I'm going to write a "How to connect with utilitarians" series on the Felicifia Wiki. It seems that there is an emerging international network of online utilitarians across facebook, felicifia.org, 80000hours and probably elsewhere that I have yet to discover. I want to make sure that the structures are in place for every utilitarian to be as tightly connected to each other as possible.

Step 1. Let's think of utilitarianism-sympathising bloggers, journalists, tweeters, etc. Don't post their names here, just add them directly to this list: http://felicifia.com/index.php?title=Ut ... n_Blogroll
Step 2. We list utilitarian tweeters, and utilitarian Facebook groups
Step 3. Any organisations that have something to offer to utilitarians e.g. GWWC, Givewell, 80000hours, Global Happiness Organisation, Singinst, ...
Step 4. Any other ways for utilitarians to connect to each other that we can think of.
Step 5. Update this page: http://felicifia.com/index.php?title=Ut ... nism_links
Step 6. I'll connect these pages to each other and to the rest of the wiki.

How big a list can we currently think of?

Should Practical Ethics be on there? It leans consequentialist, but only a small proportion of the writers are explicitly utilitarian.

It's a depressingly short list at the moment.

I'm surprised there aren't more utilitarian philosophers who blog. Maybe we just haven't found them??

I suspect to some people utilitarianism is just something they internalise without necessarily having heard of it. So someone writing on their specialty subject will be doing the best they can to improve the world without offering any keywords that we'd find. After all, writing about utility isn't necessarily a good way to maximise it. I've thought of a couple more, anyway - will add them now.

How much info is worth putting in the article, btw? The original links were basically just names, but it seemed to me worth putting in a brief sentence about the focus. Too much/too little?

Sentences for each one sounds good to me.

Nice edit, Arepo. This Philosophy Etc blog is a revelation to me. I had only glanced at it once or twice before but now I see some superb content.

Arepo wrote:I suspect to some people utilitarianism is just something they internalise without necessarily having heard of it. So someone writing on their specialty subject will be doing the best they can to improve the world without offering any keywords that we'd find. After all, writing about utility isn't necessarily a good way to maximise it.

Exactly. As Arepo says, there are plenty of utilitarian types trying to make a difference who don't use the terminology of this particular philosophical tradition. There are many more who want to make a difference within a slightly different framework (or, often, no framework at all) but who still do some great things.

This is not to say that there's no value in making people more utilitarian, because when people are more utilitarian, they're more likely to consistently do what we consider to be good things in the future (rather than, say, trying to preserve wilderness because they feel that pristine nature has intrinsic value). But there's a lot of room to make allies in the present with people who aren't utilitarian.

On the other side, there are several philosophers who do talk about utilitarian theory who aren't necessarily reducing suffering. They might muse upon abstruse conceptual distinctions just for fun, rather than to help other organisms. While I think there are several abstract philosophy problems that are hugely relevant to practitioners -- like timeless decision theory, anthropic bias, and cosmology -- there are plenty of others that are not.