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In China, until about 100 years ago people believed that if your husband died, no matter how young you were, you could not remarry. They thought that… - Yew-Kwang Ng
" "In China, until about 100 years ago people believed that if your husband died, no matter how young you were, you could not remarry. They thought that violating ‘chastity’ was obviously immoral – you didn’t have to justify this in terms of happiness! But I think this is very bad. Today many believe that it is only foolish, ancient people who think such silly things – modern people no longer do. For that particular idea, yes. But even now...throughout the world we still hold many such traditional beliefs which are similarly detrimental to happiness!
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About Yew-Kwang Ng
Yew-Kwang Ng (Chinese: 黄有光; born 1942) is a Malaysian-Australian economist. Ng is a Professor of Economics at Fudan University, Shanghai, and a Distinguished Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. He has published in a variety of academic disciplines and is best known for his work in welfare economics.
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Alternative Names:
Huang Youguang
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Additional quotes by Yew-Kwang Ng
As there are many areas of inadequate optimization (departures), and resource limitation and information costs prevent the rectification of all these departures, the pursuit of a more desirable future through either private effective altruism or governmental policies is subset to the challenge of the second-best theory (where the presence of uncorrectable distortions complicates the pursuit of desirable policies elsewhere through interdependence)...Despite the nihilistic implication of the second-best theory on the impossibility of piecemeal welfare policies...the third-best theory shows that the government or effective altruists may increase at least the expected welfare by focusing on areas of serious inadequate optimization, taking into account the indirect effects if information allows.
[W]hile the problem of interpersonal comparability of utility is a tricky one, it is not insoluble in principle. It is conceivable that, perhaps several hundred (or a thousand) years from now, neurology may have advanced to the stage where the level of happiness can be accurately correlated to some cerebral reaction that can be measured by a ‘eudaimonometer’. Hence the definition of social welfare [in terms of the sum total of individual happiness] is an objective definition, although the objects are the subjective feelings of individuals.
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One way to see the unacceptability of welfare-independent rights is to ask the question ‘why Right X?’ to a very ultimate level. If the answer is ‘Right X because Y’, then one should ask ‘Why Y?’ For example, if the answer to ‘why free speech?’ is that people enjoy free speech, it is already not welfare-independent. If the answer is free speech deters dictatorship’, then we should ask, ‘Why is it desirable to deter dictatorship?’ If one presses hard enough with such questions, most people will eventually come up with a welfare-related answer.
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