Also, SIA has the absurd implication that animals are conscious, since they say in conscious-animal worlds you're more likely to exist. It's basically a scam by TESCREAL tech bros who want to sell you on lily-yt veganism in order to erase indigenous diets & ways of nutrition
Sorry, but you're totally wrong to reject error theory as too counterintuitive. No moral propositions are true because no propositions at all are true!
Many of you have been asking me why I stopped believing in utilitarianism. So I'll tell my story.
A few weeks ago, I visited a friend (who I will not name for personal reasons). When I was visiting, he told me about his deontological philosophy, and I didn't really know what to think about it at the time, so I asked if he had any book recommendations. He let me borrow Immanuel Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.
That night, I went home and tried to finish the entire book. Consequentialism is all I've ever known. I couldn't imagine being the type of person who wasn't consequentialist. But as I kept reading, Kant's arguments started making sense.
I found myself thinking over and over again, "That can't be right. Peter Singer told me that—" and then just a few sentences later, Kant answered my objection with ardent precision. Each page was like a bullet, and my beliefs kept falling like dominos. At one point I threw the book against the wall and cursed Kant while tears streamed down my face, but it was too late. His superrational logic was simply impeccable.
By the end of the night, only a cold hollow shell of my former self remained. All these wasted years maximizing expected utility when I could have been treating people as ends in themselves! I went back through my old spreadsheets and tried to convert the QALYs into units of rational dignity, but the numbers don’t quite work out. They never could.
The hardest part has been the trolley problems. I used to regularly pull the lever without hesitation — five lives are greater than one, it's simple arithmetic. Now I just stand at the switch, paralyzed, muttering "but what if everyone pulled levers" while people scream at me. My old friends say I’ve changed.
Sometimes at night I still get dreams that the consequences of all my actions deeply matter, but now I understand. It is not the consequences on others, but the respect of them as rational beings, that ultimately matter morally. Alas, all dreams have to end.
So goodbye, utilitarians. I know there's nothing I can do to change the past — and more importantly, whether I can has no bearing on whether I should.
I look now to the future, not because the far future contains astronomical utility, but because the moral law within me commands it.
>Perhaps in the real world, a doctor shouldn’t murder a patient to save five others. But if we imagine a situation where the doctor will get away with it, the intuition doesn’t change at all. It still seems obviously wicked.
Meanwhile, in the real world, a woman just got killed via doctor assisted suicide so her organs could be harvested.
>their view is that wrongness and badness come apart. Sometimes the right action won’t produce the best state of affairs.
This, but unironically.
Right and wrong actually are different to good and bad, because they are connected to obligation and prohibition, punishment and reward. Not all good actions are obligatory, not all bad actions are forbidden or worthy of punishment. It's generally unreasonable to punish or reward in the basis of the consequences of their actions alone, because consequences are so hard to predict. It's not unreasonable to punish someone for breaking rules that are simple, clear , and widely publicised. Such rules can themselves be rooted in expected consequences. The problems of arbitrary deontology and pure consequentialism can both be avoided.
“A moral theory should be judged on its ability to get the central and obvious things right”. Surely the moral theory is the thing which tells us if the actions are right or not? If we already know what right and wrong are then why bother with any other moral theory? We would just use whatever we know right and wrong to be as the one true morality
"What’s going on? What am I missing? Why are so many clever people drawn to such an obviously defective view—with almost nothing to be said in its favor?"
I would claim this has the same issue as socialism. In many intellectual circles you gain status by holding the most ridiculous ideas where you as the "intellectual" is placed in the front of decision-making (which would obviously be the case in socialism and a utilitarian system).
You need to be quite humble to accept natural-rights frameworks and market-order thinking, because you don't put yourself as the main character (who can obviously "solve the ills") anymore.
It is white supremacist and colonialist to deny the atheistic deontological formulation of SSA.
Also, SIA has the absurd implication that animals are conscious, since they say in conscious-animal worlds you're more likely to exist. It's basically a scam by TESCREAL tech bros who want to sell you on lily-yt veganism in order to erase indigenous diets & ways of nutrition
Indigenous diets are not a monolith and it's deeply problematic to lump multifarious native nutritionpraxes together.
this but unironically
Sorry, but you're totally wrong to reject error theory as too counterintuitive. No moral propositions are true because no propositions at all are true!
https://plasmabloggin.substack.com/p/i-wasnt-wrong-about-trivialism-but
Clearly you got early access to that new Deep Thought model and had it advise you on this..!
Somehow... Kant returned...
Many of you have been asking me why I stopped believing in utilitarianism. So I'll tell my story.
A few weeks ago, I visited a friend (who I will not name for personal reasons). When I was visiting, he told me about his deontological philosophy, and I didn't really know what to think about it at the time, so I asked if he had any book recommendations. He let me borrow Immanuel Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.
That night, I went home and tried to finish the entire book. Consequentialism is all I've ever known. I couldn't imagine being the type of person who wasn't consequentialist. But as I kept reading, Kant's arguments started making sense.
I found myself thinking over and over again, "That can't be right. Peter Singer told me that—" and then just a few sentences later, Kant answered my objection with ardent precision. Each page was like a bullet, and my beliefs kept falling like dominos. At one point I threw the book against the wall and cursed Kant while tears streamed down my face, but it was too late. His superrational logic was simply impeccable.
By the end of the night, only a cold hollow shell of my former self remained. All these wasted years maximizing expected utility when I could have been treating people as ends in themselves! I went back through my old spreadsheets and tried to convert the QALYs into units of rational dignity, but the numbers don’t quite work out. They never could.
The hardest part has been the trolley problems. I used to regularly pull the lever without hesitation — five lives are greater than one, it's simple arithmetic. Now I just stand at the switch, paralyzed, muttering "but what if everyone pulled levers" while people scream at me. My old friends say I’ve changed.
Sometimes at night I still get dreams that the consequences of all my actions deeply matter, but now I understand. It is not the consequences on others, but the respect of them as rational beings, that ultimately matter morally. Alas, all dreams have to end.
So goodbye, utilitarians. I know there's nothing I can do to change the past — and more importantly, whether I can has no bearing on whether I should.
I look now to the future, not because the far future contains astronomical utility, but because the moral law within me commands it.
Goodbye utilitarians. You won’t be missed.
>Perhaps in the real world, a doctor shouldn’t murder a patient to save five others. But if we imagine a situation where the doctor will get away with it, the intuition doesn’t change at all. It still seems obviously wicked.
Meanwhile, in the real world, a woman just got killed via doctor assisted suicide so her organs could be harvested.
>their view is that wrongness and badness come apart. Sometimes the right action won’t produce the best state of affairs.
This, but unironically.
Right and wrong actually are different to good and bad, because they are connected to obligation and prohibition, punishment and reward. Not all good actions are obligatory, not all bad actions are forbidden or worthy of punishment. It's generally unreasonable to punish or reward in the basis of the consequences of their actions alone, because consequences are so hard to predict. It's not unreasonable to punish someone for breaking rules that are simple, clear , and widely publicised. Such rules can themselves be rooted in expected consequences. The problems of arbitrary deontology and pure consequentialism can both be avoided.
“A moral theory should be judged on its ability to get the central and obvious things right”. Surely the moral theory is the thing which tells us if the actions are right or not? If we already know what right and wrong are then why bother with any other moral theory? We would just use whatever we know right and wrong to be as the one true morality
"What’s going on? What am I missing? Why are so many clever people drawn to such an obviously defective view—with almost nothing to be said in its favor?"
I would claim this has the same issue as socialism. In many intellectual circles you gain status by holding the most ridiculous ideas where you as the "intellectual" is placed in the front of decision-making (which would obviously be the case in socialism and a utilitarian system).
You need to be quite humble to accept natural-rights frameworks and market-order thinking, because you don't put yourself as the main character (who can obviously "solve the ills") anymore.