Also, I think there are 2 canards here. First, suffering is actually natural and excusable. It is "natural" in the sense that a certain amount of it is pretty much inevitable and "excusable" in the sense that without it, we would quickly die from walking into pointy sticks and fires (death also being inevitable, but I would like to have it happen far in the future). No amount of rhetoric is going to make that go away. Second, I don't think that there has even been a society or a worldview that believed that suffering should not be minimized. Medicine was not invented by utilitarians, and it does not require a "pleasure is the only goal" wordview. Sextus Empiricus was a... doctor.
----- Original Message ---- From: Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com>
Somebody: It's pretty disappointing to see you give in to the traditional slippery slope argument. There are definitely some sophisticated philosophical critiques out there, but at the end of the day, a pleasure maximizing ethic is a more humane way of life than one which seeks to justify various forms of suffering as natural and excusable, because that's just the way things are.
Luckily, liberal capitalist society is willy-nilly guided by pleasure maximization via the profit motive, which in the long run will produce the same goals as a society guided by Benthamite philosopher kings. It'll just take longer to get there.
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