You are right, I was getting confused by the name. And the wikipedia article is pretty bad in that it doesn’t give a proper concise definition, at least none that I can find. SEP is better.
It still looks like you need some consequentialism in the explanation, though.
Any topic for which Wikipedia and SEP don’t both have articles suffices :-). I think you mean: “I have yet to find a topic on which both Wikipedia and SEP have articles, and for which the Wikipedia article is better.” With which I strongly agree. SEP is really excellent.
I’m using one variety of “if”, used in some particular contexts when writing in English. I was doing so only for amusement—of course I don’t imagine that anyone has trouble understanding Jayson_Virissimo’s meaning—and from the downvotes it looks as if most readers found it less amusing than I hoped. Can’t win ’em all.
But it’s no more “not English” than many uses of, e.g., the following words on LW: “friendly”, “taboo”, “simple”, “agency”, “green”. (“Friendly” as in “Friendly AI”, which means something much more specific than ordinary-English “friendly”; “taboo” as in the technique of explaining a term without using that term or other closely-related ones; “simple” in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity, according to which e.g. a “many-worlds” universe is simpler than a collapsing-wave-function one despite being in some sense much bigger and fuller of strange things; “agency” meaning the quality of acting on one’s own initiative even when there are daunting obstacles; “green” as the conventional name for a political/tribal group, typically opposed to “blue”.)
[this post is not in Up-Goer-5-ese]
The name for the type of moral theory in which
is “consequentialism.” Utilitarianism is a kind of consequentialism.
You are right, I was getting confused by the name. And the wikipedia article is pretty bad in that it doesn’t give a proper concise definition, at least none that I can find. SEP is better.
It still looks like you need some consequentialism in the explanation, though.
I have yet to find a topic, such that, if both Wikipedia and SEP have an article about it, the Wikipedia version is better.
Any topic for which Wikipedia and SEP don’t both have articles suffices :-). I think you mean: “I have yet to find a topic on which both Wikipedia and SEP have articles, and for which the Wikipedia article is better.” With which I strongly agree. SEP is really excellent.
You’re not using English “if”.
I’m using one variety of “if”, used in some particular contexts when writing in English. I was doing so only for amusement—of course I don’t imagine that anyone has trouble understanding Jayson_Virissimo’s meaning—and from the downvotes it looks as if most readers found it less amusing than I hoped. Can’t win ’em all.
But it’s no more “not English” than many uses of, e.g., the following words on LW: “friendly”, “taboo”, “simple”, “agency”, “green”. (“Friendly” as in “Friendly AI”, which means something much more specific than ordinary-English “friendly”; “taboo” as in the technique of explaining a term without using that term or other closely-related ones; “simple” in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity, according to which e.g. a “many-worlds” universe is simpler than a collapsing-wave-function one despite being in some sense much bigger and fuller of strange things; “agency” meaning the quality of acting on one’s own initiative even when there are daunting obstacles; “green” as the conventional name for a political/tribal group, typically opposed to “blue”.)