Anyone willing to give my book a read?

/u/5h1b3's comments are pretty much on point. I would echo the things he said. I read most of it except I skimmed some of the middle and later dialogue sections because to be honest the format and concept becomes a bit repetitive - maybe that's just because some of the principles and concepts of their society weren't particularly striking or new to me. It's an interesting concept of story and it works well. For the story itself you might want to get opinions from some literature/writing related subs because I really don't know anything about writing.

I definitely liked the concepts that were put forward regarding history education, lying, and religion.

Well the goal is to take utilitarianism to the extreme where it becomes absurd, but I was trying to keep it all under the whole the ends justify the means type of thing. Could you tell me which parts specifically didn't seem very utilitarian to you, and how they could be adjusted?

I don't think you really can take utilitarianism to the point where it becomes absurd and self-defeating; the further you take it, you just approximate perfect utilitarian decisions. There's no balance to be had between ideological extremes; there's just good choices and bad choices. But that's just how I look at it...

Now I don't want to get nitpicky with their society and I know you were trying to explore some ideas rather than making a scientific case study of a hypothetical society, but there were two aspects which didn't quite convince me - I don't see how the abolition of sexuality would be helpful to them; vasectomies would probably be preferable to castrations. I would really imagine a society where people are chemically induced to fall in love with each other, because, well that's pretty much the best feeling in the world so it seems odd that the utilitarians would avoid it. You did a good job making the society feel actually utilitarian (as opposed to spartan, cold, and functional - the layman definition of utilitarian), up until this point. Secondly, the justice system doesn't look efficient at all. I would envision a much more complex series of options like counselings, mental therapy, batteries of drugs, and movies which simulate the offender to be redeeming himself, just as some ideas. It takes a lot of cost to society to raise someone to adulthood and educate them, only to have it all washed away because an advanced civilization doesn't know how to reform a criminal? I don't really think so. The way prisoners are killed doesn't seem too useful when there are such realistic movies available which could show the same thing. The ending was good though.

But yeah change the name to, like, anything.

/r/askphilosophy Thread