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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2738 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 10, 2024

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If you have a secular ethical framework that is not utilitarianism or something utilitarian-adjacent (eg consequentialism), what is it? I’m having a difficult time imagining a system that can’t be understood through some broadly-conceived utilitarian underpinning.

My framework tends to be a sort of virtue ethics derived from a mix of Aristotelian teleology and Xunzi's atheistic strain of Confucianism, further reinforced by a sort of "natural law" theory with emphasis on the concept of evolutionary adaptations. In particular, beyond Xunzi himself, I find Alexander Eustice-Corwin's "Confucianism After Darwin" particularly insightful.

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