Is Utilitarianism Really Quantitative?

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

In his new book, John McCaskill argues that utilitarianism is not sensitive to numbers. If you crunch the numbers, if you have 1 billion trillion trillion with units of five amounts of happiness versus a universe that has just 10 people with 1,000 units of happiness, the former is better because what matters is the total quantity. And so this gets at your point that it may be better to have an enormous number of future people who have very low kind of happiness levels than a much smaller number of people that have really high amounts of happiness.

Paris Marx is joined by Émile P. Torres to discuss the ongoing effort to sell effective altruism and longtermism to the public, and why they’re philosophies that won’t solve the real problems we face.

Émile P. Torres is a PhD candidate at Leibniz University Hannover and the author of the forthcoming book Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation. Follow Émile on Twitter at @xriskology.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Émile recently wrote about the ongoing effort to sell longtermism and effective altruism to the public.
Peter Singer wrote an article published in 1972 arguing that rich people need to give to charity, which went on to influence effective altruists.
NYT recently opined on whether it’s ethical for lawyers to defend climate villains.
Nathan Robinson recently criticized effective altruism for Current Affairs.

Support the show