Livre d'Or

Yeah, I don't think utilitarianism is inherently stupid, I just got annoyed with the guy at Veizla for claiming it's the "only rational" basis for morality. And obviously if you're trying for the greatest happiness for the greatest number, you're still going to make sensible calculations and not be completely short term like: must kill myself to donate all my organs! or other ridiculous parodies of utilitarianism.

It's notoriously hard to articulate how connectedness and morality work together. I'm sort of ok with that, because I suspect an effective moral system is not going to be reducible to a simple statement or formula. It's something to do with how much responsibility you have being proportional to how much influence you have. Also people like Buber and Levinas always sound really sensible to me when other people explain their moral philosophies, but I'm not confident I can explain why I agree with them very well. They were somewhat reacting against Heidegger in the light of the fact that if you try to make a purely objective / rational moral system without taking into account any personal relationships, you kind of end up with Naziism. (Sorry, Godwin!)