When we design a logo, it might be a good idea for us to have a tagline included in/next to it. Here are some egs:

A clear-thinking oasis (Richard Dawkins forums)
A drop of reason in a pool of confusion (Secular Web)
A republic of freethought (Talk Rational)

That said, I had a look at some of the web's biggest forums and they generally don't have taglines. I'm not sure whether that implies it's a bad idea after all. But most of those are a very different flavour to Felicifia. In any case, it can't hurt to try and think of some and see what we think. My first idea is,

Where compassion meets logic

(or possibly rephrased as 'Where compassion and logic meet' - I can't decide which flows better)

I'm not crazy about the word 'compassion' though; it sounds a bit woolly. As an alternative,

Where empathy meets logic

(or 'Where empathy and logic meet')

But somehow that doesn't sound as good a phrase. Anyway, please add suggestions, or just comment on these ones...

Hey. Creating a tagline sounds like a good idea. I like the theme of logic + compassion/empathy and I agree that empathy is a better word than compassion. I think compassion sounds overdramatic.

I can't decide for-sure whether logic should meet empathy or the other way around. I do like 'Where empathy and logic meet' though.

I've also been thinking that your tagline is very very close to being a play on words. For example, if you rewrite it as 'the community of logic and empathy', then it means both ‘the forum of logic and empathy’ and – I think – ‘the similarity of logic and empathy’. I have probably been thinking about this too much, but do you think a play on words might be workable and desirable here? Does ‘the synthesis’ or ‘the meeting’ or ‘interaction’ do anything for you? Also, do you prefer logic to reason? I think I do, but I figure the alternative deserves being put out there.

I much prefer 'logic', simply because it's so much better defined. 'Reason' is an abstract concept that philosophers keep tussling over, allowing everyone with any crazy view to claim it for themselves.

Logic (in a narrow sense at least) is pretty clearly finding conclusions which must be true if your premises are too. Far more useful for discussion.

I've put my finger on why 'Where x and y meet' was bothering me though (and I'm irritated that it took me this long to figure out) - it a snowclone. That doesn't mean we should immediately rule it out, but it would be nice to have a unique sentence structure if we can think of one.

We want to be careful of anything punnish - they tend to have a very tabloid feel. Again, we shouldn't rule them out immediately if they're good, but I think it's much more important to have recognisable, likeable words than to link mediocre words to each other. I definitely don't like 'synthesis', 'interaction' or 'similarity' (in this context).

The meeting of empathy and logic
and
A meeting of empathy and logic

Are worth mulling over, though.

Lastly, I prefer empathy/logic to logic/empathy because I think the structure gives more emphasis to the latter word, and I think 'logic' is more important than emotion, especially in internet discussions.

You're right about where X and Y meet and I'm coming around to the position that you're right about the puns too. I'm quite willing to be swayed away from the Community or even the Meeting if it comes to that. Having said that, I've created some logos with these taglines.

When we think up better taglines, that'll give us impetus to get better logos (created or bought).

We should think of the kind of sentiments we ideally want the tagline to encapsulate - we probably won't be able to squeeze all of them in, but having an idea what we're aiming to express should help. Things I want to emphasise, off the top of my head:

Consequentialists of all varieties welcome (there's no consequentialism forum on the web, so we should be a nice venue for them)
We like logic
We like empathy/compassion whatever you call it
We're happy to talk about utilitarianism, but we're mainly here so people with utilitarian sympathies can talk about whatever they want
Just as the atheist movement has emphasised that it's really just the absence of theism, so we should emphasise that util is ultimately just the absence of additional bits of moral scaffolding
It's no more (or less) an 'ideology' than, say, empiricism
For all the redhead-genocide thought experiments that critics like to throw at it, the history of utilitarianism is a history of progressivists adopting causes well before they became publicly acceptable (Singer and Unger on helping out the world beyond our back garden, Singer on animal welfare, Mill on women's emancipation, Bentham on just about everything, Epicurus on egalitarianism in general and women in particular, for eg)

I really like all of these ideas.
I really believe that utilitarianism can easily be cast as the absence of irrationality and arbitrariness.
And you're right that utilitarians have pioneered moral progress. As far as moral hypotheses go, utilitarianism has made more predictions that we can tentatively call successful than any other ethical systems that come to mind.

Arepo wrote:Consequentialists of all varieties welcome

I think it sounds easier to agree with and less exclusive when you say "we would like to create a place where consequentialists feel welcome". I don't mean that consequentialists are persecuted elsewhere, but there is definitely some positive connotation.

My other thought on this theme here is that we don't want just consequentialists. That's obviously a niche for us, but we must be wary of excluding non-utilitarians. Including non-utilitarians can:
It can build community, facilitate promotion of utilitarianism to non-utilitarians, contribute to debate (in proper bits of the forum), keep utilitarians grounded in non-utilitarian thought, allow Felicifia to exhibit the decency of utilitarians...

Consequentialism includes non-utilitarians. Technically egoists are consequentialists, although they're unlikely to share many values with us. Still, I know a few people who'd call themselves consequentialist but not utilitarian (though I'd sometimes disagree), but at the very least, prioritarians are definitely non-util consequentialists (but for the rest of this posts I'll call sympathetic consequentialists utilitarians for brevity).

On not excluding people, I agree in theory, but I think they should be the people we target - using the secular forums as a model yet again, they're quite happy to have theist posters (some even have theist moderators), but it's important that the overall atmosphere of the forum remains pro-[the topic].

For the major secular forums that's quite an easy task, because they already have well-developed communities that have been around since the early days of the commercial web, and the only religious members they tend to attract are the most liberal Christians and dogged fundamentalists. On a forum this size, it would be easy for a bunch of Randian Objectivists/divine command advocates/intuitionists to move in and dwarf the utilitarian/aligned consequentialist membership.

It wouldn't need to be a coordinated invasion - there just aren't a high proportion people out there at the moment who call themselves consequentialists, so via a natural influx of people who've come here with the honest intention of providing intellectual arguments against util, we could find ourselves running a forum on which utilitarian ideas get habitually swamped.

That's what I'm thinking of when I say that we want to foster an atmosphere where it's safe to assume util and discuss eg the ideas it leads to without having to argue for the basic premise if you don't want to. We ideally want to grow organically (ie without banning or exclusion), but keep the proportion of utilitarians high as we do.

Personally, I think an influx of non-utilitarians to felicifia.org could be a more positive than negative thing. Necessity is the mother of invention. And I think that opposing viewpoints can stimulate us to strengthen our own arguments and explanations. However, it's a single minor difference in emphasis among a bunch of agreement. Let's press on in this cycle of creation of logos then taglines in turn.

I definitely think this should be a place for non-utilitarians too. What we don't want is for anyone who posts, say, a question of income redistribution or GMO science to get jumped on by a bunch of people complaining that it violates the sanctity of rights of somethingorother, when they just want to assume consequentialism and talk about the consequences of some action.

It would also be nice not to overwhelm those people who do want to argue for consequentialism with more critical posts than they can hope to respond to.

Yeah, I see what you mean. You're totally right. Debate needs to be in the right place. We do need be able to look at the application of utilitarianism in peace. If a person creates a thread title that says 'practical ethics of X or utilitarianism and Y', discussion of other ethical viewpoints might reasonably be included as a point of comparison, but not as a detailed thesis. We can't let it interrupt the flow of discussion.

Felicifia: empathy, logic and fun.

I just thought of an alternative, more aggressive approach to taglines - something like 'Reclaiming morality from mysticism'

(I like the alliteration, but I'm not crazy about having 'morality' in the tagline since I think it's at best an unnecessary concept for util, and since it has a bit of a bad rep in the public sphere, as having religious/preachy connotations)

Yeah, I like the theme. I suppose along those lines, there are:
reclaiming ethics from irrationality
returning logic to ethics
promoting rational morality
renewing a rational approach to ethics

Word brainstorm:

mysticism, mumbo-jumbo, welfare, happiness, ethics, secular, secularity everyday, suffering, compassion, logic, reasion, rationality, morality, empathy, society, misty, searchlight, republic, group, meeting, universal, global, everyone's, for everyone, consideration, equal consideration, beyond the species, science, scientific, humanism, enlightened, enlightenment, altruism, atavism, enjoy, life, benefit, eudaimonic, outside your brain, evolving, scientific method, moral method, foundation, clarity, fundament, behaviour, activity, action, ocean, rain, breeze, dusting, trickle, beam, gaze, focus, spotlight, telescope, magnifying glass, analysis

More later, hopefully