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Comment by roxolotl | Hacker News Reader

It’s wild how when you expose enough people to utilitarianism some of them become utility monsters. We’ve seen it with effective altruists(the modern ones not Singer’s initial conception), zizians, and I guess now efilists. We really need more modern moral theories which resonate with people. They all have downsides but the speed with which utilitarianism has been reduced to absurd once exposed to the internet is impressive.

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> We really need more modern moral theories which resonate with people. They all have downsides but the speed with which utilitarianism has been reduced to absurd once exposed to the internet is impressive.

I mean I think the internet is quite good at producing insane fringes for pretty much _all_ moral theories. There is no internet-proof philosophy.

Or perhaps we should review the ancient moral theories?

It's always good to gain wider perspective. But those "ancient moral theories" existed in a time and place with which we have little familiarity, making them hard to adapt. And worse, their adapted forms already have outsized presence in our current world-views. They're often treated as if they were universals.

I'd argue that we'd do better considering a wider range of moral theories from a diverse set of current cultures. Asian, African, and South American moral thinkers get short shrift in popular culture (as do native North American ones). Some of those theories also have ancient roots, but on a very different basis from the European ones we have a hard time escaping.

Why?

>when you expose enough people to utilitarianism some of them become utility monsters

No offense, but "utility monster" does not mean what you think it means.

Yes. It was shorthand for “become examples of how easily utilitarianism can be abused to produce immoral outputs when the calculations have absurd inputs”.

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