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This being said, utilitarianism is an ethical theory that specifies our sole moral obligation as being to maximise the total amount of ‘intrinsic value’ in the world, as tallied up from a disembodied, impartial, cosmic vantage point called ‘the point of view of the Universe’. From this view, it doesn’t matter how value – which utilitarian hedonists equate with pleasure – is distributed among people across space and time. All that matters is the total net sum.
It started as a fringe philosophical theory about humanity’s future. It’s now richly funded and increasingly dangerous
Émile P Torres
The reason that focus groups and capitalist feedback systems fail, even when they generate commodities that are immensely popular, is that people do not know what they want.
Capitalist Realism
Mark Fisher
All my mania for culture, for ‘really good’ things, for knowing about jazz recordings and red wine and Danish furniture, even about Keats and Shakespeare and James Baldwin, what if it’s all a form of vanity, or even worse, a little bandage over the initial wound of my origins? I have put between myself and my parents such a gulf of sophistication that it’s impossible for them to touch me now or to reach me at all. And I look back across that gulf, not with a sense of guilt or loss, but with relief and satisfaction. Am I better than they are? Certainly not, although maybe luckier.
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Sally Rooney
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