The Limited Role of Utility Calculations in Moral Judgment
A class on moral philosophy screwed me up for a while early in college. All the critical thinking and fancy vocabulary about the topic made me think morality was in some way real - I was all concerned about violating &quot;moral laws.&quot; It&#x27;s amazing how smart people can be so grossly deluded and incorrect about things like this.<p>&quot;Am I wasting my potential?! Is this action maximizing my contribution to general welfare?! Is Famous Person better than me because he helped more people?!&quot; Totally neurotic.<p>This kicked off an era of serious philosophizing, and I began to see countless contradictions and paradoxes with utilitarianism, etc.<p>For example, I started to see that the notion of &quot;selfhood&quot; was just a social invention or cognitive construct, because I reasoned that we&#x27;re just perpetually changing aspects of nature, and our separateness is just opinion. So then I wondered how the hell anyone could be deserving of blame or credit if they don&#x27;t actually exist, or if it was their &quot;former self&quot; who committed the crime, etc.<p>It&#x27;s kind of annoying but cute to see some popular &quot;thinkers&quot; and writers -- fancy-smarty-pants _neuroscientists_ and _atheists_, even -- who actually think morality is real, as though there are actual objective problems out there somewhere. As though you could actually do a &quot;bad thing&quot; or a &quot;good thing.&quot; That grinds my gears a little because it&#x27;s very hypocritical: They&#x27;ll write an entire book disparaging religious people who  believe things without evidence, and they&#x27;ll write another book on why, according to their pseudoscientific-philosophical horse shit, morality can be &quot;derived from science&quot; [vomit].<p>But it&#x27;s easy for smart people to cling to morality as an existential anchor point when they don&#x27;t have religion to fall back on. It&#x27;s hard to accept that you&#x27;re in free fall. But it&#x27;s nice once you come around and accept reality for what it is.