I’m currently reading Adam Becker’s book More Everything Forever and you should too….just jaw dropping
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question: when thinking about maximising 'good' for future generations isn't it those generations' sense of `good' that is relevant, not mine?
how does longtermism deal with this issue?
unless you assume that the relevant `good' is universal that seems like a major difficulty....
and if you assume what is `good' is universal, how is that and how do you know that, and isn't that what ethics would need to tell you?
@UlrikeHahn Thank you so much for tickling the brain in the right way 😊 I must admit that i am also strongly believing that there should be an objective „good“. But i am pretty sure that i have not read or heard about a theory that found it. And utilitarianism claims to have found an objectifiable good, this sum of all good, but then argues with a lot of subjective goods to calculate this quaint number. Disappointing, its influence on so many people
@UlrikeHahn One thing that occurs to me is that the focus on existential risk might be driven by this: we can't know how to maximise good for the distant future, but we can be pretty sure that some disasters will make things worse for them.
@twsh yes, I had a similar thought - though even there, I think we can all imagine situations we would describe as “a fate worse than death”….
but the root problem still seems to me to be that you need more than rank order information to get the EU calculation off the ground…
just assuming that non-existence is worse than existence doesn’t tell you how much those future lives weigh relative to current ones you could be improving….
expected utility produces/requires an interval scale…
@twsh I’ve never really thought about utilitarianism in any depth, but just coming at this from the perspective of someone who has thought about decision theory it seems wild (ie. full of deep holes that seem unlikely to be filled…)
the most obvious to me being the fact that the transition from choice to ethics means that “utilities” have to sustain normative claims (as opposed to just being arbitrary subjective ‘likes’ as in decision theory..). So either the utility you are maximising is inherently ‘good’ in an ethical normative sense (in which case you need some independent, non -utilitarian criterion for determining that) or it is inherently ‘good’ in the sense of descriptively always being desired (‘happiness’?) which is then an empirical claim and seems both limited and sketchy at the same time… (do we really want to be ‘happy’ *all the time*?, and is being ‘happy’ really ‘good’?)
and that’s before you get to the fact that standard problems for decision theory such as the possibility of interactions that can lead to independence violations etc. seem to me to become inevitable the more non-local the calculations are supposed to be…
it feels like you could take any contested issue surrounding decision theory and find an even more compelling version of that problem for utilitarianism?
I don't think there is even a single longtermist that does not also believe that 'good' is universal and, beyond that, that they have a better idea of what good is than anyone else.
So they would address your question with the deep-seeded paternalistic hubris of the Silicon Valley techbro by saying "I know best", if they even deigned to address it at all.
I think the only way to understand their philosophy - honestly, I'm not even sure it reaches the standard of a philosophy - is to start with their belief that they are the smartest crayon in the shed, and that they created / preach this ethical system to justify their shitty actions.
@FantasticalEconomics MacAskill held a position in philosophy at Oxford and has a DPhil in philosophy, so I'm going to consider him a philosopher ...
@UlrikeHahn Longtermism is a sure sign that someone has read too many SF books from the 1960s to 1980s.
@UlrikeHahn and utilitarianism in itself is absurd. Don’t know who needed an even more extremely absurd version… the idea to „measure“ the good of a deed … and now to even measure the potential future good of a deed.
Philosophy in schools and universities should be obligatory
@codingGarden well, some of the people promoting longtermism *are* philosophers, so there’s many ways thinking can go wrong…
@UlrikeHahn I'm reading both "Nerd Reich" and "End-Time Fascism." With Becker, they make a horrific trilogy...
longtermism is the reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism