The Utilitarian Calculator

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I think there is no right number. I think it depends on the goals of the society. And that's actually kind of true for all moral questions because people disagree on what it means to be good. If you have, if somebody has moral values that do not involve welfare, maybe like some people I've talked to value diversity over welfare. So even if people are overall happy, without diversity, there is some intrinsic benefit to a diverse, uh, having different cultures in different places or something like that.

Why do we feel like in order to be productive, happy, or good, we must sacrifice everything else? Is it possible to feel all three at once? Without even knowing it, we’re doing things everyday to sabotage ourselves and our societies, habits that prevent us from optimizing long term happiness. Where most books imagine solutions that, when enacted, fail to fundamentally improve our lives, Jim Davies grounds his research in cognitive science to show you not only what works, but how much it works. Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are shows us how we can use science to become our best selves, using resources we already have within our own brains.

Shermer and Davies discuss: • an operational definition of the “good life” or “happiness” or “well being” • utilitarianism vs. deontology vs. virtue ethics • effective altruism • marriage and children • objective moral values • Do we have a moral obligation to help those who cannot help themselves? • Does America have a moral obligation to help oppressed peoples in dictatorships? • immigration • abortion • the welfare state • prostitution • reparations.

Jim Davies is a full professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University and the School of Computer Science. He is the director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory and he co-hosts, along with Dr. Kim Hellemans, the podcast Minding the Brain. He is the author of Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe; Imagination: The Science of Your Mind’s Greatest Power, and his new book Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are: The Science of a Better You. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.