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ciphergoth comments on This Didn't Have To Happen - Less Wrong
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Hitchens: The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.
Yeah, I heard about this on Bullshit with Penn & Teller. I considered choosing someone else, but Mother Teresa is still the easiest symbol of pure altruism. (That same episode included a smackdown on the Dalai Lama and Ghandi, so my options look pretty weak.
Perhaps you should reconsider the value of 'pure altruism'.
Yes, 'pure altruism' is a pretty weak position, and you won't find many proponents of it. Altruism as an ethical position doesn't make any sense; you keep pushing all of your utils on other people, but if you consider a 2-person system doing this, nobody actually gets to keep any of the utils.
Agreed, but under certain conditions relating to how much causal influence one has on others vs. oneself, utilitarianism and pure altruism lead to the same prescriptions. (I would argue these conditions are usually satisfied in practice.)
Gandhi? Really? My impression is that the "smackdown" on Gandhi is vastly, vastly less forceful than the smackdown on Teresa. Though I haven't watched that particular episode, I've read other critiques that seemed to be reaching as far as possible, and they didn't reach very far.
It mostly had to do with Gandhi being racist.