The classification of a chemical messenger as a hormone, neu…
Questions
The clаssificаtiоn оf а chemical messenger as a hоrmone, neurotransmitter, or paracrine agent depends primarily on:
Define 'humаnism'
Why Utilitаriаnism is Bunk The fаct оf the matter is that humans dоn’t truly fit the maximize pleasure-minimize pain mоdel we see here, and for this reason modern utilitarianism is bunk. We don’t spend a lot of time actually maximizing our dollar return; rather we care a lot about how other people think about us, about playing music, working on our car, taking our kid to soccer practice, hanging out with our friends, playing video games, and more. While all of these things can be understood as pleasure, it’s not clear that they can be easily swapped for one another, or that pleasure is exactly the right word for all of them. What is the pleasure of raising a child? The cost to raise and put one child through college exceeds half a million dollars! That’s a lot of vacations, and then you spend your time taking them everywhere, they yell at you, keep you up at night, etc. While there is certainly pleasure in being a father or mother, the satisfaction of doing what is right for your family more often fits with the Stoic or Bushido way of acting than the utilitarian. This kind of deep satisfaction of being fairly rewarded for a hard days work, shuttling your kid to sports, or completing a big puzzle are just very different from shopping at the mall, buying toys, tickets to concerts or sporting events, or, in other words, consuming products. In modern economics this simple psychological model can be acceptably used as an assumption because when businesses sell and consumers buy, they do tend to think in terms of cost-benefit maximization. Buying the on-sale toothpaste because it’s just as good but cheaper is an example of this kind of behavior. While acceptable in some circumstances, the idea of homo economicus (that humans are perfectly rational and self-interested, and act this way in all cases to maximize their utility) does not match the complex nature of human psychology. For ethical utilitarianism, however, we do need a more dynamic psychological model to respond to the objection that their view of human motivation is too simplistic. One of the most common strategies is to make a distinction between higher and lower pleasures, where higher pleasures are things like being a father, playing sports or music, reading poetry, going to the art museum, and having truly deep conversations with friends. Lower pleasures are those that more closely match the maximizing pleasure model: buying clothes, having a drink at a bar, watching TV, and more. Happily, money is used for most of these things (both high and low) and so can still act as a shorthand for trying to maximize happiness as individuals do tend to spend on what makes them happiest. Unhappily, money cannot be used to buy a good parent, an appreciation of poetry, or, as they say, love. Overall, utilitarianism is a powerful ethical theory, but one that doesn’t seem to capture all cases or consider all the relevant political values that we might care about. What might be the pleasure benefit from a legal system that protects human rights? Or how much pleasure is there in passing your family religion or other kinds of cultural traditions to your children? What about the moral value of hard-work? In the thought exercise above, we redistributed from rich to poor and got a huge happiness bump…but did those on the bottom properly-speaking deserve more money? Utilitarians ignore all of these other moral values in favor of maximizing happiness. This simplicity is a strength, but also a weakness because while it makes decision-making quite easy, it also probably ignores other things we actually care about. Additionally, is the language of pleasure the most accurate description of art, music, sports, family, et., or are there other ways of describing why these things matter that are more accurate? Should people be allowed to take actions that will make them unhappy, such as have addictions to alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs? These and many more questions are highly relevant to the study of modern utilitarianism. So, my young political theorists: should you bet that God exists? Let’s find out!