Don’t know if I am preaching to the choir, but with how much libs try to use the trolley problem to support their favorite war criminal, it got me thinking just how cringe utilitarianism is.
Whatever utilitarianism may be in theory, in practice, it just trains people to think like bureaucrats who belive themselves to be impartial observers of society (not true), holding power over the lives of others for the sake of the common good. It’s imo a perfect distillation of bourgeois ideology into a theory of ethics. It’s a theory of ethics from the pov of a statesman or a capitalist. Only those groups of people have the power and information necessary to actually act in a meaningfully utilitarian manner.
It’s also note worthy just how prone to creating false dichotomies and ignoring historical context utilitarians are. Although this might just be the result of the trolley problem being so popular.
The problem with that stupid trolley problem meme is not that it implies utilitarianism, but that it’s myopic question-begging that very precisely controls what is and isn’t considered “relevant” information. Also it just plain lies even within that narrow scope about who is on the chopping block in a blue regime.
I have nothing to add but would like to extend my appreciation for reading that something begs-the-question and the term being used correctly.
It’s ground I’ve ceded to popular use but it still bugs me to hear. That being said begging the question isn’t the best name for the fallacy either. It does sound better in misuse, like it’s an upgrade from asking a question cause begging is the next level of asking for something. In theory I’m not a prescriptivist language wise but in practice I’m a word nerd and kinda like some of the rules. Also to be a linguistic descriptivist you have to allow for the prescriptivists to influence language as well, they’re just as much part of the process of development. Dialectics ect. But you can’t really say you’re against interfering with a language developing and then tell a major part of that development process to stop. Some stuff goes and some stuff is kept and you need people who want both and victories on either end for a good solid development and even if you didn’t it would happen anyway cause we need at least some framework to teach language to children in the modern world. These are things I care way more about than I should. But also this is a thread about philosophy so I guess that’s fitting into the crowd just fine.
Love how the moral culpability is on the lever-puller and not the party who actually tied the people up in the tracks in the first place.