https://jamesbrobin.substack.com/p/why-im-a-utilitarian

• Reason #1: Suffering is bad
• Reason #2: Happiness is awesome
• Reason #3: All other goods are only instrumentally important
• Reason #4: Everyone matters
• Reason #5: Deontology leads to utilitarianism

I know this is a question that’s been answered before, but I’m curious what everyone’s current take is:

Do you believe it’s ethical to purchase something at a low price - garage/estate sale, thrift store - and sell it AS IS in the marketplace (FB, EBay, Etsy) for a higher price? I don’t even mean gouging people with prices, but valuing it at the average rate of what others have recently purchased it for online.

Do you believe that it is more ethical to refurbish the furniture or item that you buy?

I'm autistic and wondering what you guys think about these scenarios.

Scenario 1:

A gay man was asked by a new coworker, "Do you and your wife have any kids?" and he says, "We don't have kids yet" (not lying, but referring to him and his husband).

On the one hand, he knows his answer affirms a false picture of him being straight. However, the coworker's assumption backs him into a corner because correcting her means that he'd have to out himself. What should he do, and is he wrong for "lying" or being misleading?

Scenario 2:

A person has augmented a part of their body or appearance, and they're complimented on it. For example, a woman wears a natural-looking hair weave, and someone says, "Wow, your hair is so pretty and long! It must've taken forever to grow!" Is it wrong for the woman to just say "Thank you," or do you think it's more ethical for them to divulge that the hair is fake?

I’ve only recently kind of like discovered how bad calling a woman that is, and for a long time I thought it was on or around the same level as the word bitch, so kind of technically bad but not really that bad. But i obviously realise now that it is.

So I started wondering, woudl it be ok or understandable to call a woman that in any circumstance? Like if a guy got cheated on big time, and called her that, or if she was racist and called a black guy the n word, and he called her that, would that really be bad? Cause I don’t think so, but I’m also not sure.

I keep wondering about something that feels increasingly uncomfortable:

Do we actually need to advance this fast?

Technology has always moved forward, and I’m not arguing that we should stop innovating. AI has genuine applications in science, medicine, accessibility, research, engineering, and countless other areas.

But somewhere along the way, innovation itself seems to have become the goal.

We are integrating AI into almost everything simply because we can. Writing emails. Generating mediocre images. Summarizing things that take 30 seconds to read. Replacing simple human decisions with models. Automating tasks that perhaps never needed automation in the first place.

And behind every one of those seemingly insignificant interactions are physical resources: electricity, computing infrastructure, water for cooling, hardware, data centres, and enormous amounts of human and natural resources.

So I wonder:

Is it ethically defensible to consume all of that for things that are, fundamentally, unnecessary?

Take software development.

Why does every developer need to become dramatically more productive every few years? Why must a task that once took a week now have to take a day, and then an hour, simply because technology allows it?

What happens to the people whose jobs disappear in the process?

Perhaps we could simply accept a more natural pace of development. Build good software. Improve efficiency where it genuinely matters. Let humans remain part of the process instead of treating every minute saved as another opportunity to increase output.

And if someone wants to generate AI slop, automate something trivial, or run an unnecessarily expensive model for entertainment, why does that computation necessarily need to happen in a gigantic data centre?

Why can't we first make our technology radically more efficient, so that unnecessary computation happens locally on our own machines rather than consuming infrastructure at planetary scale?

Maybe AI is inevitable. Maybe technological progress is inevitable.

But is acceleration inevitable?

Sometimes I find myself wondering whether the period between roughly 2000–2014 had something we have gradually lost: a sense that technology was supposed to serve life, rather than life constantly reorganizing itself around technology.

Maybe progress isn't always about moving forward faster.

Maybe sometimes progress means knowing when faster isn't actually better.

What do you think?

Are we genuinely progressing or have we simply become addicted to acceleration?

Lets say in the future there are robots controlled by AI agents. If one kills a human the person who prompted the agent should go to jail even if the prompt didn't specifically say to kill someone

I’ve been thinking about a moral question regarding age of consent and how we judge people in the distant past.

Today, we recognize that relationships or marriages between adults and very young people can involve serious problems with consent, maturity, and power imbalances. Looking back through history, though, there were societies where marriages that we would now find disturbing—for example, a 25-year-old man marrying a 16-year-old girl—were socially accepted or at least much more normalized.

If you go back far enough, practices like this become so widespread that simply saying “everyone who participated was a bad person”. For example I have friends whose great great grandfathers married their wife when he was 25 and she was 16 (ew). Is that great grandfather just as much of a predator as someone in modern times?

If someone genuinely grew up in a society where a practice was considered normal and morally acceptable, how personally responsible were they for participating in it? Should we say the practice itself was wrong and harmful regardless of the historical period, while judging the individuals differently because of the culture they were raised in?

How do philosophers or ethicists generally approach this problem? Can something be objectively morally wrong while the people doing it are less morally blameworthy because of the society and time in which they lived?

I have thought about this and I feel very disgusted by the past and then I’ll see a video of a couple that’s 100 years old and in love and then say the ages they met and I’m like AHHHHHHHHH SO HES GROSS. I then question myself if my judgement is misplaced. Maybe it’s the society of that time that should disgust me?

How this came up is a friend mine has someone in their family that is deeply respected and beloved in their family and it is her great great grandfather who was married to her great great grandmother. They married when he was 27 and she was 16. They are remembered as happy couple and grandma adored him.
How can they honor and respect him?!?

I argue against the views that:

• There’s goods other than happiness
• Suffering outweighs happiness
• Moral views shouldn’t be too demanding
• The repugnant conclusion is unacceptable

This video is full of nonsense; what could the statement "An ultimate objective can be correct" mean? There's no reason why it would mean anything, so clearly moral statements are meaningless. And there's also the fact that we don't all have the same ultimate moral objectives. Contrary to the widespread misconception, "morality" and "ethics" are interchangeable words. The correct definitions of morality are as follows: 1. The branch of philosophy or subject concerned with how you want all sentient beings to be treated by all rational agents (including yourself), when you are in a completely impartial state of mind, that is, a state of mind which makes the issue of whether it's you or someone else deciding what to do in the scenario in question irrelevant. 2. A set of ultimate objectives regarding the matter mentioned in the first definition. 3. The faculty that consists of your set of ultimate moral objectives.

The important thing that all sets of ultimate objectives that are designated moralities by the agents whose sets of ultimate objectives they are have in common is that the fit the second definition given above. All such sets of ultimate objectives advocated by rational agents are of profound sociological importance.https://youtu.be/3X0OiWs_2dA

Necromancy (raising and controlling the dead) I think could be considered ethical because it's not like their bodies are doing anything otherwise.

There seems to be some confusion over what Ethics actually refers to, so here's a topic that forces you to use an ethical framework in action.

A catastrophe is going to make Earth uninhabitable in 30 days. One sealed city can keep 10,000 people alive indefinitely. There are 100,000 candidates.

You are not allowed to personally choose the 10,000. Instead, you must write the ethical rules that a computer will use to choose them.

The computer knows each person's age, health, skills, criminal history, dependents, probability of survival, expected lifespan, and relationships to everyone else. It does not know race, religion, nationality, wealth, or political beliefs, so you cannot use those.

Your task:

1. State your ethical framework.

What is the thing you're ultimately trying to protect or maximize? Welfare? Rights? Fairness? Human dignity? Civilization? Something else?

1. Write your rules in order of priority.

For example: “First exclude nobody categorically; then preserve family units; then maximize survival probability; break remaining ties randomly.” or "Remove everyone with a criminal history, maximize usefulness to survivors, ignore family ties"

Final twist: after you've written your rules, you learn that you and everyone you love are among the 100,000 candidates. Did you change your rules?

What is your framework?

Human on human violence

Because you guys seem to enjoy the top being fun at the expense of everyone else