Inspired by a post by Sigmaleph

[feotakahari]

I’m much less concerned with getting people to do good things than I am with getting people to not do bad things. There are a lot of ways to say that someone deserves to be hurt, or that hurting them is for their own good, or that you’re not really hurting them. If you’re not actively causing harm, you’re already doing an above-average job.

Comments

[entanglingbriars]

The more you post about ethics, the more convinced I am that you're actually a deontologist. Admittedly a deontologist whose vision of the good is the same as utilitarianism's (i.e. maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain), but your understanding of the right (i.e. the actions an individual ought to take in pursuit of the good) seem to me to be far more based in ideas of following certain basic moral principles than utilitarianism's understanding of the right (which is that every action should be calculated to maximize pleasure and minimize pain). I suppose that might be consistent with rule utilitarianism, but rule utilitarianism seems to me to be a more deontological ethic than a consequentialist one.

[feotakahari]

Rulesets are always more notable for what they leave out than what they cover. You find some way to hurt people that isn't in the rules, and since you don't have a rule to tell you it's a bad thing, it must be a good thing! Or worse, you make up new rules to cover whatever you want, and then you make a rule that people who are strange and different should be hurt, even if they're not hurting anyone else.