You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

bogus comments on Open thread, July 23-29, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: David_Gerard 22 July 2013 10:34AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (197)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: bogus 24 July 2013 09:11:09AM *  7 points [-]

If you look at history - events, trends, culture - what are the biggest things of which one can say, that only happened because the idea "utilitarianism" existed, it wouldn't have happened otherwise?

If Jeremy Bentham had not come up with utilitarianism, I don't think classical liberalism as we know it would exist today. He came up with a remarkable number of what we now consider "right" answers in the social sciences. And he obviously influenced plenty of important folks, including e.g. John Stuart Mill.

If that hadn't happened, I think other ideas would be more important instead, e.g. natural law and perhaps some vague appeals to egalitarianism.

Comment author: Adele_L 25 July 2013 05:24:55PM 4 points [-]

He came up with a remarkable number of what we now consider "right" answers in the social sciences.

Do you have some specific examples of these?