12:36:21 From Ted Peters to Everyone : Help me understand: is utilitarianism exclusively anthropocentric by definition? Necessarily? Mmmm?

 

12:36:32 From Joe Gottlieb to Everyone : @ Ted: no, its not 

 

12:36:35 From Neil Manson to Everyone : @Ted - no, it's not. 

 

12:36:42 From Ted Peters to Everyone : Whew!

 

12:36:52 From Nick Nielsen to Everyone : G. E. Moore's short book Ethics is a good examination of utilitarianism

 

12:36:54 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : Nope

 

12:37:12 From Nick Nielsen to Everyone : thought today it would be regarded as dated

 

12:37:21 From Neil Manson to Everyone : But any *true* version of utilitarianism would be anthropocentric. :-)

 

12:37:33 From Carlos Santana to Everyone : Many Utilitarians famously take animal pleasure/pain into account: see Bentham and Signer

 

12:37:38 From Neil Manson to Everyone : [just a joke]

 

12:37:39 From Ted Peters to Everyone : Then I prefer the untrue version.

 

12:37:39 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : Not at all neil 

 

12:38:55 From Neil Manson to Everyone : @Ted - hahaha!

 

12:39:04 From Dan Capper to Everyone : Peter Singer's famous animal rights arguments are utilitarian but, obviously, not fully anthropocentric.

 

12:39:33 From Joe Gottlieb to Everyone : the anthropocentric assumption is false 

 

12:39:35 From Carlos Mariscal to Everyone : Utilitarianism is one of the only moral theories that regards animals directly, too. Non-human lives only matter to Kantians if being cruel to them makes you cruel to humans later on. Not sure what Value theorists say about animals, but it probably depends on the society involved.

 

12:39:45 From Erik Persson to Everyone : Utilitarianism cannot be anthropocentric. If the point of ethics is to maximize the quota of happiness and/or preference satisfation over pain and/or preference frustration than all feelings/preferences have to be considered in the equation.

 

12:40:21 From Joe Gottlieb to Everyone : @ Erik, well no: it *can* be anthropocentric, but (and this is what matters), it *need not be* 

 

12:40:25 From Nick Nielsen to Everyone : de facto, past utilitarianism 

has been concerned with human happiness

 

12:41:08 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : It’s hard to see how a utilitarian who grants that ETI is likely could be anthropocentric though

 

12:41:10 From Nick Nielsen to Everyone : Attributing happiness to other species is obviously going to run into philosophical problems

 

12:41:23 From Dr Sheri Wells-Jensen to Everyone : Utilitarianism seems so twistable to me: there's that Peter Singer argument where it's wrong to kill animals because that causes pain, but it's ok to kill disabled people (if he thinks they are "too disabled") because their lives will never be really happy.

 

12:41:54 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : It’s all about their ability to sense pleasure and pain

 

12:42:06 From Nick Nielsen to Everyone : Also, attributing happiness to ETI is problematic; G. E. Moore deals with the attribution of pain and pleasure to aliens

 

12:42:26 From Erik Persson to Everyone : @ Joe, it can of course be constructed to only account for human feelings/preferences but if you do not include all feelings/preferences you have to compromise with the main aim of utilitarianism.

 

12:42:30 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : @Nick - did not know that, I will check it out

 

12:42:40 From Nick Nielsen to Everyone : It's my interpretation

 

12:42:46 From Nick Nielsen to Everyone : haven't read the book in a while

 

12:43:13 From Nick Nielsen to Everyone : Moore purposefully makes this look ridiculous, using it as a stalking horse

 

12:43:24 From Lucas Mix to Everyone : I would argue that all ethical systems in our view are anthropic (constrained by human context) but not necessarily anthropocentric. Utilitarianism includes the set of all ethical utility functions. The key question is which utility function you choose. Pleasure and preference come to mind, but I could argue that natural law is also a utility function.

 

12:43:39 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : @ Lucas - yes, pretty much

 

12:43:52 From Joe Gottlieb to Everyone : @ Erik: yes that might me right 

 

12:43:57 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : Not so much with the natural law though

 

12:43:57 From Neil Manson to Everyone : Is David Lewis's "Mad Pain and Martian Pain" relevant?

 

12:44:03 From Dan Capper to Everyone : @ Sheri, that's a weakness of utilitarian approaches: the question of WHOSE flourishing matters.

 

12:44:52 From Jim Schwartz to Everyone : It could also be helpful to draw a distinction between "intensional anthropocentrism" and "incidentaly anthropocentrism" (the latter for the views that don't set out to put humans first but *somehow* find a way of validating 

human superiority nonetheless)

 

12:45:15 From Joe Gottlieb to Everyone : @ Jim: that's helpful 

 

12:45:20 From Carlos Mariscal to Everyone : Yeah, Utilitarianism runs counter to a lot of intuitions. It could justify cruelly torturing someone if it made everyone else much happier, for instance. Fred Feldman has an modification called desert-adjusted utilitarianism which is supposed to be better.

 

12:45:30 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : Exactly Jim

 

12:46:12 From Nick Nielsen to Everyone : The Ones Who Walk Away from Omolos is about this utilitarian riddle

 

12:46:14 From William Alba to Everyone : @Carlos I would walk away 

from Omelas

 

12:46:21 From Erik Persson to Everyone : It seems though that as long as we don't believe there is sentient life on Mars, it doesn't make a real difference for Doan's reasoning whether utilitarianism is anthropocentric or not.

 

12:46:47 From Ted Peters to Everyone : Yep.

 

12:47:04 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : @ Erik - true, but we do need to be careful, especially since accusation of anthropocentrism are such a common argument against us Neo-liberals…:)

 

12:48:25 From Lucas Mix to Everyone : @ Kelly, I think Neoliberalism falls afoul of egoisms across a broad range of social circles, not just the species.

 

12:48:28 From Erik Persson to Everyone : @ Kelly yes from a hardcore philosophical perspective it is of course still important but for us applied philosophy people it might not be a big thing. :-)

 

12:48:48 From Dan Capper to Everyone : @ Eric, we could extend concern to the integrity of abiotic features of Mars as a form of utilitarianism that would, of necessity, require a nonanthropocentric focus.

 

12:48:49 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : @ Lucas: Nah

 

12:49:16 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : @ Erik - fair enough, I have just taken so much shit on this that I am kinda sensitive

 

12:49:18 From Nick Nielsen to Everyone : Exercise left to the chat: define neoliberalism

 

12:49:47 From Kelly Smith to Everyone : @ Neil - IO will leave that to Linda…:)

 

12:50:15 From Ted Peters to Everyone : Neil...how do you evaluate the Wingspread version of the PP?

 

12:51:52 From Erik Persson to Everyone : The PP has come up a lot. Here is my take on that if anyone is interested. :-) doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.03.034

 

12:52:02 From Neil Manson to Everyone : See my "Formulating the Precautionary Principle."

 

12:52:23 From Neil Manson to Everyone : Erik does excellent work on the PP!

 

12:52:36 From Erik Persson to Everyone : Thanks Neil! :-)

 

12:52:48 From Ted Peters to Everyone : Neil...please give me a link or reference to your formulation of the PP.

 

12:53:34 From kdenning@yorku.ca to Everyone : For Mars to be a viable backup someday in the future...  there are so many conditions to be met. The funding required even for very preliminary Mars colonization preparation to insure against future existential risk is surely difficult to justify in a context of clear present existential risk (i.e. climate here) which requires funding/resources right now? And what happens with the tech capacity that is built in order to do basic preliminary Mars colonization? If it's redirected away from Mars, it will get deployed somewhere. And that could be very mixed. Either that, or it will simply continue to be deployed on Mars, i.e. "mission creep". 

 

13:05:34 From Alan Johnson to Everyone : I published some perspectives on the precautionary principle, with reference to Leopold, Pinchot, etc. some years ago.  Here's the link: 

 

13:05:42 From Alan Johnson to Everyone : https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol17/iss3/art9/

 

13:07:59 From Eric Hughes to Everyone : Musk launched his vehicle into orbit because it was cheaper to do that than to pay for a battery replacement.