Utilitarians' weird moral calculus, based in their inability to accept that suffering is part of life, leads them to, basically, a hatred of nature and existence.
BB is great, but he does have pretty much every last hallmark of a supervillain. And I would argue that there is probably more wisdom in comic books than in all of LessWrong.
It specifically attracts many smart people who think of themselves as smart. They are attracted to it because it seems smart or complex, and thus indicates their own intelligence. It strokes their ego and also allows them to indulge the perennial temptation of all smart people—to take control of others and society.
"If I have a headache, I personally don't like it, but is it to be considered universally or existentially bad? What does that even mean? And what if the pain arises from some healing process—is it still bad?"
I'm with you on this.
The effort to eliminate literal suffering is the entry point for much more abstract and counterproductive suffering, likewise with the goal of maximizing pleasure.
At first, I thought, "Luckily, BB's take is so fringe, it's practically a non-issue." But really, I think a large swath of the population is somewhere on this performative-empathy-driven nihilism.
Yea it is a much more common take than you think. The LessWrong forum had a years-long debate wherein many people asserted that they would rather let 1 person be tortured for 50 years than let a billion people get a mildly annoying pice of dust in their eye. Because something something “net utility”.
I should also say, for completeness, that I think BB has a point in at least some cases. We could probably eradicate screwflies and botflies from the Americas or even the world at large and eliminate vast animal suffering without doing any great ecological damage in the process. (We know this because screwflies were already eradicated in North America to protect cattle and it didn't cause any major ecosystem collapse- you'd just get fewer young birds and squirrels eaten alive by parasites.)
There are also at least a couple of species, like dolphins and elephants and gorillas, that are close enough to the human level of sapience that... well, we don't really seem to have good ways of managing their population densities in ways that aren't horrifying, and they're self-aware enough that this should be troubling.
"Culling is cruel! We should space out the water holes so the young, sick and elderly die more from thirst instead!" ...I dunno, can you not just give them contraceptives?
I don't think concern for net pleasure is totally absent from BB's writings, but he does seem to be underselling it in certain respects (you never hear him talk about how animals 'strive mightily' to reach pleasurable stimuli, for example.) Darwin made a similar general argument on the subject, that logically the pleasant stimuli which enable survival have to be more common than the painful stimuli which threaten survival, in order for animals to survive at all:
"The sum of such pleasures as these, which are habitual or frequently recurrent, give, as I can hardly doubt, to most sentient beings an excess of happiness over misery, although many occasionally suffer much."
The problem with this argument, from BB's perspective, is that the vast majority of animals don't survive very long at all, although this is more true of r-selected species with vast numbers of offspring. Most young octopus plausibly have no sensations at all in their short lives aside from being very hungry and/or getting messily eaten inside a few days. Maybe it's possible that developing in the egg-sac counts as a pleasant state of being? Or maybe just getting wafted around in the ocean currents is fun, for a while?
I can imagine young mice getting some comfort out of gestation in the womb (I don't know where he's getting this idea of consciousness only beginning at birth, I guess the abortion lobby got to him there), along with early nursing or play behaviours. Even if nine out of ten then get eaten by snakes or ferrets or something. But how do you measure that?
I think the complication that leads to anti-natalist conclusions actually lies in assigning heavy weighting to consent, which is supposed to circumvent the "murder one person to save five" dilemma. It leads to evaluations where non-consensual suffering or death is considered much worse, or totally non-permissable, compared to non-consensual pleasure or added life-years. It leads to the conclusion that non-consensually bringing living beings who can suffer into existence is immoral, even if statistically their lives would involve more pleasure than pain.
I'm not sure what the answer to that should be, because I'm fairly sure that, e.g, governments can't realistically avoid some kind of utilitarian calculus when deciding on, e.g, budget allocations between different social programs (including the decision of how much wealth to non-consensually appropriate through taxes in the first place.) Non-consensual organ harvesting is probably a little beyond the pale, though I could imagine the CCP getting creative in this area.
BB is great, but he does have pretty much every last hallmark of a supervillain. And I would argue that there is probably more wisdom in comic books than in all of LessWrong.
Yea I must admit I do like him too! Hahaha the LessWrong posters are unbelievably intelligent, but I agree
I have a hard time believing these people are for real, tbh
Utilitarianism attracts a lot of crazy, smart people.
It specifically attracts many smart people who think of themselves as smart. They are attracted to it because it seems smart or complex, and thus indicates their own intelligence. It strokes their ego and also allows them to indulge the perennial temptation of all smart people—to take control of others and society.
"If I have a headache, I personally don't like it, but is it to be considered universally or existentially bad? What does that even mean? And what if the pain arises from some healing process—is it still bad?"
I'm with you on this.
The effort to eliminate literal suffering is the entry point for much more abstract and counterproductive suffering, likewise with the goal of maximizing pleasure.
At first, I thought, "Luckily, BB's take is so fringe, it's practically a non-issue." But really, I think a large swath of the population is somewhere on this performative-empathy-driven nihilism.
Yea it is a much more common take than you think. The LessWrong forum had a years-long debate wherein many people asserted that they would rather let 1 person be tortured for 50 years than let a billion people get a mildly annoying pice of dust in their eye. Because something something “net utility”.
I should also say, for completeness, that I think BB has a point in at least some cases. We could probably eradicate screwflies and botflies from the Americas or even the world at large and eliminate vast animal suffering without doing any great ecological damage in the process. (We know this because screwflies were already eradicated in North America to protect cattle and it didn't cause any major ecosystem collapse- you'd just get fewer young birds and squirrels eaten alive by parasites.)
There are also at least a couple of species, like dolphins and elephants and gorillas, that are close enough to the human level of sapience that... well, we don't really seem to have good ways of managing their population densities in ways that aren't horrifying, and they're self-aware enough that this should be troubling.
https://www.africanelephantjournal.com/the-myth-of-too-many-elephants-in-kruger-park-and-why-culling-is-redundant/
"Culling is cruel! We should space out the water holes so the young, sick and elderly die more from thirst instead!" ...I dunno, can you not just give them contraceptives?
I don't think concern for net pleasure is totally absent from BB's writings, but he does seem to be underselling it in certain respects (you never hear him talk about how animals 'strive mightily' to reach pleasurable stimuli, for example.) Darwin made a similar general argument on the subject, that logically the pleasant stimuli which enable survival have to be more common than the painful stimuli which threaten survival, in order for animals to survive at all:
https://www.skeptical-science.com/essays/religious-belief-charles-darwin/
"The sum of such pleasures as these, which are habitual or frequently recurrent, give, as I can hardly doubt, to most sentient beings an excess of happiness over misery, although many occasionally suffer much."
The problem with this argument, from BB's perspective, is that the vast majority of animals don't survive very long at all, although this is more true of r-selected species with vast numbers of offspring. Most young octopus plausibly have no sensations at all in their short lives aside from being very hungry and/or getting messily eaten inside a few days. Maybe it's possible that developing in the egg-sac counts as a pleasant state of being? Or maybe just getting wafted around in the ocean currents is fun, for a while?
I can imagine young mice getting some comfort out of gestation in the womb (I don't know where he's getting this idea of consciousness only beginning at birth, I guess the abortion lobby got to him there), along with early nursing or play behaviours. Even if nine out of ten then get eaten by snakes or ferrets or something. But how do you measure that?
I think the complication that leads to anti-natalist conclusions actually lies in assigning heavy weighting to consent, which is supposed to circumvent the "murder one person to save five" dilemma. It leads to evaluations where non-consensual suffering or death is considered much worse, or totally non-permissable, compared to non-consensual pleasure or added life-years. It leads to the conclusion that non-consensually bringing living beings who can suffer into existence is immoral, even if statistically their lives would involve more pleasure than pain.
I'm not sure what the answer to that should be, because I'm fairly sure that, e.g, governments can't realistically avoid some kind of utilitarian calculus when deciding on, e.g, budget allocations between different social programs (including the decision of how much wealth to non-consensually appropriate through taxes in the first place.) Non-consensual organ harvesting is probably a little beyond the pale, though I could imagine the CCP getting creative in this area.