I am hesitant to do back-to-back critiques of Stefan Molyneux, because I don’t want the blog to become the “Contra Molyneux” journal. However, in his Christmas podcast, Stefan made a number of titillating and curious assertions, that I just couldn’t resist. He did not offer a thorough defense of any of them in the podcast, but we can excuse this on the ground that at least some of these are defended elsewhere, and were only presuppositions necessary for the present discussion.
It seems to me, that the problem of desire has three plausible attitudinal responses:
The hedonic approach: there is a never-ending supply of desirable things, and life is best lived by pursuing them all. Want is sated when all desirable things have been had. The goal, then, is pleasure at all times, as an equivalent to happiness.
The ascetic / Buddhist approach: the things to be desired are never-ending, which means there will never be a time when all desirable things are had. This means that want will never cease, and that leads to suffering. The goal then, is to rid ourselves of desire, and in so doing, free ourselves of the anchor of the body, which impedes the pursuit of true happiness.
…after more than two thousand years the same discussions continue, philosophers are still ranged under the same contending banners, and neither thinkers nor mankind at large seem nearer to being unanimous on the subject, than when the youth Socrates listened to the old Protagoras, and asserted… the theory of utilitarianism against the popular morality of the so-called sophist… ~John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
I wonder, sometimes, if Mill had ever actually read the Protagoras. The reason is, because having read that dialogue and the Gorgias many times, it makes no sense to me that Mill would be claiming that it was Socrates that was advocating for the pleasure principle, as against Protagoras. If Mill had read the dialogue, then perhaps the problem is that he was missing a layer of ironic sarcasm in his interpretation. I wouldn’t put it past Mill (or Bentham, for that matter) to be somewhat lacking in the capacity for contextual subtlety, given the enthusiasm with which they embraced a view of human nature utterly devoid of anything like it. To let Mill speak for himself:
In recent years, it has been speculated that Jeremy Bentham was an autist. This speculation arises out of Bentham’s extreme attempts at systematizing human interactions in his formulation of Utilitarianism. Though I realize modern Utilitarianism is much more sophisticated now (in various forms of sociology and econometrics), I think they all still suffer from the fundamental assumptions laid down by Bentham. In this essay, I will show how one of those basic tenets leads to absurd conclusions, and hides imported value assumptions from other forms of ethics. What better way to do this, than with Philippa Foot’s trolley problem, a common modern tool of the Utilitarian.
