Happiness is Not Real: Utilitarianism Justifies Evil.

the reason why John Stuart Mill had a
hit book at all the reason why utilitarianism became a commonly used concept in debates here on the internet in the 21st century at all is that it appeals to a side of our brain that we seem to exercise every day in the marketplace in most modern Western societies most of us all the time are exercising the part of our brain that chooses should I do this or should I do that in terms of whatever I will enjoy more should I buy this product should I buy that product and it's very difficult when you live in that kind of culture and you live in that kind of a park or era to take a stand against utilitarianism and point out the ways in which no this is fundamentally ineluctably evil not useful and really wrong in this video we're actually taking an even more disturbing step in explain to you that the kind of reasoning utilitarianism is based on the so called pleasure pain calculus is flawed in yet another important way it's flawed because very often you're comparing something real to something unreal or we could say something abstract to something even more abstract something unreal to something else that's dramatically less real previously on x-men but there is no question to be asked there is no salience there is no relevance of taking this abstract equation whereby you have an imaginary amount of pleasure and enjoyment and then you subtract the amount of suffering and pain and then ask well how much is left over what is it a positive or negative number at the end of the equation ABS so it's not clear to me why he's talking about an imaginary amount of pleasure and pain what would be going on in that calculation is we figure out how much good it would take like it would be caused to to torture the to commit the active of torture so I don't know where the imaginary thing is coming from but let's let's keep going thousand years later you should be able to take this stuff apart and put it back together again like it's nothing homeboy okay okay okay let's say you meet a farmer on a field you say wow that's a big truck you have a lot of apples loaded in the back of that truck I wonder I wonder how many apples are in the back of that truck and he tells you oh there are twelve thousand two hundred and eighty three apples loaded into the back of this truck okay is that a real number twelve thousand twenty three how do you know that precise number for the number of apples he says well we weigh them we actually we don't even weigh the apples we weigh the truck we weigh it before it's loaded with apples then we weigh it after and then we subtract the difference and then we take the weight and we divide it by the average weight of an apple okay so we know how much on average an apple way is we know how much the total weight is the apples and then I'm giving you this precise number of exactly how many apples are in the truck so is that a real number okay all numbers are abstractions there's a sense in which you can insist hate numbers are just created by human culture they reflect language and civilization and our subjective psychological set yeah look there's a difference between counting the number of apples through extrapolation based on an average right there's a difference with that and actually counting the apples you could count the apples by paying a human being to sit there with a chalkboard and tally how many apples have been loading the back truck there are also more technologically sophisticated ways there were actually a very sophisticated machines used by oyster farmers because oysters are worth a lot of money where they drop the oysters down a chute and they calculate not just the number but the precise size weight volume the shape of the shell you know they fall down a chute and they're scanned with lasers as they go so you could take one of those oysters counting machines you could put the apples through them you can know precisely how many apples precisely their size shape volume weight etc okay if you wanted to and then you'd say okay so that's a real number there's a sense in which that number is more real than the other number that's based on extrapolation and based on belief in an average right now if you have a farm where the particular species of tree in the particular climate all of the apples very closely conform to that average yet the the number will may have you know real predictive power if you have a farm where you know what there's a huge variation in apples some of them are huge some of their saying okay this stuff is not complex for a philosophy professor when I say a number is unreal a unit of measure is unreal we're dealing with different types of units of measure right the different types of reality you should be able to take this stuff apart and put it back together again and homey you know I'm doing this with no script and no preparation and no I didn't even bother to read John Stuart Mill from Mississippi all OH all right if I say to you you know there's a certain amount of harm done by cutting off an organ of your body let's let's keep it real here people let's talk about male circumcision there's a certain amount of harm done by cutting off this part of the body and then the the boy has to live the rest of his life it's about 60% of the nerve endings removed from the end of his penis okay so that's that's horrible that's real okay and we could try to assign a number to it we could try to measure it but I what's like real and then the mother of this newborn baby tells you well you know it may be that circumcision does harm it may be that circumcision impairs his ability of feel sensations through his penis it may have psychological effects it may cause him just physical pain and suffering yeah but you know what she gets a certain kind of pleasure she gets a certain kind of satisfaction out of the idea that she's carrying on a tradition that her parents and her grandparents participated in now you are gonna tell me that in the philosophy of John Stuart Mill you are gonna tell me that it's possible to carry out a calculus to write an equation on a blackboard that compares the harm of being done to the pleasure or grad or enjoyment that we can assign units we can assign new roles that are equally real to these two things the only way they can be equally real is if they're both equally absurd because this is part of the tragedy of the human condition happiness is not real pleasure is not real enjoyment is not real and when we talk about harm when we talk about the harm done by cutting off a human limb when we talk about the harm done by torturing a person to death we are talking about something real if there were any validity to the utilitarian approach of creating an equation a calculus assigning a unit value to the harm done and unit value of the benefit why is this not the way we evaluate for example whether or not to torture animals to death for the sake of scientific progress vivisection in a word right what why can't this is a highly funded industry with highly educated intellectual people scientists doing it why can't they ever come up with an equation why is it that the European Union with its teams of highly paid lawyers couldn't take this philosophy from John Stuart Mill and Bentham and put it into practice and just assign a number assigned a unit value to how much suffering suffering is involved with having an eighth kept in captivity and having experiments done on it and then how much benefit is going to be achieved how much pleasure people are gonna have because now they know more about you know AIDS or cancer or any other significant thing they don't even pretend to draw up these equations because they know that they're meaningless they know that they can justify any evil whatsoever okay any the most gruesome experiment imaginable on a monkey can be justified if you simply name the imaginary pleasure benefit or outcome that's supposed to result from this experiment so what do they do what is the procedure in the European where there are strict legal you know definitions but when you can and can't torture animals to death you know what's done analysis of alternatives analysis of comparable examples where medical professionals scientists people doing this research universities they have to present and they have to be challenged by counter arguments they have to present what the other methods might be that could lead to the same scientific research being done without harming animals or with doing dramatically less harm to animals and this results in innovations right so if you say you're gonna do experiments this is a this is a real example but I'm simplifying it off dub my head if you say you're gonna do experiments that involve keeping dogs in captivity and these dogs basically being miserable so that you can have mosquitoes let's say the mosquitoes are carrying malaria whatever the disease is but you have these dogs in a laboratory living their whole life in a kind of perspex case with these mosquitoes on them all right but but you know tormenting these dogs and tormenting some mosquitoes think about the benefits in terms of malaria research think about the progress that can be made how much pleasure human being is going to get into this right it's a complete dead end to present this kind of utilitarian calculus but you know what was productive saying wait a minute why do you need the dog in a cage why can't you just have a plastic membrane and then have you know the food the nectar for the for the mosquitos to drink underneath why can't you breed the mosquitoes in a cage without having a mammal there for them to drink their blood can't we redesign this experiment in this way the amount of harm the amount of suffering being done to animals has been challenged and has been reduced but not through the pipe the pleasure pain calculus not through utilitarian methods the utilitarian theorem fundamentally both in the real world and on the chalkboard does not work when we talk about killing a cow having a cow live under a steel sky in a shed on a concrete floor in a fenced-in area that's tiny for its whole life just so one day I can have its throat slit we talked about the harm done to this cow we're talking about something real and we talked about the enjoyment of the meat we are talking about something much less real or I might go so far as to say something unreal why can't be quantified can't be falsified not verifiable not you know not generalizable not Universal right for example one person enjoys eating the meat and another person doesn't there's this kind of subjective variation behavior but dude when you get into what people find pleasant what they fight a joy about when you get into the real depths of this it gets dark quick no no no no there's no way I would enjoy some of the things my fellow human beings would enjoy these pleasures were people consider pleasure were people consider enjoyable this is not something that's quantifiable verifiable countable there's no unit to measure this in the way that we can count how many apples are loaded into the back of a truck there's a difference between saying something is unknown and that something is fundamentally unknowable there's an anecdote about a Hollywood actor who had a scene in a movie and the script called for him to say alcoholism is an incurable disease and he changed the line to make the scene more interesting and he instead said alcoholism is not an incurable disease but it is a disease for which there is no known a cure so there's no cure that's known yes what an interesting suggestion that in some hypothetical future there would be a cure fellows have known I am NOT saying to you that the quantification of pleasure the assigning of a unit value to happiness is a scientific problem we have yet to solve it's not that it's a riddle that will one day be unraveled it's fundamentally flawed in such a way that you can never assign a unit to happiness you can never quantify human pleasure and the nature of harm being contrasted to it yeah you know we can talk about hypothetical examples where people are talking about their hurt feelings or their hurt pride where we start to get to equal levels of absurdity or equal levels of abstraction where it can't be quantified on either side it can't be given a unit value but when you're actually comparing torture murder death rate you know torture to interrogate someone to produce in military intelligence of something real real situation with this that are really really in the real world the 21st century questions that are being asked and where governments have to come up with answers questions with torture animals to death for scientific research these are real-world examples um my point is fundamentally you will never be able to quantify pleasure and have a real number in contrast to the very real nature of suffering harm and pain now [Music] when I look at my own father as an example he was a man who enjoyed things I could never possibly enjoy the things that made him happy in life I would find ro Berbatov and disgusting and even evil I'm just gonna give you give you one example here he owned a small business a small number of employees and he had a common email service for the company so they had a work email address and unbeknownst to his employees he enjoyed he delighted every day in reading their private emails he would even go to the office early so you try to read their private emails before they received them and he would delete emails before the recipient had seen them and then he would delight in coming back a few days later to see the two people angry at each other because they never replied the email so you know someone might send an email saying okay I'm gonna be at this event on Thursday so I assume I'm gonna see you there because you're going to this other thing nearby something like this he would delete the email and then he'd get to laugh he'd get to smile he'd get to be happy when a few days later he would read the email of one person being furious the others say hey why weren't you there I was there I went to this event on Thursday I thought you were gonna be there for this reason you never replied to me but I assumed you were coming people are disappointed and people are upset each other and my father my father was happy my father enjoyed this hey you can pick any set of examples you want whether from the world of Orthodox religious people what they enjoy is very different from what I can show it in my life whether from the world of people who were into BDSM or people who are into drug addiction my father pretty psychologically disturbing case study but you he was perceived as normal he was perceived as someone who had no mental problems at all and no addictions alright as subtle as the difference maybe between being homosexual and heterosexual what they find pleasurable is significantly different as subtle difference maybe between someone who enjoys the feeling of drunkenness and someone who does not enjoy it someone who rebels against it and feels feels not just doesn't think intellectually but feels this is a waste of my time I'm being poisoned this is a intoxicating me this is toxic this is something bad and evil and wrong and I can't focus my mind to do the kind of work I really value because I'm drinking this outlaw someone who feels that way is different in some sense from someone from the highest pleasure the main thing they enjoy in life is drinking alcohol okay the list goes on and on what is pleasant to you may not be pleasant to me it may reveal how profoundly alien we are from one another but if I cut off your arm I am doing harm in a very real sense and the harm done to you by cutting off your arm is the same as if vice versa that harm was done to me the nature of the harm were contrasting in this pleasure pain calculus right that is more real than the nature of the pleasure and the happiness that you're putting on the other side of the balance the pleasure pain calculus is evil in think as it justifies any evil imaginable and one of the fundamental logical flaws built into it is this notion of quantification this notion of assigning numbers of making an equation in which you're comparing something real to something unreal I mean really people like to disrespect my truth but the fact is that you know my name is I don't know