Hi, my name’s Ryan. I’m thrilled to be helping Jinksy to establish this Felicifia Forum at felicifia.org.

I live in Melbourne, Australia where I am studying my first year of Medicine at Monash University. I’m a utilitarian and I believe that the whole point of ethics is to apply it. But I believe it is possible for ethical behaviour to be varied rather than boring. I think it can be helpful to sign up for organ donation, to be friendly to people and to talk about large and small philosophical issues. But I believe that equally, it is important not to neglect one’s own wellbeing. This can mean following politics, reading webcomics, catching up with friends, or enjoying any other form of entertainment.

It is with this broad philosophy in mind that I approach Felicifia. I hope Felicifia can be a place for discussion ranging from timeless to topical and from serious to nonsensical.

I have a number of hobbies that I always enjoy discussing: I love rock music and I enjoy strategy games. I enjoy shooting a few baskets, going for a run or playing soccer. If you do too, I can’t wait to hear about it.

Of the philosophy that I’ve read, my favourite authors are John Stuart Mill, Daniel C. Dennett, Peter Singer and Bertrand Russell. From that, you might guess that I’m an atheist. While I have committed myself to the study of medicine, I am also interested in the sciences of language and consciousness and the philosophy of epistemology and free will.

Ethically, I prefer classical utilitarianism to preference utilitarianism. I’m sure this position will not go undiscussed, nor do I intend to evade criticism of my other ideas:
> that an empirical approach to ethics totally implies utilitarianism
> that an rationalist (intuitive) approach to ethics is compatible with utilitarianism
> that some varieties of deontology and virtue ethics might also be compatible with utilitarianism

The only other thing I can think to say is that I’m optimistic about continually improving the forum and developing the community at Felicifia.org because I believe in utilitarianism and I believe in the power of the internet.

Looking forward to chatting to you around the forums.
Ryan.

Oh, for God's sake...I keep typing messages, then accidentally clicking 'back' and deleting what I'd written. I'm partly interested in utilitarianism as a theory, but also interested in discussing other issues with utils in general, as they tend to have coherent answers to stimulating questions. I don't really have a home as such; I move around quite a bit, but I'm 22 and have quite varied hobbies and interests.

I think I consider myself a libertarian first and a utilitarian second. Specifically, if a person wishes to commit an action that will harm him, but nobody else, because he is irrational and believes his life will be improved, I do not think I would stop him, were I a benevolent dictator, unless he had been decided to be in need of help [say he's mentally retarded, or an infant, or other cases]. Most of the rest of libertarianism can be reconciled with utilitarian theory, as we start from the p-o-v that a person is better qualified to judge what will make him happy than any government body. But when the two collide, I think I take libertarianism before utilitarianism, as I don't like the assumption that the state should have the right to decide what's best for the individual.

Hmm, admin introductions. That hadn't even occurred to me. Welcome to the forum, or something...

Joe, I think we secretly suspected as much How far will you take it, though?

Say for example that someone proves tomorrow that wide government intervention into, for an obvious eg, the market would avert or substantially mitigate a serious catastrophe (for the sake of argument let's go with agricultural ruin and widespread famine caused by global warming, to give the hypothetical a sense of real-worldliness), and that no other solution is feasible. Since it's a thought experiment, let's keep it worst-case. So imagine that we prove that within fifty years, millions of people will die from famine, and within a hundred, the human race will die out completely.

Strict libertarianism (as an ethical philosophy) implies that the government should stay out come what may, and allow the catastrophe to happen. Utilitarianism would naturally demand intervention. Which option do you choose?

If you go with the latter, but still seek logical consistency in your ethics, I think you're left with one of two conclusions:

1) You're ultimately a utilitarian, albeit one who believes that the standard of evidence necessary to justify intervention into personal lives is very high; presumably you'd be interested in the expected benefit rather than simply probability of greater happiness. (this seems consistent with rule utilitarianism)

2) You're not a utilitarian or even a consequentialist, at least not in the sense that you're seeking solely to maximise any single outcome (ie you don't believe that following your code would do so), but you're not strictly an ethical libertarian, either. You have some algorithm with which you modify the expected welfare of any given outcome by the amount you had to interfere with people's self-determination to reach that outcome.

Well yes, utilitarianism can put a very high value on freedom.
Probably, no utilitarianism can call freedom inherently valuable (valuable by itself), but we can go as far as calling it a part of happiness. We can say that what we desire for the world is not just about pleasure and pain at a primal sort of level, but a higher-cognitive type of wellbeing. Of this general satisfaction and feeling of contentment in life, hardly anything is as important a part as freedom .

I can add a challenge to your libertarianism too. To whom does a right to freedom extend? To children? to people with severe disability, to babies, to plants, to all life, or to non-living objects and why?

Jinksy wrote:Say for example that someone proves tomorrow that wide government intervention into, for an obvious eg, the market would avert or substantially mitigate a serious catastrophe (for the sake of argument let's go with agricultural ruin and widespread famine caused by global warming, to give the hypothetical a sense of real-worldliness), and that no other solution is feasible. Since it's a thought experiment, let's keep it worst-case. So imagine that we prove that within fifty years, millions of people will die from famine, and within a hundred, the human race will die out completely.

I think you misunderstood the form of libertarianism I advocate. Sadly, that's always going to be the case with any political philosophy described in one word. I will try and rephrase what I mean: I think that provided an invidividual meets certain criteria [e.g. he must be sane, no undue pressure must be put on him etc - Locke laid these down better than I have] then no other individual or collective body working for the public good - i.e. the government - ought to act to force him to make a choice he does not want to make. So if I believe cocaine will make me happy, and I choose to take it, then the government ought not to stop me for my own good - it can consider stopping me for the good of those I might rob to fund my habit, but not to protect me from my own bad ideas.

But I don't believe that market regulation is never justified - so I'm perfectly happy with the idea that if the free market would cause an undesirable outcome [as can be proven to sometimes be the case] then it would be better for the state to regulate it.

Does that answer your question?

RyanCarey wrote:To whom does a right to freedom extend? To children? to people with severe disability, to babies, to plants, to all life, or to non-living objects and why?

I had to Google Locke's criteria: http://davidhildebrand.org/teaching/handouts/mill.php
In short, an agent has the right to act if he is 1. Free (not coerced) 2. Voluntary (competent to choose) [I would call replace 'voluntary' by 'rational'] and 3. Informed (has sufficient information to choose)

Non-living objects clearly don't qualify...as for how you include animals and small children, I think they fall down under 2, ditto the mentally handicapped [though not physically]. I can reverse the argument and send it back at you: how do you factor animals' desires into utilitarian theory? I'm actually interested to know what you think - Peter Singer made some very good points on this, but they weren't conclusive, imo.

I've heard those criteria before actually. I guess what I find hard to swallow about them is that they're slippery, contuous concepts. There's no obvious line which says this person is conscious enough to make their own decisions and this person is informed enough of what they're doing to their own body but that person is not. For example, it's one thing to intervene when someone says they will dial a friend drunk. It's another to intervene when someone says they will have a cigarette drunk and it's another to intervene when they say they'll take more dangerous recreational drugs drunk. You're going to have to set the standard of voluntariness so that it's in proportion to the seriousness of the act.

And that sort-of doesn't feel that different from what utilitarianism might propose anyway: interfering with people makes them grumpy and has negative consequences. So consider how seriously the person is hurting him/herself and consider whether they might actually thank you later once they're sober and informed and so on before you make your decision.

Would you consider that even if you refuse to interfere with a friend who decides to take up smoking or something, that it's better if he doesn't?

I think I would intervene to try to persuade a friend that what he is about to do is not a good idea - I don't think I would actually intervene to stop him from an action unless I believed that "Sober Jim" would never consider the action "Drunk Jim" was about to undertake. So hypothetically, if there existed a possibility that my friend, while sober, would commit an immature practical joke, I would try to persuade him not to, but not actively stop him. But I would actively stop someone from e.g. committing suicide or attempting to punch a 16 stone rugby player who'd insulted his mother, because I know that my friends would not seriously consider such acts when sober.
So I guess whether I ought to stop someone who is not fully in control of his senses comes down to, how much faith can I place in the idea that when rational, he would reject the idea he has proposed. That applies whether he is currently drunk, stoned, under medical treatment, or experiencing some emotional trauma.

It doesn't matter whether the friend in question is hurting himself; my friend Mike has been a lifelong vegetarian [well, converted approximately age 7] and vegan for much of that time and is deeply concerned with animal rights. If he drunkenly attempted to ingest some product containing animal remains, I would try to dissuade him from doing so.

Joe

I think that provided an invidividual meets certain criteria [e.g. he must be sane, no undue pressure must be put on him etc - Locke laid these down better than I have] then no other individual or collective body working for the public good - i.e. the government - ought to act to force him to make a choice he does not want to make.

I meant to reply to this sooner - this seems perfectly compatible with preference utilitarianism. I'm not keen on pref util personally, but if that's your philosophy you share it with Peter Singer who IMO is pretty good company to keep. The one departure point I can see between your philosophies in this thread is that you occasionally talk of 'having a right to [something]', a phrase that Singer carefully avoids. But from chatting to you on MSN, I get the feeling that you invoke rights in something like the sense that I invoke god in exclamations - it's the first word that arrives at your lips, not one you'd deliberately want to search for...

Arepo wrote:from chatting to you on MSN, I get the feeling that you invoke rights in something like the sense that I invoke god in exclamations - it's the first word that arrives at your lips, not one you'd deliberately want to search for...

Yup - that's a good analysis of my take on 'rights'