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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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How can you quantify, in a principled way, how much you care about one individual's pleasure/pain relative to others? I think a baseline egalitarianism is actually essential to this, as I wrote lower down in the post:

Who "deserves" what is a question of justice, of deontology. But here, we are trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This is difficult enough, boiling down all of human experience into two buckets, "pleasure" and "pain". If you add a whole 'nother set of buckets, "good people", "medium people", "bad people"... then you've really abandoned the exercise and are just doing deontology with extra steps. The pain someone experiences from not having housing or food or heat during the winter is plainly real and sincerely felt, even if you believe that that person should have done something different to avoid being in that state.

Also, I do think humans experience poverty and wealth in broadly similar ways, enough to make generalizations about the utility/disutility of both.

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