Astral Codex Ten

Bentham’s Bulldog

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Bentham’s Bulldog

Article

Bentham’s Bulldog is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between May 29, 2024 and February 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Bentham’s Bulldog has been going over some of the evidence for Christianity”; “Blogger “Bentham’s Bulldog” recently wrote Shut Up About Slave Morality”; “But (asks Bentham’s Bulldog) why do we need this guy?“. It most often appears alongside US, Berkeley, Christianity.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: May 29, 2024
  • Last seen: February 21, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
14: Related: Bentham’s Bulldog has been going over some of the evidence for Christianity, of which the most interesting is the story of St. Joseph of Cupertino (no, he didn’t work for Apple; it’s also a town in Italy - the Cupertino in California is named after him). Apparently St. Joseph could levitate, this was well-documented by everyone he met, and the Inquisition (which was concerned he might be a witch) investigated and got many eyewitness reports. Wikipedia has a more skeptical take, but I’m more interested in how well the Christianity hypothesis predicts this “evidence”.
Inline links: some of the evidence for Christianity, a more skeptical take
Grant that if God exists, that makes it possible for a monk to levitate. But God usually sticks to the laws of nature. If He was going to violate them, you would think He would do it to save the Holocaust victims, or give the Crusaders AK-47s, not to let one weird monk levitate occasionally. Bulldog tries to salvage this by saying God is very committed to natural law except occasionally to bring people to the faith. But then why levitate a random monk in 1650, rather than have every Pope be constantly two inches off the ground? I think you’d have to claim that God will only violate the laws of Nature in cases that will bring a tiny number of people to the faith but leave the vast majority unmoved, which is such a weird preference that I think you can no longer call it a “prediction” of the “God exists” hypothesis.
Inline links: tries to salvage this
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
July 30, 2024 · Original source
I. Bentham’s Bulldog
Blogger “Bentham’s Bulldog” recently wrote Shut Up About Slave Morality.
Inline links: Shut Up About Slave Morality
But (asks Bentham’s Bulldog) why do we need this guy? Isn’t slave morality, with its concern for charity, peace, and equality - simply correct? Isn’t master morality - with its barbarian warlords bragging about how their golden palaces make them better than peasants - just wrong?
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
Bentham’s Bulldog, whose surprise that anyone would endorse master morality inspired the post, wrote:
Inline links: wrote
The idea that "slave morality is morality" might be right, but only if we agree that "morality" is just "whatever popular opinion accepts right now." That's a legitimate view that many scholars hold! But others dispute it, in various ways, on various grounds. It's not a surprise that someone called "Bentham's Bulldog" would be skeptical; Bentham, after all, declared "rights" to be "nonsense," and "natural rights" to be "nonsense on stilts." But if you think, for example, that you have individual rights that cannot be permissibly violated by a democratically elected government, then you think there is something more to morality than the weight of public opinion--and that view is not compatible with the idea that slave morality is morality.
Bulldog wrote a fuller reply on his own blog, Neither Master Nor Slave But Utilitarian, which I mostly agree with. But I don’t think utilitarianism (or any other philosophy) removes the need to think in these terms. In theory, you should be neither right nor left, neither capitalist nor communist, neither pro-US nor pro-China, simply choosing The Good at every opportunity without reference to puny mortal concepts. In practice you have to use some kind of heuristic and join some kind of coalition, and so all these things become important again.
Inline links: Neither Master Nor Slave But Utilitarian
Links For September 2024
September 12, 2024 · Original source
45: Debating which candidate has better policies seems so almost comical these days - isn’t everyone already sure which candidate is an ontologically-evil commie Nazi, and which is a bold hero riding in to save the Union? Still, a few people have taken on this thankless task, most notably Richard Hanania for Trump and Jeff Maurer for Harris. The most compelling pro-Trump argument is that Harris endorses some utterly idiotic economic policies (eg price controls) that could make everyone poorer and (if doubled down upon) knock the US into corrupt perma-stagnation like the worse parts of Europe, and these are so comically bad that they should override Harris’ advantages in other areas. But Maurer argues that even sticking to economics (Trump’s relatively non-crazy area), once you add up Trump’s proposed tariffs, threats to Fed independence, and NIMBYism he doesn’t look any better than Harris here - and then he loses on the non-economic and character issues. And Bentham’s Bulldog (pro-Harris) and Samuel Hammond (pro-Trump) make cases of their own within a more specifically EA framework around existential risks, etc.
Inline links: Richard Hanania, Jeff Maurer, Bentham’s Bulldog, Samuel Hammond
Open Thread 359
December 09, 2024 · Original source
And here’s Bentham’s Bulldog trying to convince you to donate to the Shrimp Welfare Project. “I’d be surprised if we got to heaven, asked God what the highest [moral] impact thing that we could have done is, and his answer was ‘oh, something very normal and within the Overton window.’”
Inline links: Bentham’s Bulldog trying to convince you to donate to the Shrimp Welfare Project
Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe
February 21, 2025 · Original source
1: Comments On Specific Technical Points 2: Comments From Bentham’s Bulldog’s Response 3: Comments On Philosophical Points, And Getting In Fights
The anthropic principle weakly suggests that somewhere there might be things that can't be fully explained in terms of other things, but the alternative (everything can be explained in an infinite regress, so that for each level there's always a lower one) is absurd. Comments From Bentham’s Bulldog’s Response Bentham’s Bulldog wrote a response, Contra Scott Alexander On Whether Tegmark’s View Defeats Most Theistic Arguments.
Inline links: Contra Scott Alexander On Whether Tegmark’s View Defeats Most Theistic Arguments
Bentham’s Bulldog wrote a response, Contra Scott Alexander On Whether Tegmark’s View Defeats Most Theistic Arguments.
Inline links: Contra Scott Alexander On Whether Tegmark’s View Defeats Most Theistic Arguments