Bulldog
Article
Bulldog is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 08, 2024 and February 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “to be clear, I’m not suggesting Bulldog said the opposite”; “Bulldog mentions consciousness, psychophysical harmony, and moral knowledge”; “I’ve talked about this with Bulldog before”. It most often appears alongside Aristotle, Bentham, Bentham’s Bulldog.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: August 08, 2024
- Last seen: February 27, 2025
Appears In
- Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
- Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe
- Links For February 2025
Related Pages
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- Aristotle (2 shared issues)
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- Bentham (2 shared issues)
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- Bentham’s Bulldog (2 shared issues)
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- DeepSeek (2 shared issues)
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- God (2 shared issues)
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- Hitler (2 shared issues)
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- Kamala Harris (2 shared issues)
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- Reddit (2 shared issues)
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- Richard Hanania (2 shared issues)
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- Scott (2 shared issues)
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- Scott Alexander (2 shared issues)
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- Twitter (2 shared issues)
External Links
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.
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.
Bentham’s Bulldog, whose surprise that anyone would endorse master morality inspired the post, wrote:
Inline links: wrote
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
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.
Bentham’s Bulldog wrote a response, Contra Scott Alexander On Whether Tegmark’s View Defeats Most Theistic Arguments.
38: Bulldog has an analysis of how much it costs to offset meat-eating by donating to animal welfare charities (he thinks about $23/month).
Inline links: an analysis of how much it costs