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.
I've had arguments before with negative-leaning Utilitarians and the best argument I've come up with goes like this...
Proper Utility Maximization needs to take into account not only the immediate, currently existing happiness and suffering of the present slice of time, but also the net utility of all sentient beings throughout all of spacetime. Assuming that the Eternal Block Universe Theory of Physics is true, then past and future sentient beings do in fact exist, and therefore matter equally.
Now the important thing to stress here is then that what matters is not the current Net Utility today but overall Net Utility throughout Eternity. Two basic assumptions can be made about the trends through spacetime. First, that compounding population growth means that most sentient beings exist in the future. Second, that melioristic progress means that the conscious experience is, all other things being equal, more positive in the future than in the past, because of the compounding effects of technology, and sentient beings deciding to build and create better systems, structures, and societies that outlive the individuals themselves.
Sentient agents are not passive, but actively seek positive conscious experiences and try to create circumstances that will perpetuate such things. Thus, as the power of sentient beings to influence the state of the universe increases, so should the ratio of positive to negative. Other things, such as the psychological negativity bias, remain stable throughout history, but compounding factors instead trend upwards at usually an exponential rate.
Thus, assuming these trends hold, we can expect that the vast majority of conscious experiences will be positive, and the overall universe will be net positive in terms of utility. Does that suck for us who live close to the beginning of civilization? Kinda yes. But from a Utilitarian perspective, it can be argued that our suffering is for the Greatest Good, because we are the seeds, the foundation from which so much will have its beginnings.
Now, this can be countered that we do not know that the future really exists, and that humanity and its legacy might well be snuffed out sooner rather than later. In fact, the fact that we are born here now, can be seen as statistical evidence for this, because if on average you are most likely to be born at the height of human existence, then this period of time is likely to be around the maximum point before the decline.
However, we cannot be sure about this. Also, if Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true, then even if for most worlds humanity ceases to exist around this time, there still exists a non-trivial percentage of worlds where humanity survives into the far distant future, establishing a legacy among the stars and creates relative utopia through the compound effects aforementioned. For the sake of these possible worlds, and their extraordinarily high expected utility, I would recommend trying to keep life and humanity alive.