Today's post, The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism" was originally published on 28 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

 

Our intuitions, the underlying cognitive tricks that we use to build our thoughts, are an indespensible part of our cognition. The problem is that many of those intuitions are incoherent, or are undesirable upon reflection. But if you try to "renormalize" your intuition, you wind up with what is essentially utilitarianism.


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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Circular Altruism, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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