#utilitarian

But if all maximizing models are really arguing is that “people will always seek to maximize something,” then they obviously can’t predict anything, which means employing them can hardly be said to make anthropology more scientific. All they really add to analysis is a set of assumptions about human nature. The assumption, most of all, that no one ever does anything primarily out of concern for others; that whatever one does, one is only trying to get something out of it for oneself. In common English, there is a word for this attitude. It’s called “cynicism.” Most of us try to avoid people who take it too much to heart. In economics, apparently, they call it “science. ↗

— David Graeber

#pomo #rational-choice-theory #utilitarianism #attitude

For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian. ↗

— Ama Ata Aidoo

#artist #authoritarianism #corruption #embarrass #expose

I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian. ↗

— Dave Eggers

#amount #beautiful #bike #bikes #both

But on a utilitarian level, I realize that to try to accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number of people, sometimes we have to become salesmen for what we believe, and part of being a salesman is being effective. ↗

— Moby

#become #being #believe #effective #good

I'm a Utilitarian, so I don't see the rule against lying as absolute; it's always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise. ↗

— Peter Singer

#against #always #exercise #i #lying

All social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have been tolerated; forgetful that they themselves perhaps tolerate other inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last learnt to condemn. The entire history of social improvement has been a series of transitions, by which one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of a universally stigmatised injustice and tyranny. So it has been with the distinctions of slaves and freemen, nobles and serfs, patricians and plebeians; and so it will be, and in part already is, with the aristocracies of colour, race, and sex. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#racism #sexism #social-injustice #utilitarianism #equality

I have a utilitarian approach to dressing; as long as I quite like it and it covers me up, I don't care what it is. ↗

— Jo Brand

#care #covers #dressing #i #like

The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die...His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such. He gives way without reserve to his most powerful passion and the wishes it engenders. ↗

— Allan Bloom

#death

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria. ↗

— David Lodge

#cathedrals #criteria #existence #justify #modern

In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact. ↗

— Jean Piaget

#contact #external #external world #immediate #in other words