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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Utilitarianism threatens the meaning of individual lives

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Personal projects and partial relationships help give our lives meaning
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.The demandingness of utilitarianism threatens personal projects and partial relationships
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Utilitarianism requires agents to treat their own life-narrative as merely instrumental to aggregate welfare, dissolving authorial selfhood.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.Meaningful lives require what Korsgaard calls 'practical identity'—a self-conception from which one acts—which impartial maximization systematically undermines.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 3.Bernard Williams's integrity objection shows that when utility demands betraying one's ground projects, it severs the psychological continuity constitutive of a life's meaning.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Narrative theories of meaning (MacIntyre, Ricoeur) hold that a life has meaning only insofar as it exhibits teleological coherence across time toward self-chosen ends.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.Utilitarian replaceability—the view that any agent's projects matter only contingently—renders individual life-trajectories perpetually revisable by external calculation.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 3.A life whose defining commitments are permanently hostage to aggregate recalculation cannot possess the narrative unity that constitutes biographical meaning.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

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