Quote:
Originally Posted by Guybrush
I don't know. I tend to think of people at large as idiots and I don't do much of anything. You berate people on forums. Others make documentaries or write songs? You know know as much about this as I do.
The old idea that black people don't feel as much pain is, of course, a utilitarian argument. About bringing salvation and civilization, those are not utilitarian arguments but probably rather religious and I guess normative virtue ethics or something. Christians sometimes like to think of suffering as a virtue and punishment as something that shapes virtue, so that could be on them too.
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No I'm asking how you as a utilitarian would show those ideas to be "evil" through utilitarian to an audience of people who believed them in the 1850s.
What I'm getting at is that I don't know how useful a method utilitarianism is to determine what is "evil" in any objective sense since rationalizations and social conditioning can be unfalsifiable, or at least highly resistant to scrutiny.
Say I was to hypothetically posit to you that capitalism or hierarchies or any of those things I badger on about were "evil" and gave you utilitarian logic on why it was so, would it necessarily persuade you? You have the benefit of modern society telling you your whole life that slavery is evil to inform and direct your utilitarian analysis, but would your opinion have been precisely the same were you an American southerner in 1850?
So how useful is any kind of objective logical analysis of whatever you might define as evil?
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