I've started listening to the audiobook of Peter Singer's Ethics in the Real World, which is both highly recommended and very unsettling. The essays on non-human animals, for example, made me realize for the first time that it may well be possible that the net utility on Earth over all conscious creatures is massively negative.
Naturally, this led me to wonder whether, after all, efforts to eradicate all consciousness on Earth - human and non-human - may be ethically endorsable.This, in turn, reminded me of a recent post on LW asking whether the possibility of parallelized torture of future uploads justifies killing as many people as possible today.
I had responded to that post by mentioning that parallelizing euphoria was also possible, so this should cancel things out. This seemed at the time like a refutation, but I realized later I had made the error of equating the two, utility and disutility, as part of the same smooth continuum, like [-100, 100] ∈ R. There is no reason to believe the maximum disutility I can experience is equal in magnitude to the maximum utility I can experience. It may be that max disutility is far greater. I really don't know, and I don't think introspection is as useful in answering this question as it seems intuitively to be, but it seems quite plausible for this to be the case.
As these thoughts were emerging, Singer, as if hearing my concerns, quoted someone or other who claimed that the human condition is one of perpetual suffering, constantly seeking desires which, once fulfilled, are ephemeral and dissatisfying, and therefore it is a morally tragic outcome for any of us to have emerged into existence.
Of course these are shoddy arguments in support of Mass Planetary Biocide, even supposing the hypothesis that the Earth (universe?) has net negative utility is true. For one, we can engineer minds somewhere in a better neighborhood of mindspace, where utility is everywhere positive. Or maybe it's impossible even in theory to treat utility and disutility like real-valued functions of physical systems over time (though I'm betting it is). Or maybe the universe is canonically infinite, so even if 99% of conscious experiences in the universe have disutility, there are infinite quantities of both utility and disutility and so nothing we do matters, as Bostrom wrote about. (Although this is actually not an argument against MPB, just not one for it). And anyway, the state of net utility today is not nearly as important as the state of net utility could potentially be in the future. And perhaps utilitarianism is a naive and incorrect ethical framework.
Still, I had somehow always assumed implicitly that net utility of life on Earth was positive, so the realization that this need not be so is causing me significant disutility.
Agree, I meant to use the analogy to argue for "Natural selection made sure that even those beings in constant misery may not necessarily exhibit suicidal behavior." (I do hold the view that animals in nature suffer a lot more than they are happy, but that doesn't follow from anything I wrote in the above post.)
Right, but I thought your argument about sentient beings not committing suicide refers to humans primarily. At least with regard to humans, exploring why the appeal to low suicide rates may not show much seems more challenging. Animals not killing themselves could just be due to them lacking the relevant mental concepts.
It's a metaphor. Views on population ethics reflect what we want the "playlist" of all the universe's experience moments to be like, and there's no objective sense of "net utility being positive" or not. Except when you question-beggingly define "net utility" in a way that implies a conclusion, but then anyone who disagrees will just say "I don't think we should define utility that way" and you're left arguing over the same differences. That's why I called it "aesthetic" even though that feels like it doesn't give the seriousness of our moral intuitions due justice.
(And force everyone to live against their will if they do conform to it?) No; I specifically said not to do that. Viewing morality as subjective is supposed to make people more appreciative that they cannot go around completely violating the preferences of those they disagree with without the result being worse for everyone.
Lukas, I wish you had a bigger role in this community.