It seems plausible that what you suggest is one significant contributor. Here’s one more thing that imo plausibly contributes significantly:
Most of these people are consequentialists, i.e. they think of ethics in terms of sth like designing a good spacetime block.[1] Like, when making a decision, you are making a decision as if standing outside the universe and choosing which of two spacetime blocks[2] is better. Given this view of ethics, it is very natural to imagine a future in which there actually is some guy that designs/chooses a good spacetime block, and it becomes somewhat less natural to imagine futures in which the spacetime block keeps getting “designed/chosen” in a messy way by all the messy stuff inside the spacetime block, with the designing/choosing and the being-valuable done by the same entities. A person who thinks in terms of duties or a person who thinks in terms of virtues would find it much less natural to have such a strong separation between the locus of moral-agent-hood and the locus of moral-patient-hood.
It seems plausible that what you suggest is one significant contributor. Here’s one more thing that imo plausibly contributes significantly:
Most of these people are consequentialists, i.e. they think of ethics in terms of sth like designing a good spacetime block. [1] Like, when making a decision, you are making a decision as if standing outside the universe and choosing which of two spacetime blocks [2] is better. Given this view of ethics, it is very natural to imagine a future in which there actually is some guy that designs/chooses a good spacetime block, and it becomes somewhat less natural to imagine futures in which the spacetime block keeps getting “designed/chosen” in a messy way by all the messy stuff inside the spacetime block, with the designing/choosing and the being-valuable done by the same entities. A person who thinks in terms of duties or a person who thinks in terms of virtues would find it much less natural to have such a strong separation between the locus of moral-agent-hood and the locus of moral-patient-hood.
or at least they are much more in this direction than the median person, or even the median person at their iq
or more precisely: two distributions on spacetime blocks
“Unilateralist consequentialists think they’re just temporarily embarrassed omnipotentates.”