thomblake comments on Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease - Less Wrong

236 Post author: Yvain 30 May 2010 09:16PM

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Comment author: Yvain 31 May 2010 09:42:51PM 7 points [-]

I installed a mental filter that does a find and replace from "utilitarian" to "consequentialist" every time I use it outside very technical discussion, simply because the sort of people who don't read Less Wrong already have weird and negative associations with "utilitarian" that I can completely avoid by saying "consequentialist" and usually keep the meaning of whatever I'm saying intact.

Less Wrong does deserve better than me mindlessly applying that filter. But you'd need a pretty convoluted consequentialist system to promote blame (and if you were willing to go that far, you could call a deontologist someone who wants to promote states of the world in which rules are followed and bad people are punished, and therefore a consequentialist at heart). Likewise, you could imagine a preference utilitarian who wants people to be punished just because e or a sufficient number of other people prefer it. I'm not sufficiently convinced enough to edit the article, though I'll try to be more careful about those terms in the future.

Comment author: thomblake 01 June 2010 08:48:05PM 5 points [-]

I installed a mental filter that does a find and replace from "utilitarian" to "consequentialist" every time I use it outside very technical discussion,

I, for what it's worth, think this is a good heuristic.