At a certain point the whole thing stops being interesting. And at a certain point after that, it just seems like a weird obsession. Especially if you’re giving up on other things. If you’ve populated all the galaxies but one, that last empty galaxy seems more valuable to me than adding however many people you can fit into it.
I mean, pleasure[1] is a terminal value for most of us because we like it (and suffering because we dislike it), not ‘lifeless’ matter. I prefer to have animals existing than to have zero animals, if at least we can make sure that they typically enjoy themselves or it will lead to a state-of-affairs in which most enjoy themselves most of the time. This is the same for humans in specific.
Also, what’s so great about humans specifically?
I didn’t use the word ‘humans’ for a reason.
Everybody who tries seems to come up with something that has implications those same intuitions say are grossly monstrous. And in fact when somebody gets power and tries to really enact some rigid formalized system, the actual consequences tend to be monstrous.
The reason we can say that “experience suggests that you can’t do that” is because we have some standard to judge it. We need a specific reason to say that is ‘monstrous’, just like you’ll give reasons for why any action is monstrous. In principle, no one needs to be wronged[2]. We can assume a deontological commitment to not kill any life or damage anyone if that’s what bothers you. Sure, you can say that we are arbitrarily weakening our consequentialist commitment, but I haven’t said at any point that it had to be ‘at all costs’ regardless (I know that I was commenting within the context of the article, but I’m speaking personally and I haven’t even read most of it).
[1] It doesn’t need to be literal (‘naive’) ‘pleasure’ with nothing else the thing that we optimise for.
[2]This is a hypothetical for a post-scarcity society, when you definitely have resources to spare and no one needs to be compromised to get a life into the world.
I mean, pleasure[1] is a terminal value for most of us because we like it (and suffering because we dislike it), not ‘lifeless’ matter. I prefer to have animals existing than to have zero animals, if at least we can make sure that they typically enjoy themselves or it will lead to a state-of-affairs in which most enjoy themselves most of the time. This is the same for humans in specific.
I didn’t use the word ‘humans’ for a reason.
The reason we can say that “experience suggests that you can’t do that” is because we have some standard to judge it. We need a specific reason to say that is ‘monstrous’, just like you’ll give reasons for why any action is monstrous. In principle, no one needs to be wronged[2]. We can assume a deontological commitment to not kill any life or damage anyone if that’s what bothers you. Sure, you can say that we are arbitrarily weakening our consequentialist commitment, but I haven’t said at any point that it had to be ‘at all costs’ regardless (I know that I was commenting within the context of the article, but I’m speaking personally and I haven’t even read most of it).
[1] It doesn’t need to be literal (‘naive’) ‘pleasure’ with nothing else the thing that we optimise for.
[2]This is a hypothetical for a post-scarcity society, when you definitely have resources to spare and no one needs to be compromised to get a life into the world.