Rex Kerr
1 min readOct 11, 2022

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I think you're absolutely right, but there are two problems.

First, why should human flourishing be the standard of value? Why? Sputtering around saying stuff like "put your hand on a hot stove!" only tells me that (1) Harris fundamentally doesn't understand Hume's objection and (2) I'm reminded that I'm not a masochist and being burned hurts so I will essentially involuntarily not want to do it. Involuntarily disliking having my hand badly burned is not a reason. So...why? Harris never actually tells us.

Second, given what he chose ("human flourishing"), there are already a host of questions about its coherence as a goal. Present people vs future people? Do numbers of people alive matter? How many transcendent experiences listening to Beethoven's 5th make up for one hand on a hot stove? That is, it's got all the usual utilitarian flaws (some of which Ben pointed out)--and it is not at all obvious what the answers are if you pick a distributed goal like "human flourishing". If you pick a non-distributed goal like "it goes like D. Trump wants" then, sure, any time you have a tricky decision you ask the authority. But optimizing distributed value is tricky when it comes to people since most naive attempts admit unspeakably barbaric actions and/or extraordinarily counterproductive ones.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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