I should let you know that I am not anti-utilitarian, far from it. I'm just providing some devil's advocate arguments which are important to reckon with.

a) In an election of substantial size, the likelihood your vote will make a difference is beyond miniscule. Therefore your time would be better spent elsewhere.

b) and c) I edited my post to add more critiques and changed the order, so I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. If you're talking about the problem of needing to devote your life to making money and then giving it all to charity, then there are a few counterpoints to your defences. Firstly, it's not great for an ethical theory to say "it's not my fault I don't work, it's the global economy's fault". Alternative approaches like virtue and deontological ethics purport to provide answers as to how to live in this unjust world without being asked to do the impossible. Secondly, a utilitarian will only be able to sit back and enjoy their life once humanity lives in a utopia; until then, they must give up their lives toiling away for the betterment of any who suffer, assuming that the suffer the utilitarian feels from toiling is less than the difference they can make to others' lives, a fact which does not depend on any economic system. Thirdly, Singer's defence of one's own wellbeing as a tool to help spread goodness might be seen more cynically as an excuse for not doing more. Singer is a great philanthropist, but he only gives away around 40% of his wealth, not 90%. He isn't surviving on the bare minimum, which he could achieve by living in the cheapest possible accommodation, eating the cheapest foods, using next to no utilities, moving to a country with the cheapest cost of living while maintaining enough sanity and geographical connection to continue bringing in income. If you pressed him, I expect he would admit that taking care of his family to a decent standard of living comes first.

Some criticisms of utilitarianism: it implies you shouldn't vote; it deals poorly with unlikely (with hard to quantify probability) but potentially devastating events (e.g. people have used it to argue we should pump loads of money into businesses dubiously working on solutions to the potential AI apocalypse); it implies you should spend all of your time working for as much money as possible and give almost all of it away to charities with the largest marginal impact on reducing human suffering (so probably sorts of foreign aid like the stuff recommended on GiveWell), retaining only enough to scrape by on; it implies enslaving masses and hooking them up to neverending drugs to keep them constantly in a state of ignorant unthinking bliss is good; it implies if the resources to make someone stop suffering are more efficiently spent elsewhere, then that person should be killed. There are defences of course.

>Well for many ancient people, the answer was simple: if something upsets the gods, it's bad. If it pleases them, it's good.

Maybe, though non-theological ethical philosophy did start in "ancient" times (e.g. see the Ancient Greeks), not all religions had/have gods (e.g. Animism, Buddhism), plenty of people (maybe the majority?) today claim their morality stems from their religion, and of those who don't only a fraction utilise ethical theories to make judgements, rather relying on their intuitions and what their society expects.

>Stuff about Kant

I couldn't find the relevant passage where he lays out his thought experiments about lying, so I can't confirm what you said. I also can't remember whether he used them as examples of or arguments for his categorical imperative framework. And I can't remember anything to do with kittnes lol. In any case, it's strange of you to bring up Kant but not mention the categorical imperative. I get that it's complicated (rules vs. duties, how to resolve conflicts, etc.), and I'm not entirely convinced Kant had fully thought it all out himself, but the way you treat him still feels unfair.

>Jumping to utilitarianism

You started by asking "what actually makes something 'bad' or 'good'", then jumped pretty much into stating your version of utilitarianism. It's fine to be a utilitarian, but you shouldn't pretend you actually made any arguments for why it is correct.

>Stuff about conservatives

I personally think you're right that conservatives, as with almost everyone in society, don't spend much time thinking carefully about ethical theories when making moral judgements, and instead react with their gut combined with the usual psychological biases (in-group vs. out-group, familiarity, confirmation bias etc.). At least the religious can appeal to their scripture, even if it's only when convenient to what they already think. But I don't know if widespread adoption of utilitarianism would help society or mankind. I don't think anyone has ever adopted a life solely governed by utilitarian ideals, because to do so would be nigh impossible; are you familiar with the common criticisms of utilitarianism? Oh and any conservative watching your video will identify what you say they say as strawmen.

Here's a thought: your question is dumb and meaningless. According to you that is correct.

Awhile ago I wrote an essay about this. I read all the thought experiments about the continuity of personal identity - the brain upload, the clone, the swampman, memory continuity, etc. - and came to the conclusion that the only answer is that there is no continuous "me", only future people who have minds very similar to me. Tomorrow I am a different person. Dramatic events like lobotomies only serve to make future persons more dissimilar to previous ones.

Because logical positivism is often taken to believe a statement of the following sort: "a proposition is meaningful iff it is empirically testable (in principle if not in practice) or an analytic tautology or contradiction". But this statement would seem to be neither empirically testable, nor a tautology, nor a contradiction. Therefore it is not meaningful. Hence self-defeating. You can change some of the words in the statement above but the idea is the same. Whether there is a way for positivists to escape this sort of argument, I don't know, I haven't studied it.

I'll add that I take the Wittgensteinian view that language's meaning is determined by its use. This means that words can have different meanings, or at least intended meanings, not only in different contexts but also by different people. When a baby says "Mama", it isn't just saying someone's name, it is asking for its mother's attention. When a Muslim says God ("Allah" in Arabic), they typically mean something very different from what a Christian means. When you listen to someone talk, in order to understand what they mean you have to make many inferences into how they are using their words. Arts like poetry and rap can utilise this to layer meanings on top of each other. When you are trying to communicate something precisely, you need to try to make it as easy as possible for others to correctly infer what you mean. That may mean abandoning or giving a definition for what you mean by "god".

It's obviously not a synonym, nor is it a logical implication. But phrasing the individual's decision in terms of social status vs. truth-seeking does seem apt.

If consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, and if consciousness entails a first person perspective, then a first person perspective does arise from the simulation. That experience within that perspective will be the same if the emergent phenomenon is the same, which I assume you were positing by allowing the simulation to be sufficiently accurate. Of course this means that the "external" part of the simulation will have to respond to the subroutine running the mind, such that it can then produce "sensory" feedback for the mind in response to the mind's "actions". But in this hypothetical you propose I don't see why that would be impossible.

To conclude, if you accept materialism of the mind, then you must accept that your first person experience could in principle be born from a sufficiently accurate simulation. To use a sci-fi allegory, you could be a program in the Matrix.

>If we lived in a simulated universe, we would not be conscious right? Like, if we have a code that could perfectly simulate a human mind into a game, such that this simulated mind really really looks like to us to have conscious, this would be nothing more than a illusion because is just this, a simulation, a program extremely complex created by us.

I think this is wrong. Let's assume that we don't have souls, that instead the mind arises solely from the material world, i.e. our brain. Then the mind, including consciousness, is an emergent phenomenon, which is currently generated materially. But you posit a hypothetical in which the same phenomenon could be generated using programmed software and hardware to run it on. But the emergent phenomenon is the same (because you posit it is), and so consciousness still emerges.

There are countless fields of philosophy, and in each one you will find academics passionately pontificating on all sorts of questions. But you won't find many people actively arguing that a field is fundamentally wrongheaded, that philosophy isn't relevant to a field, or that a field should be left to others. I contend that this is due to self-selection bias: only the people who think a field is worth philosophical study bother write about it, while other philosophers leave them to their own devices rather than expend time and resources trying to debunk the field - that would be a fast way to lose friends and goodwill. But this then gives the false impression to onlookers that philosophers as a community all accept at least the relevance of these fields. This can then be used as ammunition by anti-philosophers, who can pick the more ridiculous fields and laugh at them. This is unlike in (some of) the sciences where new paradigms are nigh-universally accepted to supercede old ones.

Edit: This isn't to say no philosophers ever wrote criticism targeted at whole fields. They do, it happens. But only very occasionally, and you will have to dive deep into the archives to find it, because it is always vastly outweighed by the amount of research in the field, and at any point in time it will be almost impossible to find any active research being done to debunk fields as a whole.

Heyooo so anyone tired of all the Continental bullshit you have to engage with nowadays??

It's funny because most articles will get through no matter their (poor) quality but original posts and comments will get blocked and deleted. I haven't been around enough to notice Tate posts. I think he is a fucking scumbag and an idiot, and I imagine you could get some fucking bad misogyny in anything related to him because hey this is reddit, and I imagine there's a point when that violates sub rules. I mean I I think it's in everyone's interest for the level of discourse to be above the 4chan shit you can find on other subreddits. Anyway I'm not familiar with the post you're talking about so I don't know if this is relevant.

Well, that's, something... what about the proposition: "1 = 1"? Or "If Aristotle can dance, Aristotle can dance"? Are you really trying to suggest that tautologies don't exist?

Yeah so when you're talking about someone who doesn't yet exist, there aren't direct sacrifices, so I would reformulate what you are saying to something like this: "When choosing to reproduce, you are gambling on giving rise to a happy life at the risk of giving rise to a miserable one."

I don't know if this is exactly what you had in mind, but I suppose you could say that by making this gamble, you are making it on behalf of the person you are bringing into existence, and only they should have the moral authority to have made such an important choice. But we are happy to let parents make many decisions on behalf of their children, and don't give children any moral authority. And the non-existent can hardly make such a choice for themselves. Indeed, it is only after giving birth to and raising a child to adulthood that we give them their full rights and freedom of choice; prior to that important choices are made for them, and we find this acceptable.

An alternative approach is just to more straightforwardly argue that taking the gamble is ethically wrong because the possible bad outweighs the possible good. This is where you would do well to deploy an asymmetry argument. Check the link I sent you.

I don't really understand how the trolley problem applies, could you explain? However your idea about miserable lives does play an important part in the anti-natalists' asymmetry argument (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetry_(population_ethics)).

How to prove anything

This is a variant of the "liar's sentence". Consider the sentence

S = "This sentence is false or grass is blue"

If S is false, then it must be true, resulting in a contradiction. If S is true, then the statement before the "or" is false, so "grass is blue" must be true. Thus we have proved grass is blue.

Obviously this a paradox stemming from self-referentiality, and we can use it to "prove" anything. But the important thing to note is that we didn't end up with a purely logical contradiction, just that grass is blue. It's only because we know this is wrong that we can recognise the paradox.

What's the upshot of this? While people are aware of self-referential statements creating paradoxes, when practicing philosophy people normally don't worry about them because they think if they crop up they'll be able to spot them because they cause a contradiction. But what I've shown is that paradoxes don't have to create logical contradictions. So whenever you see arguments which utilise self-referential statements, be aware! There could be some funny business afoot.

(i'm finally caving and posting this here because it wasn't allowed as a post. I've shortened it considerably.)

God I remember Nussbaum as the contemporary star of ethics back in something like 2010? Probably did all her work much earlier and I had only really started getting into ethics then. Good to see she got that official recognition, she deserved it.