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So, in other Aella news, she's channelling the spirit of Hanania with this poll:
Options are (with their current percentages):
Of course Aella with her reach manages to get normies to see her posts and the replies are wild that such a person could even exist, some choice replies:
While the poll itself may be interesting, what I find most interesting of all are the responses from the normies (there are responses that look objectively at the situation and say stuff like "no, if anyone is going to hire prostitutes it should be the parents, not the make a wish foundation", but they all tend to have stuff like "e/acc" in their usernames so they aren't your average randos). These tend to be extremely negative, but not negative in a "I know what I hate and this is it" form but rather a "first encounter with a terrible eldrich abomination you want to see destroyed but are confused at how could it even exist" sort of way. It does not feel like pure hate, but rather a hate that is born of fear, true xenophobia in its original meaning of the word. Nevertheless it is still a form of hate and you can quite easily see the vitriol directed towards Aella, merely for posting this poll.
My worry here though is that as technology advances and a sliver of people with disproportionate cultural cachet adopt belief systems like those of Aella and decouple from the low sophistication ways of thinking common in most westerners along with completely different cultures entering the west and taking root the current indigenous westerners will find their belief and value systems squeezed on both sides, from above by the likes of people who think like Aella does (nothing wrong with how she thinks, in fact I support it) along with from below by the value systems of recent migrants (who still care about stuff like honour and shame etc.).
While this may be a difficult time for the squeezed westereners themselves (I have little sympathy though, these very same people expect migrants to deal with a far bigger and more rapid cultural shock and blame them if they migrants take steps to mitigate this impact), I am more concerned about potential increased societal scale strife as people lash out from being put in a world that they no longer understand (see the "what if you were executed at gitmo" response above, I for one am glad this person has no power and hope it stays this way).
Naturally I have no doubt that any reified violence by the disaffected would be put down with the same prejudice we use for terrorist attacks these days, but it would still not be a good time for social harmony and that has widespread social impacts beyond a small handful of people cracking and going on a rampage where they kill a few people before bring brought down themselves.
I didn't dig too deeply into this one, but I looked at the replies (and even *gasp* the quote tweets) on the Hanania poll. I grew up on 4chan, but I've spent enough time in sanitized spaces like Reddit that I forgot what viscerally angry uncensored people sound like; disgusting, but beautiful in a way, like a cheetah devouring a gazelle. Hanania tried to connect this reaction to the old "but I did eat breakfast this morning" failure to parse hypotheticals, and that doesn't seem quite right, but it does serve as a reminder that many (most?) people aren't like us. They are either unable or unwilling to peal back their assumptions about morality or world-models.
This is another reason why I think he's an idiot and not the public intellectual he would give his eye-teeth to be. "Ha ha, only joking" is the response everyone knows is bullshit. Oh, so your question was only a hypothetical and not meant seriously? Okay, I'm still saying no to it. But what if I said "in spherical-cow world, okay: pay ten million and you can fuck a kid". What would Hanania take away from that, then? Still only hypotheticals? Or that this answer demonstrates that in the real world there are a lot of people pretending to be moral but who would fuck children if they could get away with it?
If it's only a hypothetical, then I can give any answer at all because it doesn't matter. It's not something I would ever do in reality, and would find abhorrent in real life, but 'just pretending' world? Fine, rape six year olds and kidnap people off the streets to harvest their organs and round the Jews up in cattle trucks for the gas chambers. It's only parsing a hypothetical, right?
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Meanwhile I would argue that's a feature rather than a bug. Utilitarianism is based on false premises and is a terrible basis for a system of morality.
Do you object to sum-of-utils, hedonism, consequentialism, or just the idea of a systematic universal set of moral values in the first place?
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Utilitarianism is the worst form of moral system, except for all the others that have been tried.
Meh. Literal bronze age religions seem to do better.
What are these false premises, and how do you measure “do better”?
The two big ones that spring immediately to mind are A) the premise that happiness/suffering/utility/QALYs (whatever you want to call it) is quantifiable and fungible. IE that there is either an equivalence or some sort of commutative quality between [Person A] being x amount "worse" off and [Person B] being x amount "better" off. and B) the assumption that multi-agent games have to follow the rules of inductive logic.
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That utility is fungible between people such that X's being made better off can morally offset Y's being made worse off.
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One for me is that it has no real hard edges to the solution set. There’s no real guarantee of rights, of equal treatment, or ownership of property. If the people making the decision decide that the answer is to strip some people of civil rights, there’s nothing intrinsic to utilitarian philosophy that says “that’s not a possible solution.”
Secondly, the person making the decision gets to define the terms. This is often, in practice, defined to the benefit of the person or group making the decision. If you asked the average person about pollution, it’s a problem that should be solved. If you ask the factory owner, it’s not obvious that pollution is a problem. Thus the solution is dictated by the whims of those empowered to make those decisions, even when conflicts of interest are obvious.
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That by doing advanced calculus on harm and good you will arrive at a moral outcome. Even utilitarians agree this is false, or at least get awfully quiet and hit the downvote button when you point out where their reasoning leads to.
Another issue is whether you can even meaningfully measure harm and good to begin with.
That, admittedly, I don't have an answer for, but I noticed you haven't asked that question to Celestial, even though he made the very same claim regarding "all the other" moral systems.
Okay, I'm in a town of 1000 people. One person has a factory that produces very nice shoes, but fills the air with smog. The smog makes everyone choke and gives everyone lung cancer. Should we forcibly close down the factory?
Now I'm in the same town, but instead of a factory, it's a slaughterhouse. The stench smells about as bad as the smog, but it doesn't cause lung cancer. Also, it provides much of the food for the town. Should we forcibly close down the factory?
The answer is yes in the first case, no in the second case. One comes to this conclusion by, uh, doing calculations on the outcome. The first has lower benefit, higher cost, the second has higher benefit, lower cost. How else can you come to this kind of conclusion, if not by doing calculations on harm and good
Maybe during the industrial revolution the air and water had to be a bit polluted because the only other option was no industry, but now we have better technology and can have industry with less pollution. Any rule in deontology or virtue ethics about how to make that decision just ends up deferring to the calculation of benefit.
Like, people exist, benefits and harms exist, actions lead to outcomes in incredibly complicated ways, whether you're a socialist or liberal or conservative or a nazi you need to judge actions based on their outcomes, and the calculations are complicated because the situations are complicated. Should we have a democracy or a monarchy? Under what conditions should we go to war? Should we have computers? Should we create advanced AI? Nonconsequentialist moral systems dodge these by taking the answers for granted and treating them as 'rules' or 'virtues'. But the virtues/rules themselves embed complexity that represents a calculation that some human, or perhaps a decentralized system of humans, made in the past.
I think this is false. Too see it, take an issue that people have an actual moral position on, rather than something that boils down to material comfort. Should we promote surrogacy if we can guarantee that outcomes are "good", or should we do everything we can to limit it, even if it meant [insert catastrophe of your choice]? My opinion is the latter, because I think surrogacy is wrong in itself.
What you said is also projection. It is utilitarians who try to hide their ontological / virtue-based morality behind utils and calculus. Like I pointed out above, you're not going to get utilitarians to endorse slavery, just because it increases utils. If they ever address you, it will be a copout like "nooo, slavery causes negative-infinity utils!"
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