How plausible is an alternative timeline[1] where negative utilitarianism goes the way of communism: a benevolent idea born of good intentions that eventually leads people to commit unprecedented atrocities?[2]
My initial instinct was that it was plausible. Utilitarian bullet-biting, naïve consequentialism, and humans liking to stretch their degrees of freedom upon getting into positions of power seem all too common, alas.
But maybe negative utilitarianism is “just” too anti-memetic (/and/or too distant from human defaults and/or from the actual human culture) to coordinate a politically significant social movement around it, let alone get in power.
(NU-motivated terrorism is much more plausible and actually happens, albeit sporadically. The 20th century saw mass forced sterilizations rationalized in terms of Neo-Malthusianism; it’s not difficult to imagine mass forced sterilization rationalized in terms of negative utilitarianism, conditional on it actually having taken hold.)
This might be relevant insofar as there’s meaningful memetic competition for scarce minds[1], but much less relevant for the terrorism sort of scenarios, and I expect the latter to be more likely, due to NU’s anti-memecity probably handicapping it from becoming a meaningful political movement. In that case, the main alternative to use here is the lack of the thing, e.g., NU terrorism/athrocities vs lack of NU terrorism/athrocities.
NU arose because it’s one obvious extrapolation/specification of the utilitarian view.[2] Communism and class struggle are probably another obvious mental move that is made in most timelines involving the industrial revolution, and similarly for some strand of radical nationalism (I’m less sure about fascism/nazism in particular). Discovery of many ideas is nigh-inevitable, assuming technological and intellectual progress.[3] Whether people allow themselves to be swayed by the ideas to meaningful atrocities seems much more contingent.
There are probably some laws there, e.g., “in times like XYZ, it’s inevitable that some somewhat rebellious and radical social movement arises in response to dissatisfaction with what has become the status quo”; or “C the upper bound on the proportion of the number ‘strong movements’ within a relevant population to the number of people in said population”. (I don’t know any examples of such laws, but this seems plausible.)
How plausible is an alternative timeline[1] where negative utilitarianism goes the way of communism: a benevolent idea born of good intentions that eventually leads people to commit unprecedented atrocities?[2]
My initial instinct was that it was plausible. Utilitarian bullet-biting, naïve consequentialism, and humans liking to stretch their degrees of freedom upon getting into positions of power seem all too common, alas.
But maybe negative utilitarianism is “just” too anti-memetic (/and/or too distant from human defaults and/or from the actual human culture) to coordinate a politically significant social movement around it, let alone get in power.
(NU-motivated terrorism is much more plausible and actually happens, albeit sporadically. The 20th century saw mass forced sterilizations rationalized in terms of Neo-Malthusianism; it’s not difficult to imagine mass forced sterilization rationalized in terms of negative utilitarianism, conditional on it actually having taken hold.)
/a possible future?
FWIW, I don’t mean this to be a persuasive critique of NU.
It’s not just whether X can lead to atrocities, but whether it is more likely to lead to atrocities than the alternatives.
This might be relevant insofar as there’s meaningful memetic competition for scarce minds[1], but much less relevant for the terrorism sort of scenarios, and I expect the latter to be more likely, due to NU’s anti-memecity probably handicapping it from becoming a meaningful political movement. In that case, the main alternative to use here is the lack of the thing, e.g., NU terrorism/athrocities vs lack of NU terrorism/athrocities.
NU arose because it’s one obvious extrapolation/specification of the utilitarian view.[2] Communism and class struggle are probably another obvious mental move that is made in most timelines involving the industrial revolution, and similarly for some strand of radical nationalism (I’m less sure about fascism/nazism in particular). Discovery of many ideas is nigh-inevitable, assuming technological and intellectual progress.[3] Whether people allow themselves to be swayed by the ideas to meaningful atrocities seems much more contingent.
There are probably some laws there, e.g., “in times like XYZ, it’s inevitable that some somewhat rebellious and radical social movement arises in response to dissatisfaction with what has become the status quo”; or “C the upper bound on the proportion of the number ‘strong movements’ within a relevant population to the number of people in said population”. (I don’t know any examples of such laws, but this seems plausible.)
Utilitarianism itself being an obvious extrapolation of a combination of some prior views that rose to popularity among the educated ~Westerners
“Progress” not necessarily in the sense of improvement/betterment, but in the sense of unfolding the available implications or something like that.
It seems to me that NU probably does command atrocities, but I agree with you that it’s not exactly memetic.