into a channel between the input of everyone's projects, including his own, and an output of optimific decision; but this is to neglect the extent to which his actions and his decisions have to been as the actions and decisions which flow form the projects and attitudes with which he is most closely identified. It is thus, in the most literal sense, an attack on his integrity."
I guess that I read some Kant at some point, but I have very little recollection of it. Probably because I read some like the following, and was rather turned off as a staunch individualist and anti-establishmentarian: "Because humans are not perfectly rational (they partly act by instinct), Kant believed that humans must conform their subjective will with objective rational laws, which he called conformity obligation."
But I now I look at these categorical imperatives and think that maybe it does make more sense, at least in having some kind of a cogent worldview and something to hang one's hat on, so to speak, as opposed to this post-modern moral relativist malaise. In particular, I see the straight line from Kant's universailizability to Rawls' Theory of Justice, which I have always held in high regard, so maybe Kantian ethics really are the way to go, even though they feel too conservative to me.
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