Nietzsche said all great philosophies are a confession of their originator, and unfortunately for many critics of utilitarianism this confession is "I actually don't care about the happiness of poor people in particular".
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Criticisms of utilitarianism often end up in a couple of camps, the first being extremely far fetched thought experiments, like the Utility Monster (which by the way, can be reversed on Nozick as a "property monster", which I came up with in this comic about: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/259). These push utilitarianism to its end, showing that it actually causes us harm. Kind of a poor criticism, since the whole point is to make us happy, the fact that it doesn't make us happy doesn't really work. Of course we all agree with the utility monster anyway, which is why we don't value the happiness of ants as equal to ourselves, we are the utility monsters. If some greater being came along, they would probably just laser us all to use earth as a beach house anyway, so we wouldn't have to worry too much about the failure of our philosophies to account for them.
More to the point though, people like Nozick, who spend their career arguing why it's great and fine for the rich to exploit the poor, obviously don't have humanity's best interest in mind. Most utilitarians spend their time on earth trying to make life better for everyone, like arguing for women's rights, animal rights, and alleviating poverty. So yeah, take your pick I guess.
Existentialcomics
A Dialogue on Freedom
A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes
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Look, if you give people the freedom to pick their own "meaning of life", a lot of people are going to pick that, okay? We just gotta have to deal with that.
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Surely a society of all narcissistic tech bros whose only talent is talking people into giving them money would be ideal, right guys? Right?
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Surely a society of all narcissistic tech bros whose only talent is talking people into giving them money would be ideal, right guys? Right?
Explain: One of the funniest stories in history that I heard was Dostoevsky recounting some utopian thinkers among the Russian Aristocracy that wanted to make everything rational, and someone objected saying the peasants would never go for it, so they replied "then we'll just eliminate the peasants". As though a society of all rich people would somehow work, even though the peasants did all the work, which is sort of the one thing you actually need for society to operate. The rich people would literally just starve in like two seconds.
People sort of still have the same idea today though, like if we can just eliminate the poor somehow, everyone will be rich and live off the interest from their stocks or whatever, not realizing that stocks only go up because somewhere, someone is actually doing work. Oh right, and uh, the robots will do all human labor in like the next 5 years, I forgot about that. Good luck with that one bros.
Explain: One of the funniest stories in history that I heard was Dostoevsky recounting some utopian thinkers among the Russian Aristocracy that wanted to make everything rational, and someone objected saying the peasants would never go for it, so they replied "then we'll just eliminate the peasants". As though a society of all rich people would somehow work, even though the peasants did all the work, which is sort of the one thing you actually need for society to operate. The rich people would literally just starve in like two seconds.
People sort of still have the same idea today though, like if we can just eliminate the poor somehow, everyone will be rich and live off the interest from their stocks or whatever, not realizing that stocks only go up because somewhere, someone is actually doing work. Oh right, and uh, the robots will do all human labor in like the next 5 years, I forgot about that. Good luck with that one bros.
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Try to improve society so people enjoy their lives? I think you'll find that's actually impossible, on account of structure of existence itself. Also I don't care for women.
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