Once we’ve dealt with the mass starvation, vast numbers of deaths from malaria, horrendous poverty, etc., then we can start paying a lot more attention to awesomeness.
What if, for practical purposes, there is an inexhaustible supply of suck? What if we can’t deal with it once and for all and then turn our attention to the fun stuff?
So, judging from the reception of my post about the Malthusian Crunch certain Wrongians sense this and have gone into denial (perhaps, if they’re honest with themselves, privately admitting the hope that if they ignore the starving masses long enough, they will go away).
I propose a middle ground between giving everything and giving nothing—a non-arbitrary cutoff for how much help is enough. A cutoff that can be defended on pragmatic grounds without having to assume a shared normative morality.
You put just enough resources into pure suckiness remediation to insure that spillover suckiness will not derail your awesomeness plans. I emphasize pure because there are pursuits that simultaneously strive for new heights of awesomeness and fix suck in equal measure. Obviously this quality is desirable and such projects should not be penalized for having it.
What if, for practical purposes, there is an inexhaustible supply of suck?
Well, that would be very bad, and it might mean that an altruist of the sort I describe would in fact think the best course of action would be relentless suck-mitigation, for ever. A world of relentless suck-mitigation wouldn’t be a lot of fun, but if you’re faced with an inexhaustible supply of suck it might be the best you could do.
[EDITED to add: I see you’ve been downvoted. For what it’s worth, that wasn’t me.]
What if, for practical purposes, there is an inexhaustible supply of suck? What if we can’t deal with it once and for all and then turn our attention to the fun stuff?
So, judging from the reception of my post about the Malthusian Crunch certain Wrongians sense this and have gone into denial (perhaps, if they’re honest with themselves, privately admitting the hope that if they ignore the starving masses long enough, they will go away).
I propose a middle ground between giving everything and giving nothing—a non-arbitrary cutoff for how much help is enough. A cutoff that can be defended on pragmatic grounds without having to assume a shared normative morality.
You put just enough resources into pure suckiness remediation to insure that spillover suckiness will not derail your awesomeness plans. I emphasize pure because there are pursuits that simultaneously strive for new heights of awesomeness and fix suck in equal measure. Obviously this quality is desirable and such projects should not be penalized for having it.
Well, that would be very bad, and it might mean that an altruist of the sort I describe would in fact think the best course of action would be relentless suck-mitigation, for ever. A world of relentless suck-mitigation wouldn’t be a lot of fun, but if you’re faced with an inexhaustible supply of suck it might be the best you could do.
[EDITED to add: I see you’ve been downvoted. For what it’s worth, that wasn’t me.]