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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   28400 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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Adelstein ("Bentham's Bulldog") is a gifted philosophy grad student (I think--he was last year identified as a second year philosophy student in a well-regarded program). It's very impressive that he has multiple publications in top journals as a student. But his particular gift seems to be finding implausible positions and developing intuition pumps for them while neatly evading all the reasons why they are, even so, implausible. This is a good way to garner notoriety in the field. It is, not coincidentally, how Peter Singer really got famous. It is arguably why Jeremy Bentham is famous.

But I have to say that it is always disappointing to me when philosophers optimize for notoriety over the love of wisdom.

I think that all utilitarianism is mistaken, of course, because I am a contractualist who rejects aggregation. But Adelstein's take on veganism strikes me as aggressively, surely willfully obtuse--my priors are that it is more likely Adelstein is engaged in a kind of extended performance art, driven by the attention and notoriety he is accumulating, than that he is doing serious philosophy about the way the world really is. These are luxury beliefs par excellence--and maybe also anxieties of the sort that make people mentally ill. I guess I might be more willing to believe Adelstein was serious if I saw him walking around everywhere with a broom and facemask--and if he does, he's still wrong, but at least he's not performatively wrong.

I guess I might be more willing to believe Adelstein was serious if I saw him walking around everywhere with a broom and facemask--and if he does, he's still wrong, but at least he's not performatively wrong.

When I saw the article, the thought occurred to me that it was an awful lot of work to re-invent Jainism.

At one point I knew his name and his position as a grad student. Thanks.

But Adelstein's take on veganism strikes me as aggressively, surely willfully obtuse

They appear to becoming more like performance art with time, which is likely the product of a growing audience.

They appear to becoming more like performance art with time, which is likely the product of a growing audience.

This is absolutely my impression also.

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