In this episode of Walt Right Perspectives I speak with Bentham’s Bulldog, a philosophy student who is a stalwart advocate of Act Utilitarianism and mostly subscribes to Matt Yglesias-style center-left politics.
We get into some technical and autistic debate over moral intuitions, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind / free will, but as a former Philosophy major I found this to be a tremendously stimulating discussion and think lots of you will agree!
Topics include:
The appeal of utilitarianism and Effective Altruism to Bentham’s Bulldog
Act vs. Rule Libertarianism
Can utilitarianism be used to justify everything?
Popular suspicion toward Effective Altruism in the wake of SBF’s grifting
Existential risks and tenability of longtermism given unpredictability of future
Popular disdain for rationalist formalism
BB’s article Shooting the Messenger about how certain topics (like Walt’s article about women going through puberty too early) carry a certain inherent stink and close off productive conversation
Tenability of Peter Singer’s idea that people shouldn’t go on vacation and have a moral obligation to donate much of their income to charity
The value of proximity and ingroup preference as moral factors—should you value saving poor Americans over starving Africans?
The role of intuition in moral reasoning—things that “seem obvious”
Charity as altruistic impulse vs. an opportunity for signaling and accruing status
The Is / Ought Distinction and BB’s moral realism vs. Walt’s notion of morality as “intersubjective consensus”
Are the fundamental laws of logic / mathematical axioms true objectively or because we assume they are true?
Are physical categories like “mountain” objective or intersubjectively defined?
Walt’s philosophical skepticism driven by the inherent limitations of human intellectual and sensory faculties
BB’s moderate stance on Israel and the Gaza War
Extremism and closemindedness of anti-Israel protestors at BB’s college
Are anti-Zionist protestors anti-Semitic? Are they dangerous / intimidating?
What does a Two State Solution look like? How can any such solution deal with the right of return?
Probability that Bibi will ethnically cleanse Gaza if Trump wins
Is the Gaza War substantively different from past conflicts or is there just more space for dissent because of demographic change among Zoomers?
Is Israel going to install a puppet state?
BB’s Jewish heritage and its personal importance to him
BB’s veganism and Walt’s vegan past as a teenager—have things improved on factory farms over the past fifteen years?
Do we have more of an obligation to domestic animals like dogs / cats vs. livestock animals such as pigs and cows?
The pertinence of proximity as a moral factor as applied to factory farms vs. torturing chickens in your backyard
Under Utilitarianism does a person have a greater moral responsibility to one’s own children vs. other children?
Is there a practical way to implement Utilitarianism?
BB’s recent adoption of a generic theism due to the Fine Tuning Argument
Why BB thinks theism is more tenable than deism
Check out his Anthropic Argument for Theism
BB’s response to the Problem of Evil
BB’s view that Christianity does not support the existence of an eternal Hell
BB’s rejection of compatibilism on Free Will and support of dualism
Does a dualist understanding of the mind / the Hard Problem of Consciousness undermine the scientific rigor of psychiatry?
The greater normativity of psychiatry than other branches of medicine / science
The state of modern academia (peer review, journal system, replication crisis)
Rigor of continental philosophy vs. analytic philosophy and the value of artistic / poetic philosophy of thinkers like Nietzsche and Voltaire
BB’s extreme disdain for existentialism / absurdism and hatred for Camus
Walt’s defense of continental philosophy as a form of art
How Walt became more of a normie as he aged and acquired an appreciation for epistemic relativism and a more artistic form of rhetoric
How autism makes rationalists very bad at looking at the subtext of various issues
Was BB’s article “Losing Faith in Contrarianism” itself a contrarian take?
How a high verbal IQ and friendly disposition make it much harder to be canceled
Episode 21 : Philosophical banter with Bentham's Bulldog