![]() I’d be better categorized as an anti-theist than simply an atheist when it comes to my opinions on religion. I grew up reading my Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett. I’m about as far from religious as one can get. If our world is temporary and the afterlife doles out eternal rewards based on belief in one specific religion, how could any sane, ethical person not do anything in their power to help others get tot he good place when they die? If you truly believed that, how could you not do your utmost to convert others? Any social embarrassment you suffer would pale in comparison to the eternal impact you’d have from saving even a single person. Imagine, for a moment, that you truly believe that everyone you love and care about - heck, every person on the planet - will be tortured for eternity if they don’t come to Jesus. I may not ultimately agree with these vegans, but I do respect that they are truly following their beliefs to their logical conclusion. If I had that same gut-feeling that killing pigs was murder, I can only imagine the raw horror I’d feel living in a world where the virtual majority of the population happily went about a systematic genocide of living creatures. The ones who chain themselves to factory farm trucks to delay the slaughter of livestock. You know the ones - the vegans that obnoxiously decry any animal products when you’re trying to enjoy your hamburger in peace. On that note, I have an even greater degree of respect for the people we might call “annoying vegans”. I do have massive respect for those who do. I can’t bring myself to bite the bullet of actually following my vegan ethics to their logical conclusion. Having that belief in the moral worth of pigs isn’t quite enough, however. I happen to love my dog, and pigs seem to be capable of an equal or greater level of suffering - why should I have different standards? The answer seems to be some variant of “society doesn’t punish me for eating pigs, even though it’s morally wrong”. Petty things like “convenience” and “laziness” tend to get in the way of enacting what I truly believe to be good. Think about your own moral or political beliefs - how often do you truly follow them to their logical conclusion? I certainly don’t. This is also a valid position to hold, but Nozick is not the sort of philosopher I would expect to agree with it.īiting the bullet is something we rarely seem to do. While Nozick is right that utility monsters fly in the face of our own basic ethical intuitions, sometimes I wonder: why not just bite the bullet? Arguments for utilitarianism are true or false regardless of how “embarrassing” the outcome might be - to focus on embarrassment and conflict with intuition is to implicitly support that our philosophical theories should be predicated on emotion rather than reason. “Utilitarian theory is embarrassed by the possibility of utility monsters who get enormously greater sums of utility from any sacrifice of others than these others lose … the theory seems to require that we all be sacrificed in the monster’s maw, in order to increase total utility.” - Robert Nozick A utility monster throws a wrench in the works - the existence of one would, if the utilitarians are correct, require everyone to throw away their lives in service of the monster if the greatest good is truly what matters, then giving all of your resources to a utility monster would be the single best use of your time and energy. Robert Nozick proposed the utility monster as part of his critique of utilitarianism, which is the ethical theory that (roughly) claims we should seek the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The basic idea is that there may exist an agent that derives an incalculably large amount of utility from any given unit of resources than all of humanity does. There’s a concept in philosophy known as the “utility monster”.
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