In response to a post about the moral value of mountains

“I know probably better than you, given that it’s clear half the people reblogging this have no grounding in environmental ethics (sorry to be mean but jesus christ y’all at least read aldo leopold or SOMETHING).”

There’s a certain amount of salt from ethics majors who’re mad that their discipline isn’t taken as seriously as math or physics majors, but a discipline in which you can say “read this specific author or collection of authors, and you’ll understand” is flat-out worse than a discipline in which you say “read more of the latest research.” You see the same thing in economics—an order of followers builds up around a few leaders, and their research becomes attempts to prove the point of those leaders, and the leaders are wrong and the followers become wrong-squared. (Contrast evolutionary theory, another topic that produces weird fringes, but one in which researchers are overjoyed to proclaim the ways in which they think Darwin was wrong. I maintain that evolutionary theory is better in this sense than economics is.)

Yes, I realize the hypocrisy of saying this on a blog that also proclaims itself “buddies with Bentham.” The most I can say in my defense is that I will never tell you the reason you disagree with Utilitarianism is that you haven’t read enough Bentham. Ultimately, my points are my own, and if you think I’m wrong, maybe it’s because I’m wrong.

(no subject)

One thing I’ll say for Tumblr: it gave me exactly the language I needed to explain why I hated The Beach Beneath the Street. The book’s about a theory of what would now be called Fully Automated Luxury Communism, but it puts no effort into the Fully Automated part. It’s all about how to restructure society away from capitalistic production and towards leisure, but the required advances in automation and goods production are treated as something that will automatically happen and don’t require any particular effort. It seems selfish—“I take the fun part of society-building, and someone else over there takes the labor-intensive part.”

In response to a post about how no one complains about taxes anymore

What happened is that we grew up. When we were young, we watched the people on TV complain about taxes. Now we’re out on our own, and most of us don’t earn enough to pay taxes, so instead we complain about rent.