Scott is just describing . . . what is supposed to happen when you
are confronted with the repugnant conclusion? Yes, if your current set
of axioms lead to [something bad], you should then replace them with a
different set of axioms. That’s not an argument against
philosophy, it’s kinda the whole point.
It's similar to the anti-science types who consider the fact that science changes its conclusions based on new or reevaluated observations to be a weakness.
That whole section IV is an incoherent mess.
>Suppose you have the option to either keep World A or switch to World B, which has the same 5 billion happy people, plus another 5 billion people at happiness 80 (so slightly less happy, but still doing very well). These people aren’t taking any resources from the first group. Maybe they live on an entirely different planet or something. You can create them with no downside to any of the people who already exist. Do you keep World A or switch to World B? **You switch to B, right?** 5 billion extra quite happy people with no downside.
Not *at all* obvious to me that world B is preferable to world A. Maybe I'm not trying to maximize happiness, maybe I should minimize unhappiness instead.
>So now we’ve gone from World A (5 billion people with happiness 100) to World C (10 billion people with happiness 95). You will not be surprised to hear we can repeat the process to go to 20 billion people with happiness 90, 40 billion with 85, and so on, all the way until we reach (let’s say) a trillion people with happiness 0.01. Remember, on our scale, 0 was completely neutral, neither enjoying nor hating life, not caring whether they live or die. So we have gone from a world of 10 billion extremely happy people to a trillion near-suicidal people, **and every step seems logically valid and morally correct.**
These are smart people, and never quite occurs to them that summing utilities might be a bit like summing velocities: an approximation that only works well in non-edge cases like the speed of light.
Like, they learned about the endowment bias, that people are happier to receive 50c than they are to receive $1 that they are taxed 50% on, *despite the fact that they are really just the same thing*. And from that they reason that not having children is morally equivalent to having lots of children and then killing them all at age 10.
>(in case you think this is irrelevant to the real world, I sometimes think about this during debates about immigration. Economists make a strong argument that if you let more people into the country, it will make them better off at no cost to you. But once the people are in the country, you have to change the national culture away from your culture/preferences towards their culture/preferences, or else you are an evil racist.)
WTF Scott. This is not at all an analogous situation. Those people didn't pop into existence the moment they crossed the border; they were real, living, human beings whose happiness we chose to ignore previously. Second, the heavy implication is that "changing the national culture" is a **bad** thing. It was perfect, before, right? It can only get worse? There is no bigotry, no close-mindedness, no violence, no drug epidemic, no rot in *our* civilization -- those must all be foreign imports?
Or that any undesirable effect is not grossly outweighed by the increased happiness of people we had been leaving out of the equation. "What if a trillion people were liberated from torture, in exchange for dust specks in a single man's eye?" These are the moral conundrums rationalists wrestle with.
Yeah Scott, it *does* sound kinda racist when you bring up things only reactionaries care about in a way that's completely irrelevant to the point you're trying to make.
>I hate to disagree with twenty-nine philosophers, but I have never found any of this convincing. Just don’t create new people! I agree it’s slightly awkward to have to say creating new happy people isn’t morally praiseworthy, but it’s only a minor deviation from my intuitions, and accepting any of these muggings is much worse.
*Finally,* some sanity. We are not *required* to accept the conclusion of a *reductio ad absurdum* \-- we can use it as evidence to argue against one of the premises. Thank you, Captain Obvious, for your deep insight here. This has been truly a good use of my time reading this far.
>But I’m not sure I want to play the philosophy game. Maybe MacAskill can come up with some clever proof that the commitments I list above imply I have to have my eyes pecked out by angry seagulls or something. If that’s true, I will just not do that, and switch to some other set of axioms.
Ooops, nope, now we've gone off the deep end again. "If reason leads me to a conclusion I'm not willing to accept -- I'll just reject reason! You can't *force* me to be logical!" Well, no, I can't, but neither can you force me to listen to your bullshit. The only thing that makes you potentially worth listening to is the proposition that you're not just playing epistemic Calvinball -- that at the end of the day you are going pick **some** premises you do accept, you're going to consistent about them and you're going to accept the conclusions that logically follow from them.
I think the main silent assumption being made here is that goodness(A together with B) must be equal to goodness(A) + goodness(B), an assumption that not only doesn't need to be valid, but is also *completely ridiculous* because if it was valid you could just subdivide down to individual little happy atoms.
There's some other logical probing you can do in the same vein if you are willing to talk about brain simulations. You could have "two" brain simulations that are identical down to the last bit, or "one" brain simulation running on a space-rated computer where each transistor has a physically redundant counterpart. The number of copies of something isn't very well defined and requires an outside observer.
So you have reasons to say that goodness(A together A) isn't equal to 2*goodness(A) . That even for planets that have no communication with one another, this "together" operator isn't going to work like a sum.
Of course, the shared problem of rationalists, Scott, most philosophers, and so on and so forth, is that they generally have a rather poor math "vocabulary", which would be completely fine if rationalists weren't LARPing as math nerds.
To make matters worse, if they can't express something mathematically - a process that rationalists are only capable of doing for basic operations on real numbers - they just immediately assume that it must be stupid and irrational - as required for their idea of LARP-ing some Super Rational Math Being.
edit: and of course, the other assumption is that there's even could be a hypothetical "goodness" function that works on the state of the world. This is also obviously wrong. A frozen in time snapshot can neither be happy nor sad, it's just frozen in time, experiencing nothing.
It is *transitions* that have moral value, not the states. That is also in line with human practice (i.e. law), which, even in the US post Roe v Wade overturn, of course distinguishes between not conceiving a child and murdering them, because those are different paths leading to the same lack of a person.
For what it's worth, I'm thinking that there simply isn't any math-y tools available for such questions, and fitting linear functions to things is bound to result in nonsense when you go far.
edit: also I think a lot of this nonsense is prominent for a reason. Ethical philosophy is an applied discipline, much like engineering of a gas chamber. A large body of seemingly harmless musings can still insidiously make assumptions that undermine e.g. the value of equality, without ever even making an explicit argument against equality - and as such be practically useful and receive grants.
I know i's been a while but most philosophy students specializing in analytic philosophy know more set theory and foundationary mathematics than most math students. I did my mathematical logic masters in Amsterdam (which was basically a philosophy program) because no mathematician in Europe except Woodin at Harvard even dealt with inner model theory and he was also teaching at a philosophy department as well as the math one. However if you define math as number theory or things like anabelian geometry, then yes i don't know much but neither do most mathematicians with doctorates in other subfields of theoretical math. I am classified as a logician though.
Prob interesting to onow that various racist types consider (or at least talk about it that way) that culture is genetic. So Scott probably didnt intend to blow the dogwhistle there, but he certainly did.
>You will not be surprised to hear we can repeat the process to go to 20 billion people with happiness 90, 40 billion with 85, and so on, all the way until we reach (let’s say) a trillion people with happiness 0.01.
I would in fact be pretty surprised to hear that it is supposed to scale with the happiness of the rest of the population, taking this entirely at face value
Surely you'd stop repeating the process once it dips below whatever your treshold of sufficient happiness is, if happiness of a maximal amount of people is what you're after to begin with
The threshold of sufficient happiness in this example is defined as 0, which is the level at which people would rather kill themselves than continue living. The central assumption of the whole thought experiment is that a world that has someone who doesn't actively want to kill themselves is better than a world where that person never existed.
Philosophical GIGO.
> if your current set of axioms lead to [something bad], you should then replace them with a different set of axioms
This gets weird when your axioms themselves are supposed to define the conditions of badness
A lot of the time these arguments begin by assuming that (at least some) things which people intuitively see as bad are in fact bad, and it is a point in favor of a moral theory if it conforms to those intuitions.
I think that's a fine place to start thinking about morality but not a great place to end up. If a utilitarian's conclusions are subject to evaluation and rejection by non-utilitarian criteria, then their utilitarianism isn't really pulling its meta-ethical weight and they might want to reconsider whether they are actually a utilitarian at all.
That said, I don't think most rationalists care about meta-ethics, I suspect they just enjoy performing utilitarianism because talking about utils *feels* like doing a smart nerd thing. so when one of them comes out with something along the lines of "shut up and multiply, dust specks are worse than torture", part of me admires the, idk, integrity of it. like, good for y'all, having the courage of your (garbage) convictions over there.
It's less that their conclusions are subject to rejection and more that they're subject to *questioning*. There are a number of ways to answer the question, from rejecting utilitarianism to modifying your utilitarianism to arguing that actually the conclusion is good regardless. It's just that, y'know, if your conclusion is 'child murder is good' or something you're probably going to need to come up with a pretty convincing argument.
And yes, making people reconsider whether they're a utilitarian very much is the point, here.
>so when one of them comes out with something along the lines of "shut up and multiply, dust specks are worse than torture", part of me admires the, idk, integrity of it. like, good for y'all, having the courage of your (garbage) convictions over there.
It just comes off as silly to me. Thinking about things in the exact opposite way to normal people. Normally when your pre-existing beliefs lead you to a conclusion that seems weird or crazy you're supposed to re-evaluate your pre-existing beliefs, not just immediately start believing the weird and crazy thing.
I think there's certainly ways to point out internal inconsistencies in utilitarianism.
For example, they tend to ascribe ethical value to end results rather than transitions, but even they do not expect that stepping into a stasis chamber set to 1000 years while happy would result in 1000 years of of happiness, and stubbing your toe on the way in would result in 1000 years of horrible, fresh stubbed toe pain. Obviously the happiness or pain has something to do with transitioning between states rather than states themselves.
Ascribing ethical value to end results and not to transitions, is entirely inconsistent with anyone's subjective experience (and extrapolations from said subjective experience), the law, etc etc.
I'm not sure that "I have a set of axioms that works well in the world in which we actually live, but breaks down under very extreme and unrealistic conditions" is a particularly bad way to be.
The point of bringing up these extreme and unrealistic conditions isn't 'oh, if you are ever *actually in this specific situation* these axioms aren't going to work', it's more that 'if they give the wrong answer in this situation, how do you know they're right in any other situation?'
Whether it's a bad way to be or not really depends on your goals. If you claim to have an accurate moral theory, I'm not going to take you very seriously if you're not willing to do the work to confront contradictions in it.
Well, if your "ethical equations" are all linear, it would make perfect sense that they're an approximation that breaks down away from which ever place you took the partial derivatives at.
E.g. you may assume that "happiness" of the whole is equal to happiness of the parts, and of course that can't be an universal rule because otherwise you'd just subdivide it all down to little happy quarks making up a happy person which is obviously idiotic. (Of course, some people just boldly proclaim that happy people consist of happy quarks, but that stance is mostly regarded as stupid by almost everyone).
Or you may assume that "happiness" is not a property of dynamic transitions but a property of an instant in time. Which is of course idiotic; no one expects to experience 1000 years of happiness by happily walking into a fictional stasis chamber set to 1000 years.
Basically, you can maybe assign a moral worth to a *path* taken by something, but definitely not to any individual point on the end of the path or along the path.
There's no good reason why talking of preference of world A over world B even has to make sense in the first place. Maybe the comparison operator can't be defined for "goodness" of two different worlds, maybe you can only compare between paths that one world took. That would also match the legal system where there's a huge difference between not conceiving someone and conceiving them then murdering them a decade or two later.
What if adding one person's "utility" to another person's "utility" is not well defined, much like adding your position (as in, a place within the world) to someone else's position is not well defined in the physical world? Just because you can represent where you are with coordinates doesn't mean that addition of coordinates would make sense.
> it's more that 'if they give the wrong answer in this situation, how do you know they're right in any other situation?'
Because that's a testable question.
You can have axioms that, like the Bohr model or Newton's gravity or whatever, work just fine for everyday purposes but break down under more precise or extreme conditions. The problem isn't that you have a simplified model, the problem is that you tried to extend that model way too far and ignored the error terms (which is arguably the core problem a lot of rats have).
We use Newtonian physics only under conditions where we know that the Newtonian calculation would be supported by the supra-Newtonian physics; with arguments against utilitarianism, there is doubt that the utilitarian framework would be supported *at all* by a better theory even under such limited conditions. Appealing to “but it’s just a simplified model you don’t want to extend too far” doesn’t work *when the simplified model is itself contested*.
It’s the same goddamn thing, every time, and we have to do the same
goddamn song and dance each time too.
The reason these guys hate philosophy is because philosophers are
usually the first people to spot their bullshit.
These guys are doing philosophy when they write this stuff,
they just don’t realize they’re all empiricists in the long line of
empiricists going back through the Enlightenment, into the Scholastics
and back even further.
The claim of “uselessness” for philosophy always, always starts by
excluding “things I like” from the category of philosophy, usually
without realizing how interconnected this stuff is, and that the people
who produced the empirical and scientific framework they jerk off to
were philosophers, doing philosophy. Inevitably the reply is “well, they
called themselves philosophers, and thought they were doing philosophy,
but we know they aren’t because we like what they came up with.”
It’s just so fucking tiresome at this point. The whole LW/SSC/MIRI
complex is fucking stale. No forward movement, bunkering down and making
weird ass political alliances with people who would like to literally
eat them.
This makes me think that longtermism is just a way to make it
possible for people who feel extremely above socially conscious (“ow no,
the bottle somebody dropped, and which glass I didn’t clean up 20 years
ago now cut a car wheel! I’m now responsible for the co2 which was
released by the replacement of that car wheel!”) to leave the house, and
not be paralyzed by all the bad possible futures like Paul Atreides was.
‘Don’t worry about it, just try to focus on the greater good’ seems to
be a not bad way out of this. (Of course, then the Rationalists turn
that into a religion).
>'Don't worry about it, just try to focus on the greater good' seems to be a not bad way out of this. (Of course, then the Rationalists turn that into a religion).
They also have a bonkers stupid conception of "the greater good," one that can, conveniently, justify any amount of suffering or exploitation in the present, because it'll be balanced out by the exponentially greater amount of happiness in the far future. If the children toiling in rare earth mines were already happy just knowing that their suffering is enabling the happiness and comfort of people they'll never meet - which we can presume without having to ask, of course - imagine how happy they'll be to learn that it's also enabling the cyberorgasms of a trillion trillion future generations!
Yeah and also it is obviously and transparently so by design - people like Bostrom who talk about 10^55 or similar numbers of future people have to walk a fine line of plausible deniability while leaving it very obvious that the purpose of the exercise is a pincer movement against environmentalists. If he doesn't make the last part obvious then he won't get as much dough from those interested in immediate profits.
He and other "longtermists" can't afford having any big players mistake their position for an attack against the status quo of immediate term profit seeking, but also they can't just go ahead and say openly in public that the only reason they're defining "longtermism" is because they don't like how environmentalism may get in the way of profits. So they just make various bullshit justifications for the status quo from the greater good of 10^55 people.
There’s not really much too this, the only thing to say is “yeah
philosophy isn’t always that useful”, and “if you do the hard work with
philosophical puzzles you get a stronger theory at the end of it, as
long as you take it seriously”. You can be lazy or you can work hard.
It’s literally like anything else.
Everything else is just noise, and yeah, I like Boredoms
and Melt Banana and (some) Swans, but I listen to
other stuff too.
I do wonder…MacAskill has by all accounts a pretty chill inner life, and even his “modest” lifestyle is externally very comfortable indeed. I imagine he hasn’t had to spend a very long time thinking about the long road of terrible things a person has to mentally go through before they get to the point where suicide is an option. Having met a lot of even outwardly successful and well-adjusted people for whom suicide was at one point an option, and who chose living a pretty rough existence instead, I’m sceptical of his ability to evaluate what the inner lives are like of people who go on living externally good, middling, and bad lives on the scale of whole populations.
Near everyone who has critiqued longermism and MacAskill lately seems to have considered themselves similarly up to the task of making big claims about what life is like in different kinds of society, and offer competing visions to his (although at least the anti-longermists have the first step right that literally none of this matters if you don’t focus a huge amount of attention on now and tomorrow); I don’t think it gets mentioned enough in the discussion of longtermism that there is almost no picture in any of this of the inner lives of all of the people in these projected societies whether we adopt longermism, AI boosterism, genetics whatever or not.
> I don’t think it gets mentioned enough in the discussion of longtermism that there is almost no picture in any of this of the inner lives of all of the people in these projected societies
Exactly this
I think that's the key problem in longtermism
Perhaps there is more to it, without doing any reading of the ssc article (going from first principles here), Sneerclub was started by people into philosophy. Ergo, Scott therefore reasoned, if philosophy leads you to the sneer (and not just the sneer, but the sneer of ME SCOTT! THE GREAT AND MIGHTY CALIPH OF RATIONALISM (don't quote this out of context please)), philosophy is bad and must be destroyed. This isn't about philosophy, it is about the mods of sneerclub!
(E: lol, this joke about how Scotts writing is actually about personal vendettas is made better by the fact that he actually opens his article with an ridiculous attack on some traditional academic who uses books to go on talkshows, nice 'that happens' feeling).
E2: I think the whole article is prob also more an attempt at promoting longtermism than anything serious about philosophy. (With a dash of 'pretending to be an outsider to it all' from Scott).
Yeah I’ve been doing that since I saw that since I first came across Siskind’s article last night
(Incidentally, I should never tell people I know from non-rationalist stuff that I take any interest in rationalist stuff, because then they come across rationalist stuff and want to talk to me about it)
Chapman comes from a field (AI) that has traditionally thought it had solved and made obsolete all the problems of philosophy. Rationalism has inherited some of these attitudes, but Chapman is not a rationalist. Back in his grad school days he was one of the few people to take some of the philosophical critiques of AI seriously, and incorporated ideas from Heidegger and phenomenology. This was pretty bold for the time.
If he's inconsistent today, well, I'd take his longer-form writing to be a more accurate picture than random japes on Twitter.
There’s a myriad ways to improve people’s lives right now
and yet it’s almost a Herculean effort to marshal the political capital
to do so for even a subset of the eight billion people on earth.
The thought that there is anything I can do to improve the world for
everybody for the next ten thousand years is just
sheer wankery. Like if Julius Caesar had it in his head to try to
improve life for me today I doubt he could do the slightest thing. Life
is short, history is long, and humanity is immense.
That's why they give you examples of how to use the greater good of 10^55 people to arrive at what ever recommendations you want.
The whole thing isn't just wankery, it's a reactionary movement, reacting to environmentalism by doing a sort of a pincer maneuver - from one end, environmentalism faces people who want to roll coal right now, and from the other end it faces people who want to talk about the pleasure 10^55 people will get out of rolling coal in the future.
It would be entirely vacuous if sincerely applied - after all, our predictions of differential impact of present day actions must fade over time (due to decreasing accuracy of prediction with time; a sort of reverse butterfly effect), with the exception of large scale physical changes like global warming which would restrict available future choices and thus undermine future ability to optimize for what ever distant future goal. If any of them were sincere about it, all they'd get out of it would be an additional less compelling than usual justification for environmentalism - the kind of justification you would normally omit from discussion to avoid weakening the case by mixing strong arguments with crappy ones.
Really proving that “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” had a point
isn’t he?
“Reasoning about an ideal world is dangerous, because creating an
ideal world might depend on me getting my eyes pecked out by seagulls!”
Wait, why would you getting your eyes pecked out by seagulls be the key
to making an ideal world?
And also, note the Oedipal connotations of “getting your eyes pecked
out by seagulls”. One might almost infer that, for Scott’s unconscious
mind, philosophy equals… castration?
I tried to read the linked article but I couldn’t make it past
“Suppose you were considering giving birth to a child who you knew would
be tortured for their entire life”
I never thought I’d say this, but Scott is correct here.
I’m a moral anti-realist/nihilist, so from my perspective I don’t owe
anyone, even myself, rational consistency in my value judgements or
axioms. I don’t have to take anything to its “logical conclusion” if I
don’t want to, and if I want to revise my axioms to get results I like
better, then that’s fine. Morality is my own creation; it only has power
over me if I grant it, since nothing can force me to be moral; and since
it’s mine, my property, I am able to dismiss, ignore, revise, or
dissolve it as I please, and there’s no reason I shouldn’t. (Stirner).
Ultimately people create morality as basically just a model of our
subjective aesthetic, emotional, and prescriptive preferences for the
state of the world and how people (including ourselves) act (Moore,
etc).
Moreover, as someone in the thread said, we shouldn’t be surprised
that any moral system, when extended to infinity, produces absurd
results. A “moral system” is really just a rule-of-thumb approximation
for what we find useful as well as aesthetically and emotionally
pleasing in social situations. It’s just a model of our own internal
preferences and experience of the world, that’s it. A moral system isn’t
referring to anything objective because objective values are
ontologically coherent. And those subjective things it refers to
themselves aren’t purely consistent and rational to the Nth degree. So
it would be impossible to produce a purely internally consistent moral
system that also aligned with what we, as actual humans, actually cared
about at every point — that’s why every moral system is puritan
constricting bullshit in one place or another or it basically says
almost nothing. Hell, even if there were objective moral
values, we would only be building tentative models of them based on our
limited experiences of them — just like we do with the ostensibly
objective truths of the natural world — and so any moral system we made
would still just be a model and fall afoul of the same thing
physics models do: that when we extend them to infinity in various
dimensions, it gives nonsense because we’ve put nonsense in.
Ignoring everything else silly that you just said: the demand for logical consistency isn't a *moral* imperative, it's an epistemic one. People don't think you owe anybody correctness and consistency in your arguments, just that, if you don't have them, you're babbling.
Aside from the juvenile screed about why you’re a dead guy from the 19th century, what does this have to do with Scott Siskind’s review of the MacAskill book?
lmfao "juvenile screed" "you're a dead guy from the 19th century" wow you really can't read can you? You can't even tell the difference between referencing a philosopher and saying you *are* a philosopher!
I do think that in this light it was a bit unfair of you to go after Rawls for proposing a different kind of society than what you want: he’s allowed to do whatever!
No, I’m only talking about your moral nihilism:
> from my perspective I don't owe anyone, even myself, rational consistency in my value judgements or axioms
> I don't have to take anything to its "logical conclusion" if I don't want to, and **if I want to revise my axioms to get results I like better, then that's fine.**
Again, my moral nihilism doesn't mean I have to be committed to not criticizing someone, and anyone can see that, you're just trying to go for a cheap "gotcha" because moral nihilism makes you uncomfortable and you can't handle it. All I was showing was that what you quoted me as saying there is precisely what Rawls was doing too, so his claims to impartial objectivity were spurious. And yes, I can't morally command him *not* to make dishonest philosophy, or *not* to advocate for a society I don't like. But I can also advocate against what he's advocating for, and expose how he doesn't live up to the standards he pretends to. Because I like doing that. After all, just because someone is "allowed" to do something if they want to because normative statements/values they don't already agree with don't have any necessary hold on them doesn't mean I can't criticize them for it or even try to stop them!
And now you are going to be blocked because you are a juvenile baby who can't engage with moral nihilism or moral anti-realism in good faith and I have far better things to do with my time then repeatedly get sucked back in by you.
Scott is just describing . . . what is supposed to happen when you are confronted with the repugnant conclusion? Yes, if your current set of axioms lead to [something bad], you should then replace them with a different set of axioms. That’s not an argument against philosophy, it’s kinda the whole point.
It’s the same goddamn thing, every time, and we have to do the same goddamn song and dance each time too.
It’s just so fucking tiresome at this point. The whole LW/SSC/MIRI complex is fucking stale. No forward movement, bunkering down and making weird ass political alliances with people who would like to literally eat them.
This makes me think that longtermism is just a way to make it possible for people who feel extremely above socially conscious (“ow no, the bottle somebody dropped, and which glass I didn’t clean up 20 years ago now cut a car wheel! I’m now responsible for the co2 which was released by the replacement of that car wheel!”) to leave the house, and not be paralyzed by all the bad possible futures like Paul Atreides was. ‘Don’t worry about it, just try to focus on the greater good’ seems to be a not bad way out of this. (Of course, then the Rationalists turn that into a religion).
He didn’t actually say that. Read a book scott!
There’s not really much too this, the only thing to say is “yeah philosophy isn’t always that useful”, and “if you do the hard work with philosophical puzzles you get a stronger theory at the end of it, as long as you take it seriously”. You can be lazy or you can work hard. It’s literally like anything else.
Everything else is just noise, and yeah, I like Boredoms and Melt Banana and (some) Swans, but I listen to other stuff too.
I really don’t get long-termism.
There’s a myriad ways to improve people’s lives right now and yet it’s almost a Herculean effort to marshal the political capital to do so for even a subset of the eight billion people on earth.
The thought that there is anything I can do to improve the world for everybody for the next ten thousand years is just sheer wankery. Like if Julius Caesar had it in his head to try to improve life for me today I doubt he could do the slightest thing. Life is short, history is long, and humanity is immense.
My favourite sneer to come out of that thread:
Really proving that “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” had a point isn’t he?
“Reasoning about an ideal world is dangerous, because creating an ideal world might depend on me getting my eyes pecked out by seagulls!” Wait, why would you getting your eyes pecked out by seagulls be the key to making an ideal world?
And also, note the Oedipal connotations of “getting your eyes pecked out by seagulls”. One might almost infer that, for Scott’s unconscious mind, philosophy equals… castration?
I tried to read the linked article but I couldn’t make it past “Suppose you were considering giving birth to a child who you knew would be tortured for their entire life”
fun fact, this is a philosophy.
“philosophy is bad. don’t do it. gently ridicule anyone who takes it seriously”
I never thought I’d say this, but Scott is correct here.
I’m a moral anti-realist/nihilist, so from my perspective I don’t owe anyone, even myself, rational consistency in my value judgements or axioms. I don’t have to take anything to its “logical conclusion” if I don’t want to, and if I want to revise my axioms to get results I like better, then that’s fine. Morality is my own creation; it only has power over me if I grant it, since nothing can force me to be moral; and since it’s mine, my property, I am able to dismiss, ignore, revise, or dissolve it as I please, and there’s no reason I shouldn’t. (Stirner). Ultimately people create morality as basically just a model of our subjective aesthetic, emotional, and prescriptive preferences for the state of the world and how people (including ourselves) act (Moore, etc).
Moreover, as someone in the thread said, we shouldn’t be surprised that any moral system, when extended to infinity, produces absurd results. A “moral system” is really just a rule-of-thumb approximation for what we find useful as well as aesthetically and emotionally pleasing in social situations. It’s just a model of our own internal preferences and experience of the world, that’s it. A moral system isn’t referring to anything objective because objective values are ontologically coherent. And those subjective things it refers to themselves aren’t purely consistent and rational to the Nth degree. So it would be impossible to produce a purely internally consistent moral system that also aligned with what we, as actual humans, actually cared about at every point — that’s why every moral system is puritan constricting bullshit in one place or another or it basically says almost nothing. Hell, even if there were objective moral values, we would only be building tentative models of them based on our limited experiences of them — just like we do with the ostensibly objective truths of the natural world — and so any moral system we made would still just be a model and fall afoul of the same thing physics models do: that when we extend them to infinity in various dimensions, it gives nonsense because we’ve put nonsense in.