If I had to summarize your argument, it would be something like, “Many people’s highest moral good involves making their ideological enemies suffer.” This is indeed a thing that happens, historically.
But another huge amount of damage is caused by people who believe things like “the ends justify the means” or “you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.” Or “We only need 1 million surviving Afghanis [out of 15 million] to build a paradise for the proletariat,” to paraphrase an alleged historical statement I read once. The people who say things like this cause immediate, concrete harm. They attempt to justify this harm as being outweighed by the expected future value of their actions. But that expected future value is often theoretical, and based on dubious models of the world.
I do suspect that a significant portion of the suffering in the world is created by people who think like this. Combine them with the people you describe whose conception of “the good” actually involves many people suffering (and with people who don’t really care about acting morally at all), and I think you account for much of the human-caused suffering in the world.
One good piece of advice I heard from someone in the rationalist community was something like, “When you describe your proposed course of action, do you sound like a monologuing villain from a children’s TV show, someone who can only be defeated by the powers of friendship and heroic teamwork? If so, you would be wise to step back and reconsider the process by which you arrived at your plans.”
I agree that ``the ends justify the means″ type thinking has led to a lot of suffering. For this, I would like to switch from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to the French Revolution, as an example (I know it better, and I think it fits better, for discussions of this attitude). So, someone wants to achieve something, that are today seen as a very reasonable goal, such as ``end serfdom and establish formal equality before the law″. So, basically: their goals are positive, and they achieve these goals. But perhaps they could have achieved those goals, with less side effects, if it was not for their ``the ends justify the means″ attitude. Serfdom did end, and this change was both lasting, and spreading. After things had calmed down, the new economic relations, led to dramatically better material conditions, for the former serfs (and, for example, dramatic increase in life expectancy, due a dramatic reduction in poverty related malnutrition). But, during the revolutionary wars (and especially the Napoleon wars that followed), millions died. It sounds intuitively likely, that there would have been less destruction, if attitudes along these lines were less common.
So, yes, even when an event has such a large, and lasting, positive impact, that it is still celebrated, centuries later (14th of July is still a very big thing in France), one might find that this attitude caused concrete harm (millions of dead people, must certainly qualify as ``concrete harm″. And the French Revolution must certainly be classified as a celebrated event in any sense of that word (including, but not limited to, the literal: ``fireworks and party″ sense)).
And you are entirely correct, that damage from this type of attitude, was missing from my analysis.
If I had to summarize your argument, it would be something like, “Many people’s highest moral good involves making their ideological enemies suffer.” This is indeed a thing that happens, historically.
But another huge amount of damage is caused by people who believe things like “the ends justify the means” or “you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.” Or “We only need 1 million surviving Afghanis [out of 15 million] to build a paradise for the proletariat,” to paraphrase an alleged historical statement I read once. The people who say things like this cause immediate, concrete harm. They attempt to justify this harm as being outweighed by the expected future value of their actions. But that expected future value is often theoretical, and based on dubious models of the world.
I do suspect that a significant portion of the suffering in the world is created by people who think like this. Combine them with the people you describe whose conception of “the good” actually involves many people suffering (and with people who don’t really care about acting morally at all), and I think you account for much of the human-caused suffering in the world.
One good piece of advice I heard from someone in the rationalist community was something like, “When you describe your proposed course of action, do you sound like a monologuing villain from a children’s TV show, someone who can only be defeated by the powers of friendship and heroic teamwork? If so, you would be wise to step back and reconsider the process by which you arrived at your plans.”
I agree that ``the ends justify the means″ type thinking has led to a lot of suffering. For this, I would like to switch from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to the French Revolution, as an example (I know it better, and I think it fits better, for discussions of this attitude). So, someone wants to achieve something, that are today seen as a very reasonable goal, such as ``end serfdom and establish formal equality before the law″. So, basically: their goals are positive, and they achieve these goals. But perhaps they could have achieved those goals, with less side effects, if it was not for their ``the ends justify the means″ attitude. Serfdom did end, and this change was both lasting, and spreading. After things had calmed down, the new economic relations, led to dramatically better material conditions, for the former serfs (and, for example, dramatic increase in life expectancy, due a dramatic reduction in poverty related malnutrition). But, during the revolutionary wars (and especially the Napoleon wars that followed), millions died. It sounds intuitively likely, that there would have been less destruction, if attitudes along these lines were less common.
So, yes, even when an event has such a large, and lasting, positive impact, that it is still celebrated, centuries later (14th of July is still a very big thing in France), one might find that this attitude caused concrete harm (millions of dead people, must certainly qualify as ``concrete harm″. And the French Revolution must certainly be classified as a celebrated event in any sense of that word (including, but not limited to, the literal: ``fireworks and party″ sense)).
And you are entirely correct, that damage from this type of attitude, was missing from my analysis.