a) How does it imply you shouldn't vote?
b) How is that the fault of utilitarianism? That just sounds to me like a consequence of capitalism
c) I think you're referring to effective altruism there, which yes, is founded in utilitarianist principles. The point of effective altruism (and utilitarianism as a whole) is to produce the most good possible (which may involve working a lot to donate to charity, but Peter Singer warns against spreading yourself too thin, as it may actually affect your ability to spread goodness. "Secure your own mask [in the event of an emergency on a plane] first before assisting others" is a good analogy)

>This isn't true. There's only three or four formulations of the CI depending on your interpretation.

Wdym by "four formulations of the CI"?

>Beside the point for Kant interpretation but why should I think the fact that most people would say you should do something as good evidence for doing it? People get moral judgments wrong all the time, especially when you introduce features that test their rational consistency.

I was just pointing out that most people would say yes. I wasn't using that as evidence

>Kant famously doesn't think animals are owed anything and that the value of people is always superior to the value of things (e.g. cats), and thus he would never say this.

Oh interesting, I didn't know that. I'll clarify that in the video then

>Given the above, I think you could really benefit from sitting down and reading Kant. More generally, if you find yourself saying something like "This extremely influential and well-respected philosopher is obviously wrong", the principle of charity would suggest you probably misunderstood them.

Fair, fair. Thanks for your response

Can you elaborate on what I got wrong?

Thanks for the feedback mate!

Yeah the thing about people viewing morality through the lens of religion is admittedly very oversimplified, so I'll probably add some clarification in a text box.

And yeah I made the thing about the kitten up lol. Although I did mention the categorial imperative, so you might've read over that?

True, I was thinking about making a case for (act) utilitarianism although I wanna keep the video succinct.

You don't think the adoption of utilitarianism would help society? And the only criticisms of it I'm familiar with are that people could use utilitarianism to justify terrible things (like the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and that it's hard to quantify how much utility something has. Feel free to provide more though.

Edit: sorry for the lack of paragraphs. Reddit decided to merge them when I copy-pasted this part for some reason

Well here, I think it's important to distinguish between good and bad, and moral and immoral. Maybe your action wasn't ultimately bad (aside from the trauma you might've given to the kids but work with me here), but it was immoral because you did something that had a great risk of death, even if it didn't end up happening. Like if you leave a loaded gun in a room with a toddler and he goes on an killing spree in the local Walmart, you can't really use the excuse 'but I didn't do anything, I didn't actually kill those people'. It's like yeah, but you neglectfully did something that you knew had a great risk attached to it. So let's go back to the 'good/bad', 'moral/immoral' table here. I'd say what makes something ultimately good or bad is based on how much negative or positive emotion it produces, measured in serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, etc. If it's a net positive, it was good, and if it's a net negative, it's bad. You get it. And whether something is moral or immoral is based on whether a moral agent (that is, a person who has the ability to make decisions) acted in a way that was likely to cause harm. Meaning if two people shoot up in the air but only one of the bullets lands on someone and kill them, while one of the actions was worse they were both morally equal. It also means that, say, hypothetically if the long-term consequences of WW2 are ultimately good, that doesn't make a certain sussy moustache man a moral person. This flies in the face of the philosophy of a dude named Immanuel Kant and his idea of a 'categorical imperative'. He thought that there was this big list of moral codes [list of rules that gets progressively sussier] that are always wrong to break, no matter what. He uses the example of someone with a family opening the door after getting a knock. Standing there is a psycho axe murderer who asks him where his family is. Now the question is, should he lie? Well I think most people would say yes. While lying is usually wrong, doing it to save your family is ultimately good. But Kant would disagree. He says that if you were to lie and say they're not home, the psycho axe murderer would disappointedly turn around and walk away, thinking about how he's an embarrassment to his psycho axe murderer ancestors when all of a sudden, he sees your family climbing out of the window. Turns out they overheard the conversation and decided to escape, but if the guy had just told him the truth that they were in fact home, they would've had a chance to escape. Now, I've been keeping a veneer of objectivity in this video so far, but I've gotta say this is one of the dumbest ideas in philosophy I've ever heard. I mean, leaving aside that he's totally taking for granted that the family would overhear the killer and try to escape through a window that's conveniently in his line of sight, you're tellin' me if a billion people were strapped to a conveyer belt being dragged to the pits of Hell, and you can stop it all by slapping a kitten, he'd be like 'nah bruh it's still fucked up like you can't justify slapping a kitten over anything durrr". Like HUH? Are you ok bro? Side note he was also a weird dude. Apparently in his 79 years of life he never ventured 20 miles away from his home to go to the coast. I mean, I think he'd be right at home with the Discord moderators of today. But anyway, what I'm getting at here is that the ultimate good we can strive for is positive human emotion. Now while this sounds obvious, once you take it into consideration, you'll start to spot people all around you, whether that's a co-worker by the watercooler or the mailman or whatever, who justify their ethical beliefs based on things that have nothing to do with the betterment of human wellbeing. I remember when I was around 15 or 16 I considered myself a 'libertarian'. And not a kinda cool libertarian, like yeah, like that kinda libertarian. I thought of freedom as the highest possible good. 'We should always strive to maximise freedom!'. Now, looking back this lacked any kind of class analysis and only served the interests of the bourgeoise, but I digress. Eventually, I started to think 'hey... maybe businesses shouldn't be allowed to deny services to people based on their race or sexuality'. I mean yeah it might be restricting freedom, but these people are just making the world a worse place for people who are already getting fucked over on a daily basis. What great harm is gonna come about if old Cletus has to bake a cake for a couple of femboys, huh? I then started noticing this way of thinking in just about every debate with a conservative. They'd make points like 'yeah maybe kids should learn about gay people, but that's the place of the parents to teach, not the school!' So we're acknowledging that learning gay people exist normalises them and would lead to less discrimination, and many parents aren't willing to do that, but schools shouldn't because... it's the parents' "place"? It's appealing to this mystical order that things have to be in. 'You have schools that teach a2 + b2 = c2, the parents teach social issues if they want, and there's no mixin''! It's like, did you ever sit down and think 'what policy would ultimately be the best for human wellbeing? 'What I'm referencing here is known as a 'core value' or 'axiom'. Most people have no idea what theirs is, despite having no shortage of opinions on ethics and politics. They generally base their views on their culture around them and what they feel is right. They'll say things like "I think men should pay on the first date because that's just how it's meant to be!" and "I think criminals should face brutal punishment because... they deserve it!" despite these attitudes objectively leading to tangible harm. The truth is, if we want to build the best society we can, we have to first establish wellbeing as our axiom and use science to decide how to best achieve the maximisation of that axiom. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video. It was my first attempt at an animated video essay thing, so please leave any thoughts, criticism or questions in the comments, smash like and sub to help with the algorithm, click here to watch a video where we build a society from scratch by going through each political and economic system to decide which is best, and I'll catchya later nerds!

**Is this script accurate?**

Hey everyone reading! I just wrote a script for a YouTube video I'm going to make about what makes something bad/immoral, and I just want to make sure that everything in it is accurate before I produce it (keep in mind that there's gonna be some amateur MS Paint animation, so that kinda explains the dialogues). Anyway, here it is. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! Also I have to split this into two parts because of the 10k character limit (even though it's literally 7800 characters???) so that'll be in the replies

Me: murder is bad... right?

Stewie from Household Dude: well yeah no duh. Everyone knows that murder is bad you ******

M: but why?

S: whaddaya mean why? You kill somebody, it's bad, alright? Stop tryna complicate things, you [Peter saying 'stupid ni']

M: well what if you kill baby Hitler?

S: sigh alright well if you kill Baby Hitler I guess that's fine

M: ah, so you admit that murder isn't bad in all cases...

S: [pause] [Peter saying 'I'm cu-']

[Transition]

There are many things that we take for granted in society. Things we picked up as kids and never really questioned. Like what actually makes something 'bad' or 'good'? It seems like a pretty fundamental question, but no one can give a concrete answer... or can they?

Well for many ancient people, the answer was simple: if something upsets the gods, it's bad. If it pleases them, it's good. Simple as. Didn't say bismillah before eating your dino nuggies? You're going to the slammer, Jimmy.

But we're not living in ancient times, and we have much more sophisticated ways of thinking about the world. We're living in the modern era, where science and logic reign supreme!

So why don't we use a logic to find what makes something 'bad'? Let's have a thought experiment. Let's say you have a flowerbed that you care for everyday. Now let's say, hypothetically, I were to walk over and take a giant shit in your flowers.

Would that be 'bad'?

Norton: well of course it would be bad

Me: but why?

N: because now all me flowers are fucked up

M: what's so bad about that?

N: well I worked hard on these flowers. You're really starting to piss me off

M: ah so we're getting somewhere! Maybe what makes something bad is the 'negative emotion' it produces.

I mean it makes sense, right? Negative emotion is something we're born with and understand pretty quickly. If we get punched in the face, it hurts and it's bad.

This idea is called 'consequentialism'. Something is bad because it has negative consequences.

So that's it. Negative emotion is bad. Period.

Well, maybe not. Why do we have negative emotion in the first place? It should be pretty uncontroversial to say we evolved it to keep us safe. If our ancestors heard a predator rustling in the bushes [Dream], the ones with a greater fear response were more likely to run away faster and survive. It's natural selection.

S: So hold on, if negative emotion is what helped us survive to this day, how is it bad?

Well I don't think it's that negative emotion is bad, but that 'bad' is 'negative emotion', meaning it can be good as long as it ultimately produces more 'positive emotion' in the long-term, such as when it keeps us alive.

This idea is called 'utilitarianism'. Something bad can be justified if it's necessary for the 'greater good'. A utilitarian would switch the lever in the trolley problem, killing one person instead of four.

But let's go back to consequentialism for a second. Let's say it's 9am on a nice Tuesday morning, and you decide to rev up the Buga'i whey and go 200ks down the school zone. But let's say, due to the superior driving abilities you've gotten from playing endless hours of Mario Kart, you manage to not hit a single child in the endeavor, meaning your action had no negative consequences.

Is that still wrong?