For the moment, they are the revellers, but they also are the prisoners. The part that I didn't say is that the lords have not won any eternal victory, though they are temporarily free to indulge in worldly pleasures and their enemies are in chains. I would explain why materialism is wrong if Leibniz hadn't done it for me 300 years ago (see his mill argument so far I haven't heard a counter-argument that isn't meaningless word-jugglery, though if you have one I'd be very interested to hear it, and I say that without an ounce of Tharaz your intuition is right, I did not tell the full story in my original post. Why don't I like materialism? Merely because it is wrong and I prefer doctrines that are right. It fits within the overall materialist programme of arguing objects rather than the subjective unity of knowledge to be the prime substance or thing-in-itself. Utilitarianism is connected to materialism in that it is a characteristically materialistic ethical doctrine-just as materialism conceives of the world in terms of the motion of portions matter in relation to each other in time and space, so utilitarianism conceives of goodness as portions of positive and negative utility which constitute a global average or aggregate by virtue of their relations to each other. I said that individuals decide what is good without agreeing with each other and then provided an example of individuals doing just that. I don't know what you mean when you say that my banquet/dungeon example doesn't explain my initial conclusion. I don't have rigorous empirical research to support my claim that large number of English-speaking intellectuals espouse the doctrine, but given this robust intellectual tradition and the fact that utilitarianism is very intuitive and commonly held by regular people I meet, I think it's unreasonable to assume that no such number exists. You may ask whether we should or should not- irrespective of who we are-provide for the needs of the greater part of mankind instead those of the few, but this negates the individuation of agents that is the basis of all I brought up Bentham because he's the prototypical English utilitarian (Mill was his disciple) and because utilitarianism has historically been expounded chiefly by English-speaking philosophers such as Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and Peter Singer. The principle of morality is not the commandments set in stone for all mankind to follow but the individual man and his will. Just as a building may imitate the timewise rhythm of music with its spacewise symmetries and melody with its embellishments, so commandments have a syntactic structure that imitates voluntary action-but words are not deeds. Goethe called architecture "petrified music" in like manner, I think that commandments or 'oughts', as they are sometimes called, are petrified morality.
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