"With great power must also come...great responsibility!"
I do kind of wonder if they'll get a sort of independent folk life once enough enter the public domain. Are we going to start seeing independent Captain America, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman stories in the mid-2030s, or is the fear of lawyers too great?
This might be too much psychoanalysis on a guy I don’t know, but I feel like Elon is crashing out so hard over this because he is racked with guilt somewhere deep inside.
Elon doesn't strike me as someone who's ever been racked with guilt. He's also not a complete psychopath. The ventures that he's been involved in, especially Tesla and SpaceX, have all been generally pro-social. He strikes me as someone who genuinely cares about humanity without caring much about individual humans. So he's capable of making great sacrifices, even if that's in human lives, for what he considers the greater good.
And what he considers the "greater good" is probably quite different from what you and I would consider to be the greater good. He's probably thinking more in terms of technological advancement, "glory of mankind", etc (he's probably more Nietzschean on this than most of us).
IMHO part of why he’s so erratic is that he’s not entirely a sociopath. That and that there are strong clues his dad is a child molester, and DT being a similar person, keyed into that damage to control him.
The burning hundreds of tons of emergency food rations at considerable expense, instead of sending it to places it would save lives, seems to me similar to taking food directly out of starving children’s mouths. Is that murder? I’m not sure the difference is meaningful in that particular instance.
I am constantly struck by the knowing disingenuousness of these people tossing caution to the wind about spending hundreds of billions on poorly thought out wars, or billions in aggregate to target a few dozen high school trans athletes, or to claim Christian Virtue (TM) as their motivation, and then immediately act with such intense disregard of ANY moral obligation towards people in need, no matter how small the cost or how enormous the return on investment.
The complete cauterizing of any kind of empathy or common good for anyone who differs from them by accident of birth, ethnicity, religion, moral structure, sexuality or gender, neurobiology, etc… is so eye watering it is hard to take it in.
It’s not hypocrisy so much as it is a kind of pure and complete dehumanization of “the other” such that the enormous mass of humanity comprising that “other” ends up solely tallied as a debit and never a credit. As a burden and not a benefit.
Every day I think I’ve become cynical and hardened enough to cope with the degradation of our social fabric and or care for each other, and every day the revealed truth of the world is 100 times worse than I imagined.
Basically agree with this, with one caveat: depending on exactly how off the estimates end up being, it's plausible that it ends up being exposed that a lot of the methods we have for evaluating foreign aid intervention are so bad we can't really rely on them in any serious way.
I have no idea how likely that is; but if it turns out that unplugging all HIV foreign aid has no detectable effect on HIV deaths in Africa over five years, I think it would be pretty good evidence that there were some pretty big blind spots/group think/whatever in the way proponents were thinking about this.
But for the kinds of interventions we are talking about here, we already have RCTs showing the effectiveness of the intervention -- which provide much stronger causal evidence than "twitter guy eyeballing a timeseries with no counterfactual."
Yeah, that sounds pretty likely to me, but something at the structure of BB's essay nagged at me: it acknowledged the possibility that that the "Twitter guy eyeballing things" should update us away from the RCT estimates but in a way that kind of minimized the critique: the feeling is _if_ the Twitter guy is right, all we do is just be grateful the absolute worst case scenarios didn't materialize. But that's wrong: _if_ the Twitter guy is right, we also have to reevaluate the whole process that generated those estimates, and it didn't feel like BB was really alive to that point.
Let's say there is an astronaut trapped in deep space and every hour on the hour you have to remotely access and reboot the life support system to keep that astronaut alive. How long are you morally obligated to keep disrupting your life in order to keep him alive for another hour?
I think instead of there being a definite length of time ie: three months the question is contingent on whether there is any hope of rescue. If the astronaut can expect to be rescued at some point then you have to keep going until that point is reached. If there is no hope, then you don't even have to wait one hour before letting him die.
This USAID controversy is working on the same principle I feel.
A lot of people have criticized our planet's sole trillionaire as not humanitarian enough. But the truth is that Musk has done more for malaria than any man alive.
Thanks to his work at USAID, nearly a quintillion more Plasmodiums are alive today!
Even if the efficiency of aid getting through is something awful like ten percent, the marginal benefit to the poor and suffering is radically higher than the marginal cost to people in the developing world. Even more so considering that the budget wasn’t reallocated to domestic welfare programs but instead was accompanied by cuts to local welfare and massive additional tax cuts and subsidies to the wealthy egoists like Musk and Trump himself. Not to mention Musk’s mind boggling self dealing with contracts during the 90 day quasi Presidency he purchased.
And I think this is a coherent argument against foreign aid - that foreign aid actually does more harm than good by funding bad actors. However, this is not the argument that anybody in that thread is making - rather everyone is leaning in to the argument that there are no trade-offs and nobody died when we cut funding because it all was going to fund tents for the Taliban.
The most successful aid programs are designed to minimise interaction with undesirable behaviours and entities.
The AfriDev pump, for example, was designed specifically to be installed by two unskilled women with basic hand tools in a day. Women only. Because the men in affected countries are typically corrupt and lazy, yet the women who do the brunt of the work tend to be survival motivated.
Yes, the hot take tweets are almost always wrong and dumb, that’s what makes them hot takes. And I agree with your conclusions. But I think you’re underweighting the irritation it causes to receive the “vibe” (as delivered via social media algorithm so maybe be entirely untrue) that giving more and then cutting back is morally *worse* than giving less in the first place
But no one is claiming that giving more and then cutting back is worse than giving less in the first place. If Elon Musk or Donald Trump had created USAID in the first place and then later decided to scale it back, no one would be calling them murderers for it or saying they had killed millions of people. Likewise, no one is saying that America killed millions of people - rather, America saved millions, and Musk and Trump are murderers for preventing it from saving more. They actively did things that caused those people to die, and not just by scaling back a previous good action they had taken.
Actually, yes, pulling the rug out from people and organizations that relied in good faith upon an agreed funding scheme IS radically worse than just not funding something to begin with.
If you moved across the country to begin a new job and then were told your contract had been voided the day of, and you had no recourse to promissory estoppel for the costs and sacrifice you made when moving out there and foregoing other jobs.. you would be righteously pissed.
This is orders of magnitude worse and more extreme and yet people are bothered by the vibes? I don’t get this reaction at all. It’s so profoundly petty, as if annoyance is equivalent to the destruction of the lives of others, simply because so many people have diminished the humanity of their interlocutors to the point of seeing them as nothing.
No the analogy would be your job letting you go after a few decades compared to remaining unemployed that whole time
An agreed funding scheme isn’t an eternal obligation. Starting to give charity doesn’t mean you have to continue doing so forever.
I think it served no actual benefit to cut in this case, and so the US has decided not to save some people it could have for minimal effort which is wrong and shameful, but it’s not the same as murdering those people.
Any amount of aid is strictly good (if it’s not just corruption etc..) and any decrease of aid is just less positive and not an absolute negative thing
Have you seen https://goflaw.substack.com/p/i-tried-reproducing-that-lancet-study / https://goflaw.substack.com/p/the-lancet-and-usaid-part-deux ? Can't say I can verify the math but it's a competent-looking criticism of the Lancet study that claims that the predicted death toll is very sensitive to the specific modelling choices (IIUIC essentially because the authors chose an approach that couldn't really differentiate between mortality reductions by USAID interventions vs. mortality decreasing over time due to general progress of the world) and the real death toll might be more likely in the tens of thousands (ie. a few thousand per year).
I don't know, maybe? Pangram thinks a small part of ot has been "lightly edited" but most of the text is not AI. In any case, don't see why it would matter.
Rufo has continually acted like a maniac on X. He wears a thick cloak of rationality, but at his core he’s deeply ignorant, to the point of malice. Ezra Klein gave him a softball interview recently, in which Ezra, unbeknownst to him, got taken for a walk through maga propaganda.
Rufo is not particularly smart. He is deeply envious of better thinkers, hence his touting of his Harvard extension degree despite knowing that he fails all of the test-taking heuristics he badly wants to apply (solely) to every hated minority population. Surely nobody seriously doubts that KBJ would take him to the woodshed in any neutral academic metric, yet he is happy to live in the opaque world he has built for himself where he can make a pretense to rationality and intellectual authority.
At core he’s just a guy who lost his mind because there is a two block stretch in Seattle with lots of mentally ill drug addicts, and he decided that the entirety of modern society must be burned down so that people like him never get annoyed by Pioneer Square ever again.
Its astonishing your lack of selfawareness in your last sentence; you as a liberal are in favor of abortion; wich kills aproxximately 73 millons humans each year; you liberals dont have a shred of moral autorithy talking about dead children
A moderate pro choice position is the most rational. We don’t want conscious beings suffering, and we also don’t like making extreme violations on women’s bodily autonomy.
The idea that a fetus with no demonstrable cognition or self-awareness or even neuro-connected pain experience… has ANY similarity to a child or adult human experiencing the existential horror of toil and death from starvation or disease… is risible.
All life exists on a spectrum. Does a week old fetus have ANY value? Yeah. Is it enough value to infringe on a women’s bodily autonomy for 9 months? No.
I'm pro-choice (probably because deep down inside I hate children... this is NOT the case for most pro-choice people!) but yes, if you are actually pro-life that has to be among your top issues. The thing about EA is that, event though the cultural left goes after it fairly frequently (look at TESCREAL etc.), it's almost entirely secular and therefore on the cultural left side. And being heavily male they're not going to take a position that would put them at odds with feminism. So we see discussions of the effects of things on hypothetical trillions of people in the future (or of billions of shrimp) but rarely of unborn fetuses etc.
It's more of a theoretical argument for me but yeah, if you start looking into the abortion thing you can make a reasonable case.
This is probably overly charitable but the steelman USAID tent photo argument is a perfectly good argument against USAID: like many aid efforts, it may have good intentions and maybe even good first order effects but the second order effects (destroying local industry/fueling corruption/supporting the taliban/etc) are negative. It isn’t aid exactly, but an analogous example is if you saw a picture of the taliban riding American tanks holding American weapons post withdrawal and someone said “see this is why funding the 20 year war in Afghanistan was dumb” it’s a terrible retort to say “you fool, that taliban STOLE those weapons it’s not like we gave them tanks.” Like yes that’s the point! whatever the intentions of the money spent, the result is the Taliban has a bunch of stuff, that’s why the war was a bad use of money!
The analogous argument to the tent thing wouldn’t be “seems like funding a 20 year war in Afghanistan is dumb”—that would be analogous to “we shouldn’t have sent aid to that particular war-torn area.” The analogous argument would be “seems like funding a military is dumb.”
not going to argue about precisely correct scale of analogy, I guess I’m saying the Taliban having tanks is a bad thing resulting from military stuff and it’s valid to point that out, and Taliban having USAID tents is a bad thing resulting from USAID and it’s valid to point that out. As a paradigmatic example while making a claim that military interventions/aid interventions are bad on average, both examples are perfectly cromulent.
I might even agree about net-badness in the military intervention case. Not so for USAID but it’s correct there are unintended downsides and it’s intellectually sloppy to make fun of the Taliban tent thing when there are so many obviously correct arguments to make against Musk et al!
I don't really see why the Taliban having tents is a sufficiently bad thing that it needs to factor into anyone's calculations about giving other people tents.
But the correct scale of the analogy is not a quibble—since the argument is about tradeoffs, it’s important to understand not only how bad the tradeoff is, but also whether it could be avoided by more limited action, or only by total inaction.
As an example in support of the claim that USAID was a total waste of money and cutting it didn’t hurt anyone, it’s clearly legit! It’s genuine evidence in favor of musks position! Is it *sufficient* evidence obviously not, but saying “lol this picture is a scam with literally zero evidentiary value against USAID” is lazy and wrong. The correct argument against is “USAID is a big organization so obviously there will be lots of embarrassing episodes even if it’s doing great, so the evidentiary value of this genuinely embarrassing embarassing photo is >0 but very low and the evidence of net positive results from USAID work is very strong”
I guess that's a good thing to say to whatever group of people are dumb to work that out on their own, are not only pretending not to understand that and also won't find it to be cringe inducing weak shit that puts them off even more. I'm not convinced that group exists.
What if we think third world populations threaten first world civilization, so we think there should ideally be less third worlders, so we stop engaging in interventions that artificially prop up their populations? The deaths are sad but might ultimately be good in the big picture, considering how much potential future value rests on survival of first world civilization. If we want to get to the stars, we have to stop inflating the populations that drag us relentlessly down to earth.
Why do you think their deaths are sad? If you do feel that way, maybe the first world should use its resources and talent to save and uplift the third world, as it’s done many times before.
Colonialism *is* the logically correct EA answer, but exceedingly unpopular politically, so they just ignore the obvious conclusions of their positions.
But given dramatic population decline the 1st world actively relies on third world immigration in order to survive. So I really doubt there is a good case for this.
Populations don't need to grow in perpetuity for the survival of civilization. A lower population is almost undisputably more survivable than being completely replaced by low-IQ foreigners.
The arguments for responsibility here seem pretty weak to me:
1. Legality itself doesn't matter for moral responsibility. The Supreme Court has ruled that police have no legal obligation to save lives, but the government obviously has a moral obligation to do so (probably because it has a monopoly on force, thus preventing many people from being otherwise able to save themselves).*
2. The U.S. government has a moral obligation to use ambulances when necessary to save the lives of U.S. citizens. This is why you would be responsible for the death if you stopped the ambulance.
3. Normally, you are not responisble for every bad thing that tesults from failing to donate more than you are required to. You seem to agree with this. So, if you donated whatever you believe the minimum requirement to be, and fhen medical devices ended up left in some people and some ambulances were left without drivers, you would not be reaponsible for the suffering that resulted. You were never required to donate enough to solve those issues (on the contrary, if you were required to donate, it would probably be to save more lives elsewhere, not to remove medical devices).
4. The counterfactual test counts far too many things as killing. I think you know this. but for some reason you think that this test would get the right verdict when it comes to donations. This makes no sense, because in your view whether failing to donate counts as killing (or, at least, whethet it counts as causing deaths that you are responsible for, which is really what the debate is about) depends on the amount you donated, which doesn't change the counterfactual.
* In fact, it seems to me that using said force to force people to donate to other countries is actively bad and wrong. You would and should feel the same way if I forced you to donate abroad against your will, I presume.
Your #1 is confused. That police aren’t legally obligated to prevent a crime but are morally obligated to do so, doesn’t demonstrate that acting *illegally* doesn’t affect moral responsibility. If a car hits a pedestrian, it makes an enormous moral difference whether the car or the pedestrian was going against the red light.
There is a moral obligation not to run red lights in a society where doing so reliably puts others at risks. The law actually has very little to do with it (if rules around red lights were merely strong social conventions, running a red light would be wrong in the same way).
Whether the government has a moral responsibility to use tax dollars to help save people abroad in the first place is what's at question, here. The legality of the action is mostly irrelevant to the morality. If they have no such obligation, then there's nothing inherently wrong with stopping them from doing it.
Indeed, if they were wrong to do it all along. then the government has an obligation to stop.
You’re doing the thing again. It’s true that social conventions can create moral obligations in lieu of laws. It doesn’t follow that laws can’t create moral obligations. Indeed, the whole concept of “the rule of law” is that the government in particular is obliged to follow the law, not social conventions or popular opinion. Not doing so does indeed put others, and society itself, at risk. It would have been wrong for Eisenhower to send the National Guard to Little Rock before the Supreme Court ruled, for instance.
In this case, Musk’s illegal action has an additional moral dimension, which is that ending the funding suddenly and without warning meant that the affected nations and people had no time to make other arrangements. If I’m charitably helping my neighbor collect his lifesaving medication, I’m free to stop at any time, but it would be wrong for me to simply not deliver all of a sudden one day, rather than letting him know in advance.
But the social convention doesn’t create moral obligations and neither do laws. The rule of law is valuable for the consistency and order it creates not because the law is somehow morally special.
This second part is right but it’s bad irrespective of the illegality. That it is illegal is not in principle an issue.
If the rule of law is valuable for creating consistency and order, then abusing the rule of law does harm. Whether we call that a question of morals or not is indifferent to me, I guess, but it seems parallel to other harms, many of which are treated as a matter of morals.
Yes I agree but it’s not a harm because it’s breaking the rule of law. The distinction isn’t really important in this case but in some cases it may be critical especially where the law itself seems to be harmful or serve no useful purpose.
Your first paragraph seems to me not to be applicable to wrongful laws. I do not think the government is obligated to follow wrongful laws even for everyday "rule of law" reasons. Now, I suppose many people think that foreign aid donations are not inherently wrong, and so the government can give foreign aid without doing anything wrong. Yet, the governments donations come from coercing taxpayers to give it money, and I think this imposes strict obligations on what the government can use that money for, in contrast to private citizens. Private citizens can buy themselves golden toilets; the government cannot.
Similarly, private citizens can donate to foreign aid, but in my view it is straightforwardly wrong for the government to do so. So, the government is obligated to immediately stop, and any bureaucrats who get in the way of stopping it are in the wrong, just as if they were using these same barriers to protect government officials buying themselves golden toilets. I understand that this is a stronger position than what I said before, but it is the position I am actually inclined to defend at length, as opposed to the more milquetoast view I was implying earlier.
Your second paragraph seems only tangentially related to the first. All of those things could still happen without the law, right? Indeed, the law could demand you end the funding suddenly, and then the law would be wrong on your view, wouldn't it? Still, I'm open to the idea that Musk ended the funding too suddenly (though I'm a bit reluctant to condemn him for it...I get the strong impression that the few cuts we got were a rare moment of opportunity unlikely to stick around long, so I'm really not sure what his alternatives realistically were). Overall, though, I just don't think that's really what most of the conversation is about.
If there were universal agreement about which laws were wrongful, then those wrongful laws wouldn’t exist. Instead, we have a situation where some people think certain laws are just and others think those same laws are unjust. So to say “well, the rule of law doesn’t apply to unjust laws” is to deny the rule of law entirely. I don’t think you can have thought through the implications of this. Imagine a judge who believes property is theft, so refuses to rule in favor of the government in shoplifting cases. Or imagine an anti-Elon who decrees that tax money designated for the military will now go to buy bed nets (and golden toilets while we’re at it) for the third world.
Some amount of prosecutorial/executive discretion does exist, of course. And individuals employed by the government might choose to disobey and suffer the consequences, like Kim Davis if you’re familiar with that case. But simply decreeing that the money the law requires be spent in one area will no longer be spent does not fall under that category.
I’m not interested in an argument about foreign aid on the merits, because (per my argument above) it’s irrelevant to the question of whether it’s right or wrong for the government to break its own laws.
Regarding the point about Elon moving too fast, you’re right that it’s separate from the rule of law question (though one advantage of the legislative process is that it usually leaves time for people to see what’s coming). If Congress passed a law ending foreign aid immediately, I would condemn that as an unjust law. But it would at least have democratic legitimacy. Musk’s action has both problems, so it’s doubly unjust.
Yeah, so in my view "a judge who believes that property is theft, so refuses to rule in favor of the government in shoplifting cases" is the exact same as "a judge who believes that slavery is theft, so refuses to rule in favor of the slaveowner in escaped slave cases" except for the crucial fact that the former judge is totally wrong and the latter judge is totally right (and thus justified in ruling against slaveowners on principle). Most people think this is the right result, too.
Of course, there is a question about how to constrain people who are totally wrong without constraining the people who are totally right, but that mostly seems to me to be a practical question irrelevant to the morality as hand. If you are totally right (note: this is not the same as you *believing* that you are totally right), then you will be justified in breaking those constraints when necessary. For example, anyone would be totally justified in cutting aid that in fact just went to support slavery in the Middle East.
I think the same thing in general, for example, about the rules of war: most of them make very little sense morally (e.g. just war theory treats soldiers invading another country as if they have the same moral culpability as soldiers defending their country), and the question of how best to constrain bad actors is mostly separate from the morality, here. If a good actor needs to break those constraints for actual, sufficient, good reasons (note: not just because they believe they have good reasons), then they will often be justified in doing so.
What keeps bad actors in check in not moral principles, it's force. So, the question of how to constrain bad actors in war or in government positions is not actually resolved by moral principles. I am not saying that someone (e.g. Elon) shouldn't be punished for breaking the law (if that's what we need to do, practically, to enforce important constraints), but even if he needs to be punished he still was justified, in my view. That being said, in Elon's case, it's not clear to me whether punishment is even on the table: I don't know if anyone is seriously planning to implement any such punishment or not.
Generally lots of utilitarians including myself implicitly don’t seem to believe in the killing-letting die distinction. Personally I think it’s spurious because the counterfactual exists where those people didn’t die and which possibility prevailed is up to you in some capacity.
Frankly I and other utilitarians would be ok with forcing you to donate, that’s basically why we would support a program of tax funded foreign aid. There is no 1st order moral protection against coercion.
If you reject that distinction entirely and then use that rejection to justify theft, then I would be justified right now in hacking your computer, stealing your bank information, and donating all of your spare money to the Against Malaria Foundation.
I really don't think that is a compelling position.
Yeah probably would, except for I’m a broke student so it rly wouldn’t be very much money, that being said, doing that on widespread level would be liable to be counter productive, so we do things like convince people in democracies to vote for taxes which then go to fund foreign aid. Taxes are theft but so what, property is only instrumental.
Also to be clear rejecting the distinction is not justifying the theft, the theft is justified by the benefits to utility. Plus the fact that there is no in principle reason to refrain from theft in my view. Just a large number of instrumental reasons.
This isn’t a conversation where you’re gonna convince me that this isn’t a compelling position. For a utilitarian who doesn’t advocate for what is really some kind of hybrid theory, property isn’t important as a first or even second order concern, so whether or not something is theft isn’t really important except insofar as that leads to problems of implementation and decreases utility.
This isn’t some kind of crazy position for me to have, it’s basically all standard utilitarian positions I’m just not gonna pretend like it’s something different.
I mean, you are right that this is a pretty standard utilitarian viewpoint, but I do actually think that utilitarianism is a crazy position for anyone to have. In my experience, though, utilitarians are relatively immune to counter-examples. I think this is largely because utilitarians are selectively skeptical about many moral intuitions in a way that's hard to justify.
For example, when you ask people not just "Is X is good or bad?" but "Why is X good or bad?" you just get straightforward anti-utilitarian moral intuitions. I think it's a good thing to be sad at your mom's funeral. I don't at all think this is good because it benefits you in some way; instead, it's good because it's the fitting attitude to have to your mom passing.
The utilitarian must insist that this latter explanation is wrong: if it's good, it must be because it instrumentally produces more good than bad. This just strikes me (and most people, as far as I can tell) as mistaken on its face. Even if it turned out I was slightly less happy as a result of having the right attitude at my mother's funeral, it's still a good thing that I was sad that she passed.
Now compare (1) the killing vs letting die distinction and (2) property rights. For (1), killing is worse than letting die because killing someone mistreats them in a way letting them die doesn't. It seems like utilitarians have to deny that, but denying that strikes me as rather crazy. Sure, in both cases someone ends up dead, but that's not the only thing that matters here, and actively making someone dead mistreats them in a way that letting them die from causes you aren't responsible for doesn't.
For (2) property rights are important simply because we should be able to decide what to do with our own lives, and that includes what we do with our own property. Suppose, for example, that I am playing the game Dark Souls, and I would be happier using all of the tools available to beat the game. However, instead I opt to try to beat the game with no armor, no spells, and no potions. The challenge is frustrating, but it's what I decided to do with (this small portion) of my life, and that's what matters here, not whether it maximizes my utility.
Utilitarians have to insist that this is the wrong way to use your own property. Indeed, if you were the last person left, a utilitarian would require you to abandon your own little life-projects whenever doing so would make you happier. This, again, strikes me as a crazy position. If I were the last person left on Earth, I would likely hold a very similar (and fitting) attitude as I would during my mom's funeral, and I would rather spend much of my time unhappily etching the final epitaph of humanity than pursue what utilitarians think is most important.
I don't think any of this will move the needle at all with your typical utilitarian (or you, if you are such), but I don't see why it shouldn't. Our intuitions about why things matter are just as important as our intuitions about what matters, and those explanations in most cases undermine utilitarianism directly. I don't think there's any good way to debunk all of these intuitions without debunking morality as a whole, so I don't think there's any good way for utilitarians to support their view.
I likewise like rights based positions like libertarianism are pretty crazy to have. That’s probably fair, I am skeptical of any intuitions I can spot, but it’s hard to spot em all, and that leaves blind spots.
The issue is that just because it strikes someone that way doesn’t make it true. I have lots of intuitions but unless there is a good argument for why that is the case I disregard them, they are a moral guide post but hardly definitive.
It’s not clear to me that this is the case, in both cases the counterfactual involves the other person surviving and in both cases which result occurs is in your hands. You are responsible for their death through your actions.
Yes but that’s because being able to decide what you want to do with your life is conceive to it being a good life. Presumably if you’ve decided to do this dark souls challenge run I will assume that somehow this is net utility for you unless clear evidence is provided to the contrary. But none of this establishes that as a matter of first principles you have a legitimate and morally relevent right to your property. A right nobody can give a good account of.
No we do not, the general rule is to defer to your use of your property on the assumption that you best know your own interests (unless you’re impaired in some way, something that would also be a reason for limiting your autonomy in most views like yours). If you place that much value in it then it seems like it does give you utility. This is a common point anti-utilitarians seem to make, mistaking that utility must necessarily be purely hedonic. Though it usually is, this seems like it’s probably a case of non-hedonic utility.
I actually disagree, I want an account of why something matters or what matters. If a proper account can’t be given I don’t think there is a strong case for it. I recognize this is an exacting standard that you may think is unreasonable however. Regarding common-sense moral intuitions all of these ultimately seem to end up in vague consequentialist justifications when pushed to its limit (see the interest theories of rights, which is a good description of our rights practice and entirely relies on implicit consequentialist premises).
The only place utilitarianism doesn’t seem to do well is in the domain of moral responsibility, but given that nobody can provide an account of how free will would work that doesn’t make it seemingly impossible or trivial I don’t much care about moral responsibility since it probably isn’t real.
Let’s consult the mythology of america’s pantheon:
“Look, when you can do the things that I can, but you don't, and then the bad things happen - they happen because of you."
- Peter Parker
https://youtu.be/AVlww2uJHAc?t=154
Love that
"With great power must also come...great responsibility!"
I do kind of wonder if they'll get a sort of independent folk life once enough enter the public domain. Are we going to start seeing independent Captain America, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman stories in the mid-2030s, or is the fear of lawyers too great?
This might be too much psychoanalysis on a guy I don’t know, but I feel like Elon is crashing out so hard over this because he is racked with guilt somewhere deep inside.
Elon doesn't strike me as someone who's ever been racked with guilt. He's also not a complete psychopath. The ventures that he's been involved in, especially Tesla and SpaceX, have all been generally pro-social. He strikes me as someone who genuinely cares about humanity without caring much about individual humans. So he's capable of making great sacrifices, even if that's in human lives, for what he considers the greater good.
And what he considers the "greater good" is probably quite different from what you and I would consider to be the greater good. He's probably thinking more in terms of technological advancement, "glory of mankind", etc (he's probably more Nietzschean on this than most of us).
IMHO part of why he’s so erratic is that he’s not entirely a sociopath. That and that there are strong clues his dad is a child molester, and DT being a similar person, keyed into that damage to control him.
One could hope.
That or the ketamine addiction.
Well done.
The burning hundreds of tons of emergency food rations at considerable expense, instead of sending it to places it would save lives, seems to me similar to taking food directly out of starving children’s mouths. Is that murder? I’m not sure the difference is meaningful in that particular instance.
I am constantly struck by the knowing disingenuousness of these people tossing caution to the wind about spending hundreds of billions on poorly thought out wars, or billions in aggregate to target a few dozen high school trans athletes, or to claim Christian Virtue (TM) as their motivation, and then immediately act with such intense disregard of ANY moral obligation towards people in need, no matter how small the cost or how enormous the return on investment.
The complete cauterizing of any kind of empathy or common good for anyone who differs from them by accident of birth, ethnicity, religion, moral structure, sexuality or gender, neurobiology, etc… is so eye watering it is hard to take it in.
It’s not hypocrisy so much as it is a kind of pure and complete dehumanization of “the other” such that the enormous mass of humanity comprising that “other” ends up solely tallied as a debit and never a credit. As a burden and not a benefit.
Every day I think I’ve become cynical and hardened enough to cope with the degradation of our social fabric and or care for each other, and every day the revealed truth of the world is 100 times worse than I imagined.
I would agree the killing let die distinction is frankly spurious.
Thanks,
Commenting for algo
Thanks I will do the same.
Also this reply probably boosts the post marginally but not as much as the original comment
Basically agree with this, with one caveat: depending on exactly how off the estimates end up being, it's plausible that it ends up being exposed that a lot of the methods we have for evaluating foreign aid intervention are so bad we can't really rely on them in any serious way.
I have no idea how likely that is; but if it turns out that unplugging all HIV foreign aid has no detectable effect on HIV deaths in Africa over five years, I think it would be pretty good evidence that there were some pretty big blind spots/group think/whatever in the way proponents were thinking about this.
But for the kinds of interventions we are talking about here, we already have RCTs showing the effectiveness of the intervention -- which provide much stronger causal evidence than "twitter guy eyeballing a timeseries with no counterfactual."
Yeah, that sounds pretty likely to me, but something at the structure of BB's essay nagged at me: it acknowledged the possibility that that the "Twitter guy eyeballing things" should update us away from the RCT estimates but in a way that kind of minimized the critique: the feeling is _if_ the Twitter guy is right, all we do is just be grateful the absolute worst case scenarios didn't materialize. But that's wrong: _if_ the Twitter guy is right, we also have to reevaluate the whole process that generated those estimates, and it didn't feel like BB was really alive to that point.
Nice article, sounds exactly right
Let's say there is an astronaut trapped in deep space and every hour on the hour you have to remotely access and reboot the life support system to keep that astronaut alive. How long are you morally obligated to keep disrupting your life in order to keep him alive for another hour?
I think instead of there being a definite length of time ie: three months the question is contingent on whether there is any hope of rescue. If the astronaut can expect to be rescued at some point then you have to keep going until that point is reached. If there is no hope, then you don't even have to wait one hour before letting him die.
This USAID controversy is working on the same principle I feel.
A lot of people have criticized our planet's sole trillionaire as not humanitarian enough. But the truth is that Musk has done more for malaria than any man alive.
Thanks to his work at USAID, nearly a quintillion more Plasmodiums are alive today!
Elon was right though
There’s nothing more corrupt than governmental aid programs in the developing world.
>Elon was right though
That nobody could cite a single name from among those who died?
No, Elon was quite clearly wrong; see linked examples above.
The sitting US president using invest-in-my-crypto-scheme-to-get-a-pardon is more corrupt.
Even if the efficiency of aid getting through is something awful like ten percent, the marginal benefit to the poor and suffering is radically higher than the marginal cost to people in the developing world. Even more so considering that the budget wasn’t reallocated to domestic welfare programs but instead was accompanied by cuts to local welfare and massive additional tax cuts and subsidies to the wealthy egoists like Musk and Trump himself. Not to mention Musk’s mind boggling self dealing with contracts during the 90 day quasi Presidency he purchased.
It doesn’t go to people, it props up crime syndicates
Even charities aren’t immune to this problem, but they’re multiples better than any government agency
And I think this is a coherent argument against foreign aid - that foreign aid actually does more harm than good by funding bad actors. However, this is not the argument that anybody in that thread is making - rather everyone is leaning in to the argument that there are no trade-offs and nobody died when we cut funding because it all was going to fund tents for the Taliban.
The most successful aid programs are designed to minimise interaction with undesirable behaviours and entities.
The AfriDev pump, for example, was designed specifically to be installed by two unskilled women with basic hand tools in a day. Women only. Because the men in affected countries are typically corrupt and lazy, yet the women who do the brunt of the work tend to be survival motivated.
Yes, the hot take tweets are almost always wrong and dumb, that’s what makes them hot takes. And I agree with your conclusions. But I think you’re underweighting the irritation it causes to receive the “vibe” (as delivered via social media algorithm so maybe be entirely untrue) that giving more and then cutting back is morally *worse* than giving less in the first place
But no one is claiming that giving more and then cutting back is worse than giving less in the first place. If Elon Musk or Donald Trump had created USAID in the first place and then later decided to scale it back, no one would be calling them murderers for it or saying they had killed millions of people. Likewise, no one is saying that America killed millions of people - rather, America saved millions, and Musk and Trump are murderers for preventing it from saving more. They actively did things that caused those people to die, and not just by scaling back a previous good action they had taken.
Actually, yes, pulling the rug out from people and organizations that relied in good faith upon an agreed funding scheme IS radically worse than just not funding something to begin with.
If you moved across the country to begin a new job and then were told your contract had been voided the day of, and you had no recourse to promissory estoppel for the costs and sacrifice you made when moving out there and foregoing other jobs.. you would be righteously pissed.
This is orders of magnitude worse and more extreme and yet people are bothered by the vibes? I don’t get this reaction at all. It’s so profoundly petty, as if annoyance is equivalent to the destruction of the lives of others, simply because so many people have diminished the humanity of their interlocutors to the point of seeing them as nothing.
No the analogy would be your job letting you go after a few decades compared to remaining unemployed that whole time
An agreed funding scheme isn’t an eternal obligation. Starting to give charity doesn’t mean you have to continue doing so forever.
I think it served no actual benefit to cut in this case, and so the US has decided not to save some people it could have for minimal effort which is wrong and shameful, but it’s not the same as murdering those people.
Any amount of aid is strictly good (if it’s not just corruption etc..) and any decrease of aid is just less positive and not an absolute negative thing
Have you seen https://goflaw.substack.com/p/i-tried-reproducing-that-lancet-study / https://goflaw.substack.com/p/the-lancet-and-usaid-part-deux ? Can't say I can verify the math but it's a competent-looking criticism of the Lancet study that claims that the predicted death toll is very sensitive to the specific modelling choices (IIUIC essentially because the authors chose an approach that couldn't really differentiate between mortality reductions by USAID interventions vs. mortality decreasing over time due to general progress of the world) and the real death toll might be more likely in the tens of thousands (ie. a few thousand per year).
A more accessible summary, along with a couple other arguments for the Lancet estimates being several orders of magnitude off, is at https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/did-elon-musk-kill-millions
Thousands of people dying annually due to government cuts is still not great but seems within the normal range of consequences for superpower actions.
The heretical insights article is 100% AI generated
I don't know, maybe? Pangram thinks a small part of ot has been "lightly edited" but most of the text is not AI. In any case, don't see why it would matter.
Rufo has continually acted like a maniac on X. He wears a thick cloak of rationality, but at his core he’s deeply ignorant, to the point of malice. Ezra Klein gave him a softball interview recently, in which Ezra, unbeknownst to him, got taken for a walk through maga propaganda.
Rufo is not particularly smart. He is deeply envious of better thinkers, hence his touting of his Harvard extension degree despite knowing that he fails all of the test-taking heuristics he badly wants to apply (solely) to every hated minority population. Surely nobody seriously doubts that KBJ would take him to the woodshed in any neutral academic metric, yet he is happy to live in the opaque world he has built for himself where he can make a pretense to rationality and intellectual authority.
At core he’s just a guy who lost his mind because there is a two block stretch in Seattle with lots of mentally ill drug addicts, and he decided that the entirety of modern society must be burned down so that people like him never get annoyed by Pioneer Square ever again.
Its astonishing your lack of selfawareness in your last sentence; you as a liberal are in favor of abortion; wich kills aproxximately 73 millons humans each year; you liberals dont have a shred of moral autorithy talking about dead children
A moderate pro choice position is the most rational. We don’t want conscious beings suffering, and we also don’t like making extreme violations on women’s bodily autonomy.
The idea that a fetus with no demonstrable cognition or self-awareness or even neuro-connected pain experience… has ANY similarity to a child or adult human experiencing the existential horror of toil and death from starvation or disease… is risible.
Just genuinely beyond serious thought.
All life exists on a spectrum. Does a week old fetus have ANY value? Yeah. Is it enough value to infringe on a women’s bodily autonomy for 9 months? No.
I'm pro-choice (probably because deep down inside I hate children... this is NOT the case for most pro-choice people!) but yes, if you are actually pro-life that has to be among your top issues. The thing about EA is that, event though the cultural left goes after it fairly frequently (look at TESCREAL etc.), it's almost entirely secular and therefore on the cultural left side. And being heavily male they're not going to take a position that would put them at odds with feminism. So we see discussions of the effects of things on hypothetical trillions of people in the future (or of billions of shrimp) but rarely of unborn fetuses etc.
It's more of a theoretical argument for me but yeah, if you start looking into the abortion thing you can make a reasonable case.
This is probably overly charitable but the steelman USAID tent photo argument is a perfectly good argument against USAID: like many aid efforts, it may have good intentions and maybe even good first order effects but the second order effects (destroying local industry/fueling corruption/supporting the taliban/etc) are negative. It isn’t aid exactly, but an analogous example is if you saw a picture of the taliban riding American tanks holding American weapons post withdrawal and someone said “see this is why funding the 20 year war in Afghanistan was dumb” it’s a terrible retort to say “you fool, that taliban STOLE those weapons it’s not like we gave them tanks.” Like yes that’s the point! whatever the intentions of the money spent, the result is the Taliban has a bunch of stuff, that’s why the war was a bad use of money!
The analogous argument to the tent thing wouldn’t be “seems like funding a 20 year war in Afghanistan is dumb”—that would be analogous to “we shouldn’t have sent aid to that particular war-torn area.” The analogous argument would be “seems like funding a military is dumb.”
not going to argue about precisely correct scale of analogy, I guess I’m saying the Taliban having tanks is a bad thing resulting from military stuff and it’s valid to point that out, and Taliban having USAID tents is a bad thing resulting from USAID and it’s valid to point that out. As a paradigmatic example while making a claim that military interventions/aid interventions are bad on average, both examples are perfectly cromulent.
I might even agree about net-badness in the military intervention case. Not so for USAID but it’s correct there are unintended downsides and it’s intellectually sloppy to make fun of the Taliban tent thing when there are so many obviously correct arguments to make against Musk et al!
I don't really see why the Taliban having tents is a sufficiently bad thing that it needs to factor into anyone's calculations about giving other people tents.
But the correct scale of the analogy is not a quibble—since the argument is about tradeoffs, it’s important to understand not only how bad the tradeoff is, but also whether it could be avoided by more limited action, or only by total inaction.
Yeah but tents aren't weapons
As an example in support of the claim that USAID was a total waste of money and cutting it didn’t hurt anyone, it’s clearly legit! It’s genuine evidence in favor of musks position! Is it *sufficient* evidence obviously not, but saying “lol this picture is a scam with literally zero evidentiary value against USAID” is lazy and wrong. The correct argument against is “USAID is a big organization so obviously there will be lots of embarrassing episodes even if it’s doing great, so the evidentiary value of this genuinely embarrassing embarassing photo is >0 but very low and the evidence of net positive results from USAID work is very strong”
I guess that's a good thing to say to whatever group of people are dumb to work that out on their own, are not only pretending not to understand that and also won't find it to be cringe inducing weak shit that puts them off even more. I'm not convinced that group exists.
Could be! In my opinion (epistemic) virtue is its own reward, and also happens to pay off in the long run
What if we think third world populations threaten first world civilization, so we think there should ideally be less third worlders, so we stop engaging in interventions that artificially prop up their populations? The deaths are sad but might ultimately be good in the big picture, considering how much potential future value rests on survival of first world civilization. If we want to get to the stars, we have to stop inflating the populations that drag us relentlessly down to earth.
Why do you think their deaths are sad? If you do feel that way, maybe the first world should use its resources and talent to save and uplift the third world, as it’s done many times before.
Colonialism *is* the logically correct EA answer, but exceedingly unpopular politically, so they just ignore the obvious conclusions of their positions.
But given dramatic population decline the 1st world actively relies on third world immigration in order to survive. So I really doubt there is a good case for this.
Populations don't need to grow in perpetuity for the survival of civilization. A lower population is almost undisputably more survivable than being completely replaced by low-IQ foreigners.
Replaced? Give me a break.
But for survival you need one stability which is currently not present.
People in habitable places are less likely to migrate.
they should simply say this if that's what they believe
Development makes birth rates decline
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertility-rate-vs-the-share-living-in-extreme-poverty
The arguments for responsibility here seem pretty weak to me:
1. Legality itself doesn't matter for moral responsibility. The Supreme Court has ruled that police have no legal obligation to save lives, but the government obviously has a moral obligation to do so (probably because it has a monopoly on force, thus preventing many people from being otherwise able to save themselves).*
2. The U.S. government has a moral obligation to use ambulances when necessary to save the lives of U.S. citizens. This is why you would be responsible for the death if you stopped the ambulance.
3. Normally, you are not responisble for every bad thing that tesults from failing to donate more than you are required to. You seem to agree with this. So, if you donated whatever you believe the minimum requirement to be, and fhen medical devices ended up left in some people and some ambulances were left without drivers, you would not be reaponsible for the suffering that resulted. You were never required to donate enough to solve those issues (on the contrary, if you were required to donate, it would probably be to save more lives elsewhere, not to remove medical devices).
4. The counterfactual test counts far too many things as killing. I think you know this. but for some reason you think that this test would get the right verdict when it comes to donations. This makes no sense, because in your view whether failing to donate counts as killing (or, at least, whethet it counts as causing deaths that you are responsible for, which is really what the debate is about) depends on the amount you donated, which doesn't change the counterfactual.
* In fact, it seems to me that using said force to force people to donate to other countries is actively bad and wrong. You would and should feel the same way if I forced you to donate abroad against your will, I presume.
Your #1 is confused. That police aren’t legally obligated to prevent a crime but are morally obligated to do so, doesn’t demonstrate that acting *illegally* doesn’t affect moral responsibility. If a car hits a pedestrian, it makes an enormous moral difference whether the car or the pedestrian was going against the red light.
There is a moral obligation not to run red lights in a society where doing so reliably puts others at risks. The law actually has very little to do with it (if rules around red lights were merely strong social conventions, running a red light would be wrong in the same way).
Whether the government has a moral responsibility to use tax dollars to help save people abroad in the first place is what's at question, here. The legality of the action is mostly irrelevant to the morality. If they have no such obligation, then there's nothing inherently wrong with stopping them from doing it.
Indeed, if they were wrong to do it all along. then the government has an obligation to stop.
You’re doing the thing again. It’s true that social conventions can create moral obligations in lieu of laws. It doesn’t follow that laws can’t create moral obligations. Indeed, the whole concept of “the rule of law” is that the government in particular is obliged to follow the law, not social conventions or popular opinion. Not doing so does indeed put others, and society itself, at risk. It would have been wrong for Eisenhower to send the National Guard to Little Rock before the Supreme Court ruled, for instance.
In this case, Musk’s illegal action has an additional moral dimension, which is that ending the funding suddenly and without warning meant that the affected nations and people had no time to make other arrangements. If I’m charitably helping my neighbor collect his lifesaving medication, I’m free to stop at any time, but it would be wrong for me to simply not deliver all of a sudden one day, rather than letting him know in advance.
But the social convention doesn’t create moral obligations and neither do laws. The rule of law is valuable for the consistency and order it creates not because the law is somehow morally special.
This second part is right but it’s bad irrespective of the illegality. That it is illegal is not in principle an issue.
If the rule of law is valuable for creating consistency and order, then abusing the rule of law does harm. Whether we call that a question of morals or not is indifferent to me, I guess, but it seems parallel to other harms, many of which are treated as a matter of morals.
Yes I agree but it’s not a harm because it’s breaking the rule of law. The distinction isn’t really important in this case but in some cases it may be critical especially where the law itself seems to be harmful or serve no useful purpose.
It's fine if you disagree but:
Your first paragraph seems to me not to be applicable to wrongful laws. I do not think the government is obligated to follow wrongful laws even for everyday "rule of law" reasons. Now, I suppose many people think that foreign aid donations are not inherently wrong, and so the government can give foreign aid without doing anything wrong. Yet, the governments donations come from coercing taxpayers to give it money, and I think this imposes strict obligations on what the government can use that money for, in contrast to private citizens. Private citizens can buy themselves golden toilets; the government cannot.
Similarly, private citizens can donate to foreign aid, but in my view it is straightforwardly wrong for the government to do so. So, the government is obligated to immediately stop, and any bureaucrats who get in the way of stopping it are in the wrong, just as if they were using these same barriers to protect government officials buying themselves golden toilets. I understand that this is a stronger position than what I said before, but it is the position I am actually inclined to defend at length, as opposed to the more milquetoast view I was implying earlier.
Your second paragraph seems only tangentially related to the first. All of those things could still happen without the law, right? Indeed, the law could demand you end the funding suddenly, and then the law would be wrong on your view, wouldn't it? Still, I'm open to the idea that Musk ended the funding too suddenly (though I'm a bit reluctant to condemn him for it...I get the strong impression that the few cuts we got were a rare moment of opportunity unlikely to stick around long, so I'm really not sure what his alternatives realistically were). Overall, though, I just don't think that's really what most of the conversation is about.
If there were universal agreement about which laws were wrongful, then those wrongful laws wouldn’t exist. Instead, we have a situation where some people think certain laws are just and others think those same laws are unjust. So to say “well, the rule of law doesn’t apply to unjust laws” is to deny the rule of law entirely. I don’t think you can have thought through the implications of this. Imagine a judge who believes property is theft, so refuses to rule in favor of the government in shoplifting cases. Or imagine an anti-Elon who decrees that tax money designated for the military will now go to buy bed nets (and golden toilets while we’re at it) for the third world.
Some amount of prosecutorial/executive discretion does exist, of course. And individuals employed by the government might choose to disobey and suffer the consequences, like Kim Davis if you’re familiar with that case. But simply decreeing that the money the law requires be spent in one area will no longer be spent does not fall under that category.
I’m not interested in an argument about foreign aid on the merits, because (per my argument above) it’s irrelevant to the question of whether it’s right or wrong for the government to break its own laws.
Regarding the point about Elon moving too fast, you’re right that it’s separate from the rule of law question (though one advantage of the legislative process is that it usually leaves time for people to see what’s coming). If Congress passed a law ending foreign aid immediately, I would condemn that as an unjust law. But it would at least have democratic legitimacy. Musk’s action has both problems, so it’s doubly unjust.
Yeah, so in my view "a judge who believes that property is theft, so refuses to rule in favor of the government in shoplifting cases" is the exact same as "a judge who believes that slavery is theft, so refuses to rule in favor of the slaveowner in escaped slave cases" except for the crucial fact that the former judge is totally wrong and the latter judge is totally right (and thus justified in ruling against slaveowners on principle). Most people think this is the right result, too.
Of course, there is a question about how to constrain people who are totally wrong without constraining the people who are totally right, but that mostly seems to me to be a practical question irrelevant to the morality as hand. If you are totally right (note: this is not the same as you *believing* that you are totally right), then you will be justified in breaking those constraints when necessary. For example, anyone would be totally justified in cutting aid that in fact just went to support slavery in the Middle East.
I think the same thing in general, for example, about the rules of war: most of them make very little sense morally (e.g. just war theory treats soldiers invading another country as if they have the same moral culpability as soldiers defending their country), and the question of how best to constrain bad actors is mostly separate from the morality, here. If a good actor needs to break those constraints for actual, sufficient, good reasons (note: not just because they believe they have good reasons), then they will often be justified in doing so.
What keeps bad actors in check in not moral principles, it's force. So, the question of how to constrain bad actors in war or in government positions is not actually resolved by moral principles. I am not saying that someone (e.g. Elon) shouldn't be punished for breaking the law (if that's what we need to do, practically, to enforce important constraints), but even if he needs to be punished he still was justified, in my view. That being said, in Elon's case, it's not clear to me whether punishment is even on the table: I don't know if anyone is seriously planning to implement any such punishment or not.
That all seems straightforwardly correct to me. The state has no special moral status.
I agree the state has no special moral status; that’s exactly what I’m saying. The state has to follow the law like everyone else.
Should have been clearer that the law likewise has no special moral status.
Ah, well, this might be better addressed in our conversation under the other comment.
Generally lots of utilitarians including myself implicitly don’t seem to believe in the killing-letting die distinction. Personally I think it’s spurious because the counterfactual exists where those people didn’t die and which possibility prevailed is up to you in some capacity.
Frankly I and other utilitarians would be ok with forcing you to donate, that’s basically why we would support a program of tax funded foreign aid. There is no 1st order moral protection against coercion.
If you reject that distinction entirely and then use that rejection to justify theft, then I would be justified right now in hacking your computer, stealing your bank information, and donating all of your spare money to the Against Malaria Foundation.
I really don't think that is a compelling position.
Yeah probably would, except for I’m a broke student so it rly wouldn’t be very much money, that being said, doing that on widespread level would be liable to be counter productive, so we do things like convince people in democracies to vote for taxes which then go to fund foreign aid. Taxes are theft but so what, property is only instrumental.
Also to be clear rejecting the distinction is not justifying the theft, the theft is justified by the benefits to utility. Plus the fact that there is no in principle reason to refrain from theft in my view. Just a large number of instrumental reasons.
This isn’t a conversation where you’re gonna convince me that this isn’t a compelling position. For a utilitarian who doesn’t advocate for what is really some kind of hybrid theory, property isn’t important as a first or even second order concern, so whether or not something is theft isn’t really important except insofar as that leads to problems of implementation and decreases utility.
This isn’t some kind of crazy position for me to have, it’s basically all standard utilitarian positions I’m just not gonna pretend like it’s something different.
I mean, you are right that this is a pretty standard utilitarian viewpoint, but I do actually think that utilitarianism is a crazy position for anyone to have. In my experience, though, utilitarians are relatively immune to counter-examples. I think this is largely because utilitarians are selectively skeptical about many moral intuitions in a way that's hard to justify.
For example, when you ask people not just "Is X is good or bad?" but "Why is X good or bad?" you just get straightforward anti-utilitarian moral intuitions. I think it's a good thing to be sad at your mom's funeral. I don't at all think this is good because it benefits you in some way; instead, it's good because it's the fitting attitude to have to your mom passing.
The utilitarian must insist that this latter explanation is wrong: if it's good, it must be because it instrumentally produces more good than bad. This just strikes me (and most people, as far as I can tell) as mistaken on its face. Even if it turned out I was slightly less happy as a result of having the right attitude at my mother's funeral, it's still a good thing that I was sad that she passed.
Now compare (1) the killing vs letting die distinction and (2) property rights. For (1), killing is worse than letting die because killing someone mistreats them in a way letting them die doesn't. It seems like utilitarians have to deny that, but denying that strikes me as rather crazy. Sure, in both cases someone ends up dead, but that's not the only thing that matters here, and actively making someone dead mistreats them in a way that letting them die from causes you aren't responsible for doesn't.
For (2) property rights are important simply because we should be able to decide what to do with our own lives, and that includes what we do with our own property. Suppose, for example, that I am playing the game Dark Souls, and I would be happier using all of the tools available to beat the game. However, instead I opt to try to beat the game with no armor, no spells, and no potions. The challenge is frustrating, but it's what I decided to do with (this small portion) of my life, and that's what matters here, not whether it maximizes my utility.
Utilitarians have to insist that this is the wrong way to use your own property. Indeed, if you were the last person left, a utilitarian would require you to abandon your own little life-projects whenever doing so would make you happier. This, again, strikes me as a crazy position. If I were the last person left on Earth, I would likely hold a very similar (and fitting) attitude as I would during my mom's funeral, and I would rather spend much of my time unhappily etching the final epitaph of humanity than pursue what utilitarians think is most important.
I don't think any of this will move the needle at all with your typical utilitarian (or you, if you are such), but I don't see why it shouldn't. Our intuitions about why things matter are just as important as our intuitions about what matters, and those explanations in most cases undermine utilitarianism directly. I don't think there's any good way to debunk all of these intuitions without debunking morality as a whole, so I don't think there's any good way for utilitarians to support their view.
I likewise like rights based positions like libertarianism are pretty crazy to have. That’s probably fair, I am skeptical of any intuitions I can spot, but it’s hard to spot em all, and that leaves blind spots.
The issue is that just because it strikes someone that way doesn’t make it true. I have lots of intuitions but unless there is a good argument for why that is the case I disregard them, they are a moral guide post but hardly definitive.
It’s not clear to me that this is the case, in both cases the counterfactual involves the other person surviving and in both cases which result occurs is in your hands. You are responsible for their death through your actions.
Yes but that’s because being able to decide what you want to do with your life is conceive to it being a good life. Presumably if you’ve decided to do this dark souls challenge run I will assume that somehow this is net utility for you unless clear evidence is provided to the contrary. But none of this establishes that as a matter of first principles you have a legitimate and morally relevent right to your property. A right nobody can give a good account of.
No we do not, the general rule is to defer to your use of your property on the assumption that you best know your own interests (unless you’re impaired in some way, something that would also be a reason for limiting your autonomy in most views like yours). If you place that much value in it then it seems like it does give you utility. This is a common point anti-utilitarians seem to make, mistaking that utility must necessarily be purely hedonic. Though it usually is, this seems like it’s probably a case of non-hedonic utility.
I actually disagree, I want an account of why something matters or what matters. If a proper account can’t be given I don’t think there is a strong case for it. I recognize this is an exacting standard that you may think is unreasonable however. Regarding common-sense moral intuitions all of these ultimately seem to end up in vague consequentialist justifications when pushed to its limit (see the interest theories of rights, which is a good description of our rights practice and entirely relies on implicit consequentialist premises).
The only place utilitarianism doesn’t seem to do well is in the domain of moral responsibility, but given that nobody can provide an account of how free will would work that doesn’t make it seemingly impossible or trivial I don’t much care about moral responsibility since it probably isn’t real.