Today's soundtrack is Nine Inch Nails: Bad Witch, an album that isn't at all what I expected. I was initially disappointed by it; I was listening to it at a moderate volume while driving in the car with the windows down, and kept noticing that there were quietly repetitive sections. But later, I turned it up and discovered that the album is very experimental; it has lots of interludes, minimal vocals, and atypical song structures. The more I've been listening to it, the more I've enjoyed it. One track that stands out in particular for me is "Play the Goddamn Part," which is reminiscent of the haunting soundtrack from the Black Lodge scenes in the show Twin Peaks.
This afternoon, I'm reading the next section of Alain Stephen's This Book Will Make You Think, "Mill."
John Stuart Mill was greatly influenced by Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism. Mill was the author of On Liberty (which I own, and am looking forward to reading! C'mon, Randomizer!). Like Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill believed that the goodness of a thing was measured by how much "happiness and pleasure [it gave to] the largest majority" (p. 24). Where Mill is marked as evolving Bentham's idea of utilitarianism is that he formulated a system by which he ranked happiness and pleasure; Bentham believed that the quality of the thing providing pleasure was irrelevant, but Mill believed that, given two acts that give pleasure, one could be more good: for example, participating in an intellectually stimulating group project is high on the quality of pleasure scale, whereas passively watching South Park, while arguably a pleasurable experience, is a lower-quality pleasure.
