npub14p…kxw3v on Nostr: So in philosophy there is a controversial moral philosophy known as utilitarianism. ...

So in philosophy there is a controversial moral philosophy known as utilitarianism. Basically, the premise is that the ethical action is always the one that maximizes "utility", whatever that means. A lot of Utilitarians just define utility as net global human pleasure and happiness.

The most common criticism of Utilitarianism is how absurdly inhuman it is. It demands people take actions that produce high-utility outcomes without much consideration for the fact that humans are REALLY bad at knowing what all of the eventual outcomes of their actions are. Furthermore, it completely ignores people's rights, authorizing (and even requiring) an arbitrary amount of lies, manipulation, and violation of others in order to achieve that best outcome. If you can't convince someone to donate excess food to the needy? Steal it from them. If you can't convince a doctor to save 5 other children's lives? Hold the doctor's own child at gunpoint. Etc...

One solution to this is called Negative Utilitarianism. Instead of maximizing pleasure or happiness, Negative Utilitarianism demands people act in a way that minimizes suffering. It doesn't really matter that one person wants something more than another person, or that they will live a long and happy life if you just commit one small atrocity, Negative Utilitarianism requires that the action reduces the amount of sufferring in the world.

The argument I heard against Negative Utilitarianism is that is justifies total human extinction. After all, if there are no humans on Earth, then how can any of them suffer? Personally I think this actually understates just how bad Negative Utilitarianism is. Sure there are a small number of anti-natalists who truly believe in voluntary extinction, but I would say that most fans of Negative Utilitarianism wouldn't be fans of ending humanity. I think most of them would just come up with a justification for not to wiping humans off the face of the Earth, and for why extinction should be ignored as a course of action by the philosophy.

However despite this, I see plenty of examples of systematic sickness within society caused by a strong aversion to suffering. For example, many people go all in on the idea that economic and societal growth can somehow be followed forever. A lot of the reason AI hype, crypto hype, and even regular old stock market investing exist is because people would rather throw a hail mary vaguely towards the dream of a post-scarcity society than accept the idea that life will continually require innocent people doing their very best to suffer and die for the rest of eternity.

My ethical beliefs aren't really either of these versions of Utilitarianism, but I do believe that even just existing should outweigh just about any amount or kind of suffering. To me, when I hear "the Earth is going to become overpopulated and turn human life into a living hell, I'm pretty happy since that means we aren't going to have to go extinct of waste our resources on shallow hedonism.

Because of this, it's hard for me to justify ANY sort of long term compounding investment. In my view, such things are unnatural, temporary, and undeserved. I hate having money that comes from something bad or undeserved.