Congratulations on getting a response from Scott Alexander, whom (IIRC) you once described as one of your favorite writers (he is one of mine too).
I suspect that when you say that "the Egyptians built pyramids off the backs of slaves", you are speaking metaphorically (or hyperbolically?), since:
1) AFAIK it's pretty much universally believed among Egyptologists that the actual pyramid laborers were paid (Hollywood and their sources notwithstanding :) - archaeologists have even found some pay stubs, as it were - for a decent one page summary you could use [1] as a starting point); and
2) It _appears_, but mostly with indirect evidence, to be the case that the Old Kingdom (particularly the Fourth Dynasty, which was the height of pyramid building) had a relatively small number of slaves** as a fraction of their total economy, so even metaphorically saying the pyramids were indirectly built by slaves (via the slaves' contribution to the overall surplus which could then be applied to pyramid building) is an iffy proposition. But coming up with solid numbers (compared to e.g. later Bronze Age Mesopotamia) is still very much a work in progress. If you know of any relevant work from say the last twenty years I would love to see some links.
** The Fourth Dynasty as it turns out is in fact when there starts to be evidence, generally written rather than material evidence, of numbers of what we might reasonably call "slaves";
prisoners of war mostly - Sneferu, the first pharoah of the Fourth Dynasty, father of Khufu aka Cheops, both:
1) made significant improvements in pyramid construction (although step pyramids predated his reign by quite a while); and
2) seems to have been (but beware of evidentiary survivorship bias) the first pharoah to engage in warfare at least partly for explicit purpose of gaining POWs for slave labor.
TL;DR - the big Fourth Dynasty pyramids might indirectly have required slave labor, but that claim has to be consider "not proven" so far.
No worries at all. You inspired me to go dig a little bit to see if anything has been learned more recently (re slaves in 4th Dynasty Egypt) - doesn't seem like any major changes in understanding over the last 20 some years.
You’re badly misreading Nietzsche if you see Utilitarianism as a synthesis of slave morality and master morality. Nietzsche was openly and explicitly contemptuous of utilitarianism, which he critiqued as a futile attempt to reconstruct Christian ethics in a world in where the Christian God is dead. For Nietzsche, utilitarianism is a misleading rationalization of received, unexamined slave morality.
ok, but the claim is that utilitarianism is not, in any meaningful sense, a merger of master and slave morality…but strictly slave morality.
This is an interesting claim and worth addressing directly.
In my view there are (at least) two flavors of utilitarianism. One is something like e/acc and the other is more woke. That is, one emphasizes growing the pie through glorious achievements and the other emphasizes protecting the weak.
The former seems to have some master-morality vibes.
For Nietzsche, that distinction is not important. Even a Utilitarianism that emphasizes “glorious achievement” is still a slave morality so long as it remains rooted in post-Christian notions like the moral equality of persons and compassion for suffering. His critique was that utilitarianism simply accepted these notions without thinking deeply enough about how the death of God had upended them. A superficial aesthetic of greatness and accomplishment is irrelevant to that critique. Nietzsche was very attuned to how master-morality vibes can conceal what he called a “slave soul”.
To be clear, I am not personally a doctrinaire Nietzschean. I have nothing against the moral equality of persons or compassion for suffering. I just think any discussion of how utilitarianism relates to Nietzschean concepts like master and slave morality should be grounded in what Nietzsche actually thought. If you don’t think all utilitarianism is an example of slave morality, you’re either misunderstanding Nietzsche, or redefining the term “slave morality” to mean something different.
First, I would argue that the essence of slave morality is glorifying weakness. Are we on the same page about that? Nuances about what Nietzsche thought are not of too much importance to me other than that he pointed out to everyone that Christianity does this pretty explicitly. But Nietzschean concepts have outgrown Nietzsche himself and we can talk about them in their own right.
Next, I would argue that the essence of utilitarianism is to measure good and evil by adding up utility. Caring a lot about suffering is a component of *many* utilitarian perspectives, but not all of them. For example, one might believe that the suffering of the weak represents null utility (as opposed to negative utility). If it is null, it hardly impacts the calculus.
This might not be representative of mainstream utilitarianism, but it's just an example to show that slave morality is not necessarily inherent in utility calculus. I believe you can use utilitarian arguments to *rationalize* pretty much any moral perspective and often it's just that -- a post hoc rationalization.
If you’re defining “slave morality” as “glorifying weakness”, then yes, utilitarianism isn’t a slave morality because it doesn’t glorify weakness. However, if you’re simplifying the concept of slave morality in that way you’re not engaging with the real depth of Nietzsche’s thought.
Scott doesn’t seem to understand Nietzsche at all. At one point he holds up Richard Hanania as the purest Nietzschean around and then quotes Hanania saying humans have an innate moral sense that separates us from other animals.
I would say this is a misunderstanding: the Niezstchean idea of slave morality is that of the people that think that suffering makes you better. The Christian idea of the redeeming power of suffering. Risk aversion was not even an idea in the age of Nieztsche.
He said that the slave needed some reason to justify the fact of accepting life as a slave, and they “inverted” the natural values of power and supremacy. “Slave morality” and “value inversion” go together. Nieztsche does not embrace the oppressing morality of the master, but rejects slave morality and the idea of suffering as betterment. Utilitarianism is not slave morality, because no hedonistic or eudamonic moral system supports the value of sacrifice for its own sake.
The Scott Alexander piece was not concluding that Matt yglesias was anything like a definite ubermensch; he was instead offered up as Scott making a stab in the direction of what an effective compromise might begin to look like. It is a point worth bringing up considering how monstrous something like One Billion Americans would look in practice.
India has over a billion people. Nothing about it is appealing. Yglesias wants to get a billion Americans by bringing over millions and millions of Indians and Guatemalans. Flooding millions to turn American cities into slums is not good for anyone but slum lords.
> who think Elon Musk has, despite facilitating enormous progress, been profoundly harmful to the world because of the problematic views he expresses.
Thinking that promoting bad ideas leads to bad outcomes is actually completely independent of “slave morality” and is completely compatible with basic consequentialism.
Typo: > It’s not enough not to kill, you haver to give your wealth away
> who oppose earning to give (getting a bunch of money so you can give it away) because they think career success is immoral
I think it's more that it incentivizes perverse actions, such as becoming an oil CEO that creates tons of negative externalities (or e.g. creating FTX). It's not universalizable and the threshold we've set of donating 10% of income incentivizes looking for better paying jobs (which usually create more negative externalities) instead of more moral jobs (which usually pay lower) because donating 10% of your income as a multi-millionaire oil CEO is easier than donating 10% while living on a minimum wage for an NGO that's trying to do good in the world.
> who think Elon Musk has, despite facilitating enormous progress, been profoundly harmful to the world because of the problematic views he expresses.
Yeah, and the worker exploitation, undermining public transport, censoring leftwing thought and fundraising, etc etc
> Utilitarians are in a good position to explain the errors of both the master and slave moralist. The master moralist neglects the weak and vulnerable in favor of building giant skyscrapers. The slave moralist passes up efforts to genuinely better the world because they’re pathologically risk averse.
I would say that utilitarianism is demonstrably not risk averse enough (see my post "the wagering calamity objection to utilitarianism")
> I mean the ones who totally ignore where the charity goes and vomit twenty pages of the words “arrogant”, “billionaire”, and “white”.
I agree that "arrogant" and "white" are not really relevant criticisms, but I think "billionaire" is. Just like there is regulatory capture there is also movement capture and being too dependent on billionaires may lead you to be averse in criticizing them. Within the EA community we saw this with people like Musk and SBF and Sam Altman and Ben Delo, and the rich in general. To mix metaphors; it's hard to criticize the hand that feeds you.
> rather than the stifling risk aversion and problematization that much of the left focuses on obsessively.
This equating the left with slave morality (and the ingroup with morality) seems very ingroup bias-y. So let me crosspost my comment on Scott's post here:
Hmmm, I don't think you're characterizing the left fairly here. You seem to characterize the left wing as (all the bad parts of) slave morality but I don't have that experience. Yes, if you go by what terminally online teens on twitter say you might get that impression, but go to NGOs, or protest organizers, or left wing political party meetups and talk with people there and you will get a whole other impression.
Take for example being gay or polyamorous. If you're cool enough to get both a boyfriend and a girlfriend the progressives will cheer you on. The conservatives on the other hand will say you can't have a partner of the same sex and are restricted to only your own gender like everyone else. They will also say that you can't have more than one partner.
Or take green energy, the left wants to build wind and solar farms, while the conservatives are trying to block it.
Or take public transport, the left wants to build trains and metros, but the conservatives are trying to block it.
Or what about abortion, the left wants you to have bodily autonomy, the conservatives are trying to block it. You mentioned how the left is pro-immigration and the conservatives are trying to block it, but some conservatives like the republican vice-president even want to restrict where woman can travel within their own country, while the left is pro-freedom of movement.
The left wants to build more social housing/homes/homeless shelters, the conservatives are trying to block it.
The left wants you to be able to change your gender and build your own body like you want to, the right is trying to block it.
Or what about bike lanes and pedestrian infrastructure, the left are trying to build it, the right wants to block it.
You mentioned effective altruism as an example of good slave morality, but failed to mention that it is mostly a leftwing movement. According to the latest survey data, 76.8% is left wing, 8.1% is centrist, 2.9% is right wing and 5.6% is libertarian.
Also the whole leftist meme/goal of wanting to achieve "Fully automated luxury gay space communism" just screams of the attitude you praised in this post, but isn't mentioned. I think the left (minus terminally online twitterers that don't matter) are closest to the "superman" ideal.
The real utilitarian ubermensch is whatever person or superintelligence will succeed in tiling the universe with hedonium (which I wholeheartedly believe in not as a reductio ad absurdum, but as the true end goal of utilitarianism).
The contents don't live quite live up to the title -- utilitarianism isn't a unique alternative to MM and SM, and is still open to the standard objections.
I enjoyed the lengthy Scott Alexander piece overall, found it quite balanced and comprehensive. Although he was unnecessarily harsh on you.
Your response is a good one. Utilitarianish is now added to the lexicon. And seeing as the universe is transactional, that moral compass seems to make the most sense.
1) If you are already committed to doing good, you can do more good if you are stronger. Thus strength is an important second-order virtue. Note that this is very much EA thinking (get rich then donate etc.)
2) Helping people is not only about making them happy instead of suffering, but also helping them become strong instead of weak so they can generate utility themselves instead of being dangerously dependent on external help. Give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish etc.
3) These are self-evident, this is how doctors think and developmental economists and all practically helpful people, but philosophers strangely forget these. And then we get an over-reaction from Vulgar Nietzscheans saying strength is the only thing that matters.
(Everybody knows Mussolini grabbed power in a violent coup, the March To Rome. Except he did not. It is a complete myth made up by Mussolini to look strong. They started marching, the government caved in when they were still far away from Rome, then they held a non-violent victory parade in Rome, took some heroic looking pics, and created this myth. The opposition gladly accepted this myth as they were not Vulgar Nietzscheans and for them a violent, illegal coup was a bad thing. I strongly suspect we have some similar bipartisan myths. Maybe Osama Bin Laden was just a rich fool who tried to look important and did not "mastermind" anything, just gave the terrorists some cash who let him take "credit" because they were not planning to survive the act.)
4) The antidote to that is to keep vitalism part of the utilitarian package. Be like that doctor who heals people's knees not only so that they do not feel pain but also so that they can run an 5K.
5) The reason it is hard to keep it part of the package that it has a "fascist aesthetic whiff" and that smells bad so you over-correct. My advice: just get over the aesthetic problem. Make it explicit that in the ideal world everybody can run 5K, deadlift twice their body weight, do their taxes, write a simple Python app, calculate the amount of paint they need to repaint their houses, never requires public assistance to live on and could survive a week in the wilderness naked. And yes we want a human colony on Mars to mitigate x-risk. Maybe not the highest priority, world hunger comes first, but eventually.
I've gotta admit, I was flabbergasted to see Scott invoking Ozy's "morality of the dead" against you. That piece a critique of an especially crude form of deontology. Scott thinks a guy whose nom de plume is "Bentham's Bulldog" thinks we're not strongly called to active (and proactive) goodness?
I find that whole polemic annoying. So what if taken to the extremes you can also associate humility and quietism with the dead? They could still be good ways to live. “Die before ye die!”
They also don't effectively reduce the amount of meat eaten in the world, through activism, donations or just personal influence. I hope it won't come as breaking news that rejection of the active-passive distinction is a pretty major feature of utilitarianism.
I love that meme! My response to the piece was similar. If one focuses on the Niezstchean master and slave dichotomy, it tends to end up in fairly extreme places.
Yet in both Christian and pagan morality, there are prescriptions for reciprocity. Hubris brings Nemesis according to the Greco-roman theology. “Do unto to your neighbor.” Is a central tenant of Christianity. As far as I’m concerned, if the ubermench isn’t promoting such balance, its not got much legs in the grand scheme. Things are not so black-and-white.
Congratulations on getting a response from Scott Alexander, whom (IIRC) you once described as one of your favorite writers (he is one of mine too).
I suspect that when you say that "the Egyptians built pyramids off the backs of slaves", you are speaking metaphorically (or hyperbolically?), since:
1) AFAIK it's pretty much universally believed among Egyptologists that the actual pyramid laborers were paid (Hollywood and their sources notwithstanding :) - archaeologists have even found some pay stubs, as it were - for a decent one page summary you could use [1] as a starting point); and
2) It _appears_, but mostly with indirect evidence, to be the case that the Old Kingdom (particularly the Fourth Dynasty, which was the height of pyramid building) had a relatively small number of slaves** as a fraction of their total economy, so even metaphorically saying the pyramids were indirectly built by slaves (via the slaves' contribution to the overall surplus which could then be applied to pyramid building) is an iffy proposition. But coming up with solid numbers (compared to e.g. later Bronze Age Mesopotamia) is still very much a work in progress. If you know of any relevant work from say the last twenty years I would love to see some links.
** The Fourth Dynasty as it turns out is in fact when there starts to be evidence, generally written rather than material evidence, of numbers of what we might reasonably call "slaves";
prisoners of war mostly - Sneferu, the first pharoah of the Fourth Dynasty, father of Khufu aka Cheops, both:
1) made significant improvements in pyramid construction (although step pyramids predated his reign by quite a while); and
2) seems to have been (but beware of evidentiary survivorship bias) the first pharoah to engage in warfare at least partly for explicit purpose of gaining POWs for slave labor.
TL;DR - the big Fourth Dynasty pyramids might indirectly have required slave labor, but that claim has to be consider "not proven" so far.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/11/great-pyramid-tombs-slaves-egypt
Will fix!
No worries at all. You inspired me to go dig a little bit to see if anything has been learned more recently (re slaves in 4th Dynasty Egypt) - doesn't seem like any major changes in understanding over the last 20 some years.
You’re badly misreading Nietzsche if you see Utilitarianism as a synthesis of slave morality and master morality. Nietzsche was openly and explicitly contemptuous of utilitarianism, which he critiqued as a futile attempt to reconstruct Christian ethics in a world in where the Christian God is dead. For Nietzsche, utilitarianism is a misleading rationalization of received, unexamined slave morality.
But I wasn’t claiming to be reading Nietzsche but, like Scott, riffing on the general themes!
ok, but the claim is that utilitarianism is not, in any meaningful sense, a merger of master and slave morality…but strictly slave morality.
This is an interesting claim and worth addressing directly.
In my view there are (at least) two flavors of utilitarianism. One is something like e/acc and the other is more woke. That is, one emphasizes growing the pie through glorious achievements and the other emphasizes protecting the weak.
The former seems to have some master-morality vibes.
For Nietzsche, that distinction is not important. Even a Utilitarianism that emphasizes “glorious achievement” is still a slave morality so long as it remains rooted in post-Christian notions like the moral equality of persons and compassion for suffering. His critique was that utilitarianism simply accepted these notions without thinking deeply enough about how the death of God had upended them. A superficial aesthetic of greatness and accomplishment is irrelevant to that critique. Nietzsche was very attuned to how master-morality vibes can conceal what he called a “slave soul”.
To be clear, I am not personally a doctrinaire Nietzschean. I have nothing against the moral equality of persons or compassion for suffering. I just think any discussion of how utilitarianism relates to Nietzschean concepts like master and slave morality should be grounded in what Nietzsche actually thought. If you don’t think all utilitarianism is an example of slave morality, you’re either misunderstanding Nietzsche, or redefining the term “slave morality” to mean something different.
First, I would argue that the essence of slave morality is glorifying weakness. Are we on the same page about that? Nuances about what Nietzsche thought are not of too much importance to me other than that he pointed out to everyone that Christianity does this pretty explicitly. But Nietzschean concepts have outgrown Nietzsche himself and we can talk about them in their own right.
Next, I would argue that the essence of utilitarianism is to measure good and evil by adding up utility. Caring a lot about suffering is a component of *many* utilitarian perspectives, but not all of them. For example, one might believe that the suffering of the weak represents null utility (as opposed to negative utility). If it is null, it hardly impacts the calculus.
This might not be representative of mainstream utilitarianism, but it's just an example to show that slave morality is not necessarily inherent in utility calculus. I believe you can use utilitarian arguments to *rationalize* pretty much any moral perspective and often it's just that -- a post hoc rationalization.
If you’re defining “slave morality” as “glorifying weakness”, then yes, utilitarianism isn’t a slave morality because it doesn’t glorify weakness. However, if you’re simplifying the concept of slave morality in that way you’re not engaging with the real depth of Nietzsche’s thought.
what do you think are the essential components of slave morality, then?
Scott doesn’t seem to understand Nietzsche at all. At one point he holds up Richard Hanania as the purest Nietzschean around and then quotes Hanania saying humans have an innate moral sense that separates us from other animals.
Nietzsche's actual position on Utilitarianism was more amusing: that it is so fuckin' British:
" Hail, ye worthies, barrow-wheeling, "Longer--better," aye revealing,
Stiffer aye in head and knee; Unenraptured, never jesting, Mediocre everlasting,
SANS GENIE ET SANS ESPRIT! "
It was already that "Germans have culture, Brits merely civilization" thang.
At least by Ecce Homo, Nietzsche hated German culture even more than the British
I would say this is a misunderstanding: the Niezstchean idea of slave morality is that of the people that think that suffering makes you better. The Christian idea of the redeeming power of suffering. Risk aversion was not even an idea in the age of Nieztsche.
He said that the slave needed some reason to justify the fact of accepting life as a slave, and they “inverted” the natural values of power and supremacy. “Slave morality” and “value inversion” go together. Nieztsche does not embrace the oppressing morality of the master, but rejects slave morality and the idea of suffering as betterment. Utilitarianism is not slave morality, because no hedonistic or eudamonic moral system supports the value of sacrifice for its own sake.
The Scott Alexander piece was not concluding that Matt yglesias was anything like a definite ubermensch; he was instead offered up as Scott making a stab in the direction of what an effective compromise might begin to look like. It is a point worth bringing up considering how monstrous something like One Billion Americans would look in practice.
Can you spell out why you think it one billion Americans would look monstrous? Intuitively, I think it would be great.
India has over a billion people. Nothing about it is appealing. Yglesias wants to get a billion Americans by bringing over millions and millions of Indians and Guatemalans. Flooding millions to turn American cities into slums is not good for anyone but slum lords.
Jane Jacobs defined slums as “places where people who can afford to leave, do.”
In that sense, attracting hundreds of millions of immigrants to come live in slums is an oxymoron.
1980 220 million
Today 330 million
Show me how it's better. many ways worse
Just more crowded. Noisier.
Okay, I'll bite.
(1) Lower violent crime rate
(2) Much less abuse faced by sexual minorities
(3) Abuse of those in interracial relationships dropping from still substantial to within error bars of zero
(4) Much better food choices that don't involve the corpses of tortured beings
(5) Can play D&D without being called a Satanist
(6) Airplanes not full of cigarette smoke
Should I stop, or is there a prize for getting to 100?
I'll bite back. Which of those things are a fcn of 110 million more people?
None. The two are more likely effects of a common cause, namely it being a pretty awesome place to live.
Pretty awesome sure but
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-the-most-serial-killers
> who think Elon Musk has, despite facilitating enormous progress, been profoundly harmful to the world because of the problematic views he expresses.
Thinking that promoting bad ideas leads to bad outcomes is actually completely independent of “slave morality” and is completely compatible with basic consequentialism.
Typo: > It’s not enough not to kill, you haver to give your wealth away
> who oppose earning to give (getting a bunch of money so you can give it away) because they think career success is immoral
I think it's more that it incentivizes perverse actions, such as becoming an oil CEO that creates tons of negative externalities (or e.g. creating FTX). It's not universalizable and the threshold we've set of donating 10% of income incentivizes looking for better paying jobs (which usually create more negative externalities) instead of more moral jobs (which usually pay lower) because donating 10% of your income as a multi-millionaire oil CEO is easier than donating 10% while living on a minimum wage for an NGO that's trying to do good in the world.
> who think Elon Musk has, despite facilitating enormous progress, been profoundly harmful to the world because of the problematic views he expresses.
Yeah, and the worker exploitation, undermining public transport, censoring leftwing thought and fundraising, etc etc
> Utilitarians are in a good position to explain the errors of both the master and slave moralist. The master moralist neglects the weak and vulnerable in favor of building giant skyscrapers. The slave moralist passes up efforts to genuinely better the world because they’re pathologically risk averse.
I would say that utilitarianism is demonstrably not risk averse enough (see my post "the wagering calamity objection to utilitarianism")
> I mean the ones who totally ignore where the charity goes and vomit twenty pages of the words “arrogant”, “billionaire”, and “white”.
I agree that "arrogant" and "white" are not really relevant criticisms, but I think "billionaire" is. Just like there is regulatory capture there is also movement capture and being too dependent on billionaires may lead you to be averse in criticizing them. Within the EA community we saw this with people like Musk and SBF and Sam Altman and Ben Delo, and the rich in general. To mix metaphors; it's hard to criticize the hand that feeds you.
> rather than the stifling risk aversion and problematization that much of the left focuses on obsessively.
This equating the left with slave morality (and the ingroup with morality) seems very ingroup bias-y. So let me crosspost my comment on Scott's post here:
Hmmm, I don't think you're characterizing the left fairly here. You seem to characterize the left wing as (all the bad parts of) slave morality but I don't have that experience. Yes, if you go by what terminally online teens on twitter say you might get that impression, but go to NGOs, or protest organizers, or left wing political party meetups and talk with people there and you will get a whole other impression.
Take for example being gay or polyamorous. If you're cool enough to get both a boyfriend and a girlfriend the progressives will cheer you on. The conservatives on the other hand will say you can't have a partner of the same sex and are restricted to only your own gender like everyone else. They will also say that you can't have more than one partner.
Or take green energy, the left wants to build wind and solar farms, while the conservatives are trying to block it.
Or take public transport, the left wants to build trains and metros, but the conservatives are trying to block it.
Or what about abortion, the left wants you to have bodily autonomy, the conservatives are trying to block it. You mentioned how the left is pro-immigration and the conservatives are trying to block it, but some conservatives like the republican vice-president even want to restrict where woman can travel within their own country, while the left is pro-freedom of movement.
The left wants to build more social housing/homes/homeless shelters, the conservatives are trying to block it.
The left wants you to be able to change your gender and build your own body like you want to, the right is trying to block it.
Or what about bike lanes and pedestrian infrastructure, the left are trying to build it, the right wants to block it.
You mentioned effective altruism as an example of good slave morality, but failed to mention that it is mostly a leftwing movement. According to the latest survey data, 76.8% is left wing, 8.1% is centrist, 2.9% is right wing and 5.6% is libertarian.
Also the whole leftist meme/goal of wanting to achieve "Fully automated luxury gay space communism" just screams of the attitude you praised in this post, but isn't mentioned. I think the left (minus terminally online twitterers that don't matter) are closest to the "superman" ideal.
A very minor typo: "you haver to give your wealth away".
A very minor typo "you haver to give your wealth away."
The real utilitarian ubermensch is whatever person or superintelligence will succeed in tiling the universe with hedonium (which I wholeheartedly believe in not as a reductio ad absurdum, but as the true end goal of utilitarianism).
The contents don't live quite live up to the title -- utilitarianism isn't a unique alternative to MM and SM, and is still open to the standard objections.
I enjoyed the lengthy Scott Alexander piece overall, found it quite balanced and comprehensive. Although he was unnecessarily harsh on you.
Your response is a good one. Utilitarianish is now added to the lexicon. And seeing as the universe is transactional, that moral compass seems to make the most sense.
I didn't find it unnecessarily harsh. Which bits did you think were harsh?
Same as J Goard’s comments
Dear BB
I recommend an intermediate position on vitalism.
1) If you are already committed to doing good, you can do more good if you are stronger. Thus strength is an important second-order virtue. Note that this is very much EA thinking (get rich then donate etc.)
2) Helping people is not only about making them happy instead of suffering, but also helping them become strong instead of weak so they can generate utility themselves instead of being dangerously dependent on external help. Give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish etc.
3) These are self-evident, this is how doctors think and developmental economists and all practically helpful people, but philosophers strangely forget these. And then we get an over-reaction from Vulgar Nietzscheans saying strength is the only thing that matters.
(Everybody knows Mussolini grabbed power in a violent coup, the March To Rome. Except he did not. It is a complete myth made up by Mussolini to look strong. They started marching, the government caved in when they were still far away from Rome, then they held a non-violent victory parade in Rome, took some heroic looking pics, and created this myth. The opposition gladly accepted this myth as they were not Vulgar Nietzscheans and for them a violent, illegal coup was a bad thing. I strongly suspect we have some similar bipartisan myths. Maybe Osama Bin Laden was just a rich fool who tried to look important and did not "mastermind" anything, just gave the terrorists some cash who let him take "credit" because they were not planning to survive the act.)
4) The antidote to that is to keep vitalism part of the utilitarian package. Be like that doctor who heals people's knees not only so that they do not feel pain but also so that they can run an 5K.
5) The reason it is hard to keep it part of the package that it has a "fascist aesthetic whiff" and that smells bad so you over-correct. My advice: just get over the aesthetic problem. Make it explicit that in the ideal world everybody can run 5K, deadlift twice their body weight, do their taxes, write a simple Python app, calculate the amount of paint they need to repaint their houses, never requires public assistance to live on and could survive a week in the wilderness naked. And yes we want a human colony on Mars to mitigate x-risk. Maybe not the highest priority, world hunger comes first, but eventually.
I've gotta admit, I was flabbergasted to see Scott invoking Ozy's "morality of the dead" against you. That piece a critique of an especially crude form of deontology. Scott thinks a guy whose nom de plume is "Bentham's Bulldog" thinks we're not strongly called to active (and proactive) goodness?
I find that whole polemic annoying. So what if taken to the extremes you can also associate humility and quietism with the dead? They could still be good ways to live. “Die before ye die!”
Corpses don’t eat meat.
They also don't effectively reduce the amount of meat eaten in the world, through activism, donations or just personal influence. I hope it won't come as breaking news that rejection of the active-passive distinction is a pretty major feature of utilitarianism.
I love that meme! My response to the piece was similar. If one focuses on the Niezstchean master and slave dichotomy, it tends to end up in fairly extreme places.
Yet in both Christian and pagan morality, there are prescriptions for reciprocity. Hubris brings Nemesis according to the Greco-roman theology. “Do unto to your neighbor.” Is a central tenant of Christianity. As far as I’m concerned, if the ubermench isn’t promoting such balance, its not got much legs in the grand scheme. Things are not so black-and-white.