What traits do we share? Since we're hoping that this will be more of a general discussion forum for people sympathetic to utilitarianism than a forum for discussing utilitarianism, it'd be nice to find things we have in common. So here's my shameless effort to integrate us as we grow. While we're still just a handful of regular posters, it should be relatively easy. I can name a few things already:


TraderJoe, Claceyj and me = fans of the card game bridge

TraderJoe & BenHourigan = committed libertarians

Nick, Benthamite, Toby Ord (and Alan Dawrst?) = professional philosophers/ethicists

TraderJoe and Questionable Mark = recent maths grad; maths student

TraderJoe, Questionable Mark and me = all worn women's clothing on multiple occasions. Possibly for differing reasons

Don Alhambra, RyanCarey and me = web comic addicts

Don Alhambra & RyanCarey (ETA and claceyj, who's only a medical science grad in training to be a doctor. Doh... thanks, TJ) = both involved in medicine (I think - Don's a neuroscientist in something mediciney, IIRC)

Ryan Carey, Toby Ord, Nick, Ben Hourigan and me = live or have lived in Melbourne for a substiantial period

Toby Ord, Ryan Carey and me = fans of strategy games in general


Did I miss any other obvious comparisons, or omit anyone from the above? Do they inspire any of you to burst into song (preferably duet)?

To finish, though I usually find hobby lists a bit dull, I'll have a go. Who knows what else we have in common? Mine:

Martial arts (zillions, though my favourites being kickboxing, Brazilian Jujitsu and anything purely flashy); strategy and role playing games, on computer or in person; writing/editing creative prose - though oddly not so keen on reading it unless it's interactive in some way - ie. I'm editing it or it's part of a game; Improv aka Theatresports; anime; anything that involves being on a boat, preferably on the sea; popular science (and very gradually trying to learn real science and maths); history of the major empires (though atm this mostly = a desire to read about them rather than any actual knowledge); some classic sci-fi (eg. Asimov's short stories, The Forever War, the first three Ender books, Dune, Star Trek: TNG, Hitchhiker's Guide 1-3, everything I've read so far by Stanislaw Lem); learning Japanese

well very funny list...i was jsut invited to browse your webforum by jinksy today and i am intrigued

i am sure he remembers well that i am an old (well middle aged) woman with kids, husband, mortgage, dog, a 10 yr old car and i hate housework, none of which appears in your list of what we have in common, so i hope no one minds me being here

what i do have in common with the things on ryan's list tho are:


i am a bridge addict (is that too much of an understatement sasha?)
i have worn women's clothing on more than one occasion (possibly for a variety of reasons)
i have recently found a new interest in philosophy and have jsut purchased some books on philosophy (easy readers for the masses - de botton, zukav etc) and am considering taking a paper or two at our local university next year (but it may eat into my bridge time - see item #1)
i have not studied maths at university level, but consider myself to be more a math/science person than a liberal arts person (despite the fact i am currently doing a paper in italian...finding it eats too much into my bridge time - see item #1)
i have lived in melbourne for a year - and possibly live closer to melbourne than any of the rest of you (in Christchurch)
i trained and worked as a dietitian but am not currently doing so - so have an interest in medicine/medical sciences - and i have a daughter sitting, as i speak, her final med school exams
and i have 3 teenage boys who play strategy games - i am hopeless, usually dying in the first 15 seconds of any game but am well briefed about the importance of plenty of game time, specially when exams are looming - something to do with brain waves and how much more effective they are if you are in a gaming induced alpha state

i have read asimov, the ender series, have not read harry potter or lord of the rings, i like historical fiction, history geography and biographies, i LOVE books with good production values and have never been known to go into a book store and emerge with ONLY the book i went into get...i guess my average would be about 5 - all my kids are avid readers too - and now i pretty much read only bridge books (see item #1) - currently woolsey's matchpoints, watson play of the hand and several of mike lawrence's

and as for inspiring me to break into song, my kids would say "please don't!" but i sing along with familiar music in the car, am currently enjoying jack johnson (again) and yoyo ma's cello solos

and i believe in self determination, doing what is right, treading lightly on the earth, taking care of one's own and being gentle with other people

is that enough?

Kotuku said:i have lived in melbourne for a year - and possibly live closer to melbourne than any of the rest of you (in Christchurch)

I'm afraid I live very close to Melbourne, Kotuku. In East Malvern :-p

While I don't share the scifi link, I do share your love of bridge. Well I did. I accompanied my dad to bridge club when I was about 6 years old. Apparently I was the youngest person who they had seen there. Unfortunately, I don't recall the rules, let alone the skill of it. I have only gone so far as returning to the game 500.

Kotuku said: Jack Johnson[/b]

I enjoy Jack Johnson too! I appreciate a lot of popular guitar music of his style. Also, you've clearly travelled to each of the countries that I've been to. (All two of them!). Have you been overseas elsewhere?

Arepo said:the Ender books

. Yes! I enjoyed reading those books when I was growing up. I suppose I could think of many books I prefered to the Ender books except perhaps the writing of Diana Wynne Jones (e.g. Chrestomanci)

when we lived in melbourne we lived in sandringham and i really liked it a lot - but my husband ended up working really long hours, so for family reasons we returned to wellington - were there for 5 yrs (had prev lived there for 15 yrs) and have now been in chch for 5 yrs - it is slowly growing on me

i have lived in the US on 3 different occasions - as an exchange student, then when my husband was studying for his MBA at Columbia in NY city, with one baby, then after 6 yrs back in NZ, in Philadelphia for 4 yrs while he did his PhD, with 4 children. While we were there that time i took the 4 kids and drove from Philadelphia to Alaska and back camping all but 3 nights out of 3 1/2 months, while my husband stayed home and did the big part of his research for his PhD.

I have also visited England briefly several times, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, France several times, Spain, Italy 3 times, Istanbul twice and a couple of short stop overs in Hong Kong and Tokyo. We never did the big OE straight after uni and have been playing catch up ever since!

None of my kids play bridge, but two of the boys play fierce 500 - killer instincts, testosterone toxicity, smart brains make them deadly to play against.

and i agree with your opinion of the chrestomanci books

Hi kotuku

kotuku wrote:well very funny list...i was jsut invited to browse your webforum by jinksy today and i am intrigued

i am sure he remembers well that i am an old (well middle aged) woman with kids, husband, mortgage, dog, a 10 yr old car and i hate housework, none of which appears in your list of what we have in common, so i hope no one minds me being here

(durn it Ryan, who forgot to shut the back door? Next thing you know we'll have infidels creeping in here, too!)

what i do have in common with the things on ryan's list tho are:

and i have 3 teenage boys who play strategy games - i am hopeless, usually dying in the first 15 seconds of any game but am well briefed about the importance of plenty of game time, specially when exams are looming - something to do with brain waves and how much more effective they are if you are in a gaming induced alpha state

Wow, those sound like smart kids. The best excuse for gaming I could come up with at that age was an appeal to political liberalism...

i have read asimov, the ender series, have not read harry potter or lord of the rings, i like historical fiction, history geography and biographies, i LOVE books with good production values and have never been known to go into a book store and emerge with ONLY the book i went into get...i guess my average would be about 5 - all my kids are avid readers too - and now i pretty much read only bridge books (see item #1) - currently woolsey's matchpoints, watson play of the hand and several of mike lawrence's

I'm currently reading Mollo's Case for the Defence, which has a very nice format and a good learning curve (although the bidding is archaic enough to occasionally confuse).

is that enough?

Sure. Well almost. Leave some money in the collection box, pledge your undying fealty to Peter Singer and return in one week with a new convert, and then shall ye receive the honour of becoming a level 1 Operating Hedon

I've been really busy atm [just started a new trading job and moved to Ireland - these things are related!] but I did get a chance to quickly visit this: I don't know whether he'll remember it, but I'm pretty sure Toby Ord and I were part of the Balliol 2020 project together.

And you missed ClaceyJ off the list of medics...oh wait, I see why

I used to be a keen martial arts fan; I have a purple belt in Choi Kwang-Do, fwiw. My reading and music tastes are somewhat eclectic; I watch few TV series, and those that I do are generally comedy. I'm not a big film buff either, but I do write an inordinate amount of Facebook notes, which I may get around to posting here at some point [at least, the better ones] and spend my time doing activities I perceive to be enriching in many ways. Mostly these involve alcohol, if I'm being honest.

I would be surprised if an overwhelming majority of us were not atheists.

Today my dad just asked me who Richard Dawkins was. Knowing that he is a devout atheist and ex-member of a sceptics society, it shocked me. But I'm sure parents who don't know the world's most prominent atheist is something we mostly share too? (if Dawkins is not the most important, he's the most atheist!)

Well the most likely thing would be a shared attitude to discussing issues in terms of utility and consequences - even as we might differ as to what these are in different domains. e.g. evolution - gene-centric versus individual versus multi-level selection, economics - rational expectations versus behavioural, politics - individual versus collective, etc.. Even as, and we will, disagree we would also share a dislike for subjective, relativist and absolutist arguments and so hopefully not have deal with such bull - an attraction to this forum I hope - and also a respect and emphasis for empirical inquiry and science and dislike of pesudo-science etc. I would too be surprised if we are not all atheists and naturalists - anyone here who is not?

As for music, hobbies and other interests I would be surprised if there is anything predictable in common - although if there were that would be very interesting as such a correlation might tell us something about how we came to utilitarianism or how it altered our preferences, once we became one, on these other topics.

faithlessgod wrote:Well the most likely thing would be a shared attitude to discussing issues in terms of utility and consequences

Doesn't that assume that we are all utilitarians here? At least one member has declared ey was not a utilitarian, and I think it is more interesting if there aren't too clear limits on who can participate.

we would also share a dislike for subjective, relativist and absolutist arguments and so hopefully not have deal with such bull - an attraction to this forum I hope - and also a respect and emphasis for empirical inquiry and science and dislike of pesudo-science etc. I would too be surprised if we are not all atheists and naturalists - anyone here who is not?

I do dislike the subjectivist view of ethics, if that is the view that there is no such thing as an ethical truth. I myself am strongly on the “objective ethical truths” side, but I must recognize that issue is much more complicated than that simple opposition, and that there are many in-between positions, such as those of Hare and Peter Singer.

As for absolutist arguments — I don't understand exactly what comes under that expression.

I also would like to be able to say that I dislike pseudo-science too. But then that too seems to me to be a much more complicated issue, precisely as to what counts as pseudo-science. Maybe the issue is more one of a mindset than of precise theories. There are some people who have a certain “mystical” mindset that makes rational discussion difficult. The same goes for religion. If God was just a hypothesis, a physical entity the existence of which we could discuss, and agree or disagree upon, like we can agree or disagree upon any other particular factual statement, then it wouldn't bother me so much. The problem with religion is that it (generally) carries an implicit ethical obligation to believe in the existence of God, etc. That is what makes discussion difficult with religious people.

It's strange, actually. Why should not believing in the existence of X be seen as offensive to X? A lot of people don't know I exist, and so don't believe that I exist, and that doesn't offend me so much!

Ah and a question, about another thing some here may have in common: are there others who are specifically interested in the animal question, in the moral status of non-human animals, and in what is generally called “animal rights”?

David

David Olivier wrote:

faithlessgod wrote:Well the most likely thing would be a shared attitude to discussing issues in terms of utility and consequences

Doesn't that assume that we are all utilitarians here? At least one member has declared ey was not a utilitarian, and I think it is more interesting if there aren't too clear limits on who can participate.

True. I'm also keen to make this a place for discussions about things besides utilitarianism. I know I don't want to talk about it all the time!

It's strange, actually. Why should not believing in the existence of X be seen as offensive to X? A lot of people don't know I exist, and so don't believe that I exist, and that doesn't offend me so much!

I like this idea Although I think the claim by most hostile fundamentalists would be that we've rejected god. There's some truth to that - we still don't believe in him even after they've told us of his existence.

Ah and a question, about another thing some here may have in common: are there others who are specifically interested in the animal question, in the moral status of non-human animals, and in what is generally called “animal rights”?

What do you mean by 'interested'? I'm ethically vegetarian (and I think most utils are pretty sympathetic towards vegetarianism even if they eat meat themselves), but it's not something I spend much time thinking about. Being an incorrigible Benthamite I also loathe the phrase 'animal rights'. That said, I was heartened to discover that there's a new UK political party called Animals Count... and still more heartened to learn on chatting to the President (after I attended a talk by him) that he openly considered himself a utilitarian (I've invited him to this board, though he said he'd be very busy finishing his thesis for a while).

I would rather refer to this as Animal Welfare than Rights, really.
But that's fantastic. I wonder if the leaders of any Australian Political parties declare themselves utilitarian?

Arepo wrote:Being an incorrigible Benthamite I also loathe the phrase 'animal rights'.

“Rights” is an everyday word, used in legal matters and in our everyday relations. I'm happy that women now have the right to vote.

I don't believe in rights as a fundamental ethical concept. However, I think ethics in practice has different levels. Something like the two levels of Hare, but I'd say there are more than two. It's like in physics: on the fundamental level, space is isotropic, which means that all directions have the same properties. So fundamentally there is no such thing as up and down. But now try to build a bridge with no reference to up and down...

I don't believe that animals have rights. I believe that they should be given rights. Just like before having the right to vote, women didn't have that right. In other words, there is no such thing as natural rights, or ethical rights, but that doesn't mean that we should do without the concept of rights in practice.

David

It's not too hard to distinguish between legal and ethical rights. But I don't see why we should need to. Other phrases would inevitably serve as well, especially in areas (like 'animal rights') where the boundaries are blurry enough to confuse people. I don't have much time for the indirect utilitarian idea that people are genetically too dumb to be trusted with real ethics, so I'd much prefer to phrase things in terms of welfare...

Arepo wrote:It's not too hard to distinguish between legal and ethical rights. But I don't see why we should need to. Other phrases would inevitably serve as well, especially in areas (like 'animal rights') where the boundaries are blurry enough to confuse people. I don't have much time for the indirect utilitarian idea that people are genetically too dumb to be trusted with real ethics, so I'd much prefer to phrase things in terms of welfare...

The way I look at ""rights-speak" is like, say, "free will-speak" or "atom-speak".

When physicists discovered the atom was not indivisible, this made "atom-speak" in error when it implied they were indivisible. However they still retain "atom-speak" changing and improving the definition of atom - a reforming definition solution.

When people use "free will-speak" they are in error if they think this refers to a contra-causal or libertarian free will. Does this mean we should avoid using "free will-speak", well we can be a compatibilist and use this language appropriately without making this error. The implicit reforming definition approach is often used over "free will-speak" (see naturalism.org).

Here I agree with most of the posters that there are no such things are natural rights, that is "rights-speak" is in error when this is assumed or implied. However "rights-speak" is too useful not to use. (The success theory here uses a reforming definition based on an argument that rights can be derived from welfare utilitarianism, which focuses only on "welfare interests" not any other interests we may or may not have, but this approach does not lead to absolute rights).

I grew up in Melbourne and then lived there again while doing my MA

Fan of strategy games in general

Martial Arts, do Judo, but not very well

Learning Japanese, well used to live there... acually tried teaching some to Arepo once.

Classic Sci-Fi? well, I like Phillip K. Dick and am reading 'Do androids dream of electric sheep?' right now

redcarded wrote:Classic Sci-Fi? well, I like Phillip K. Dick and am reading 'Do androids dream of electric sheep?' right now

Great book, pity mercerism was removed from the film - still it was a great film too. I also recommend PKD fans to check out Stanisalw Lem. A very different style of sf but he also covers pkd's ever recurrent theme of the fuzziness between reality and fantasy.
(Anyway IMHO the funniest ever sf story is Lems' "The Great Washing Machine Tragedy".)