2) That God is a utilitarian and sacrifices some men to hellfire in order to maximize total heavenly happiness, glory, or whatever. In some situations God may be faced with two choices, such as to save Smith and Robinson by condemning Jones (or allowing Jones to condemn himself; it does not matter for this case, because praxeologically killing is the same as letting die) versus saving Jones but in the process condemning Smith and Robinson. The inevitable result is God’s choosing the former as resulting in the greater good for whose sake Jones is sacrificed. I don’t like the idea. My solution is to accept that hell is real but to deny that people go there. Hell is empty. God’s power is not so little that He can’t even prevent the summum malum.

I agree that a couple contemplating marriage should know everything about each other, including their sexual “kinks.” But it is not necessary that they know each other intimately, i.e., by experience.

They should know each other abstractly, and on the basis of these data decide whether they are compatible or want to spend their life with each other, but not through intimate experience.

I don’t need to jump from a 7th story of a building or eat rat poison to know that I’ll die if I do so. I can know lots of things without testing them on myself.

Update. So, if there was a girl I really liked and even thought I might want to marry, I’d sit her down and ask: “So, honey, what are your sexual perversions? And you have to be honest: if you like it with animals, say, then you’d better tell me now, before I have to, as per Ex 22:19 or Lev 18:23, you know, stone you. And please don’t seduce my cat.”

But there is another sense of indifference. Nature is not indifferent to man’s endeavors to change it, to make it suit his desires better. It allows human beings to manipulate it. If nature were indifferent to men in the second sense, then it would treat them with contempt. It would say, in effect: “I despise you and spit on your pathetic attempts to act on me. I will not yield nor condescend to be altered by you.” Nature gives up its secrets, given sufficient and proper effort, and nature is responsive to human action. A truly indifferent nature would simply crush us, giving us no chance to live.

Consider your own house. This is nature, a crucial part of your environment. Home improvement is a huge industry. Your house is very malleable, and you decide what to create out of it. The power is yours.

Nature says to men: “Do with me as you please. I dare you: make something useful out of me. Civilize me, if you are good enough.” Now, of course, there are rules you must know to manipulate nature: nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. But learning the rules is, too, part of mastering and subduing nature. This is not at all indifference. That is a very friendly and amiable attitude of nature toward men.

Thus, when faced with a disease, a Westerner would want to develop a drug to cure the disease. An Easterner would want to control his consciousness, manage his internal experience, so that the disease does not bother him. A yogi may be poor, malnourished, and sick, but his consciousness flows in such a way that he is unaffected by these external maladies.

“Yet the psychiatrist who enjoys his trade is also receiving constant feedback: the way the patient holds himself, the expression on his face, the hesitation in his voice, the content of the material he brings up in the therapeutic hour — all these bits of information are important clues the psychiatrist uses to monitor the progress of the therapy. The difference between a surgeon and a psychiatrist is that the former considers blood and excision the only feedback worth attending to, whereas the latter considers the signals reflecting a patient’s state of mind to be significant information. The surgeon judges the psychiatrist to be soft because he is interested in such ephemeral goals; the psychiatrist thinks the surgeon crude for his concentration on mechanics.” (Flow, 56)

Isn’t it odd for a person who has written a treatise on happiness to despise people who are not like him, in fact, people who simply perform other tasks within social cooperation? And moreover, to ascribe to those other people the predilection for having similar contempt for himself?

Judging from a few sentences here and there, our author is very insecure about his science. Studying consciousness appears to him to be a “soft” endeavor, not unlike the far “harder” chemistry and even biology. How boring.

Mises has this to say about economics:

“It is common with narrow-minded people to reflect upon every respect in which other people differ from themselves. The camel in the fable takes exception to all other animals for not having a hump, and the Ruritanian criticizes the Laputanian for not being a Ruritanian. The research worker in the laboratory considers it as the sole worthy home of inquiry, and differential equations as the only sound method of expressing the results of scientific thought. He is simply incapable of seeing the epistemological problems of human action. For him economics cannot be anything but a kind of mechanics.” (Human Action, 8)

Oh well.

Wouldn’t this solve the bioethical problems, if God told each individual when and where to die? Maybe God does tell but only to His chosen saints. Here is another reason to be holy: you don’t have to worry whether to cling to life or let go; you get God’s explicit guidance before death.

The reason for man’s civilizational success is the recognition of higher productivity of divided labor and therefore of the usefulness of association even on the global scale. Hauser says that dolphins also have some rudimentary division of labor during cooperative hunts. Of course, human social bonds and their specializations are permanent, unlike, I assume, those of dolphins. Is it the case that a particular dolphin would always be a driver, having developed the right skills, and others would always be barriers? If so, then division of labor is, though understood as causing prosperity by humans, would still exist in an instinctive form in dolphins, though Hauser does not tell us.

I think, therefore, that, though human prudence is enlightened by the speculative intellect and therefore far exceeds the capacities of animal prudence, the difference is one of degree not kind. What separates man from the animals with respect to morality is love not prudence, though the fact that all other people in the world can be loved at least for their usefulness to the agent is due to understanding of the basics of social cooperation. The clue is that this understanding is fairly sublime, as is realizing the long-term harmony of interests of all human beings, and people do easily hate the foreigners, in the US from the Chinese to the Mexicans. In other words, it is the capacity to love not love’s reach, intensity, or even that natural love can be upgraded to charity that makes man unique and makes morality apply to him.

Therefore, animals can never be utilitarians, because they can’t be disinterestedly benevolent impartial spectators over some group of people which is the form of love required by utilitarianism.