Pooperscootian Utilitarianism part 4: Some vague Pooperscootian Utilitarian calculus and thoughts on death/other topics

Should you think about your duty, or about the consequences of your actions? Or should you concentrate on becoming a good person?

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Clinton
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Pooperscootian Utilitarianism part 4: Some vague Pooperscootian Utilitarian calculus and thoughts on death/other topics

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Pooperscootian Utilitarianism part 4: Some vague Pooperscootian Utilitarian calculus and thoughts on death, when to create life, and aliens.

Please read Pooperscootian Utilitarianism parts 1-3 before reading this for best results

In part 1 I discussed my proposed definition of “want” and “free will.” In part 2 I discussed a thought experiment that suggested that individuality is a lot less clear-cut than we tend to perceive it as being. In part 3 I discussed various concepts. I discussed that Pooperscootian Utilitarianism would primarily use Act Utilitarianism to conclude moral conundrums, but would use Rule Utilitarianism if the actions Act Utilitarianism describes would result in more suffering than Rule Utilitarianism. I had also discussed how Pooperscootian Utilitarianism could either use a modified version of Total Consequentialism or a modified version of Average Consequentialism, and that both were flawed in their basic forms, without that modification.
I also argue two important points that I’ll delve into more in this section
#1. There is no reason to create new life unless it assists existing life or life that will exist.
#2. There is some threshold of happiness level that determines whether or not an individual’s continued existence ceases benefitting itself. If you’re below that threshold of happiness, your existence is causing harm to you, enough such that it would benefit you more to end your life than not.


So, when does it make sense to create new life?

Well, one interesting and important thing to note, that I’d say is pretty self-evident, but that a lot of people don’t think about, is that there was no reason for life to exist before the existence of life…noting that by life, I’d include any form of intelligence whether they be gods without physical bodies, or whatever.
Again, that’s because there is no reason to create new life unless it assists previously existing life, or life that will exist…because before life exists there is nothing to benefit from coming into existence, so it’s not like coming into existence can benefit the life form that would itself. Because no life existed to be assisted by life before life existed, and because choosing not to create the first life would mean that life would never exist, there was no reason to create life before life existed.
Now, in our universe, on the other hand, we know that life would eventually exist inevitably, and so you could argue that there might have been reason to create earlier life that might be able to assist the future life-that-would-be.
But in a reality in which life would never come about, there’d be no reason to create new life.
Is that saying that life would ideally have never come into existence? Not necessarily. However, if it’s not true that life would ideally have never come into existence, then a life never having come into existence at least couldn’t have been any worse than having come into existence…because before life exists there is nothing to benefit from coming into existence.
So, either it was a bad thing for life to come into existence in our reality, or it was no better for life to have come into existence than it would have been for it to have never happened.
So what if, ideally, life would have never come into existence? Then I’d say that if you could find some button to press to extinguish all life instantaneously and painlessly, it’d probably be a good idea to press it. If that’s not the case though, or even if not, there would still be a possibility that life would ideally never end, given that it’s already here, so long as the existence of new life keeps assisting previously existing life more than it harms it, or helps it enough more than it harms it.
This brings us to a concept it might be worthwhile to learn about: anti-natalism – the concept that it’s morally wrong to create new life.
One concise and useful common anti-natalist argument is the following:
If we think of the desirability value of being alive as having a maximum desirability of 0, and the desirability of not being alive as having a constant desirability value of 0, then any suffering in life not canceled out by an equivalent amount of pleasure would render existence as having negative value, which is worse than not being alive…and therefore according to this argument ideally life would never come into existence, and once it exists the only reason for it not to cease to exist is the extra suffering often involved with ceasing to exist…unless the life form’s existence can assist previously existing life more than the suffering resulting from its continued existence.

I’d say there are counter-arguments to the view that creating new life is morally wrong though.
For one thing, like I mentioned above, even if life would ideally not exist, we can still make our existences worthwhile by improving the lives of our fellow life forms, and in this way, there could even be arguments for the creation of new life…so long as that new life would improve the life around it enough.
Furthermore, I’d say that, unfortunately, many anti-natalists focus on discouraging human beings from procreating. I’d argue that such a policy is probably a good idea in nations that encourage having babies and already have overpopulation problems…but it’s also worth noting that many such nations are the more impoverished environments in which having children can be especially useful…because in many of the impoverished nations one’s children are essentially one’s retirement plan. Without the means to save large sums of money to retire, or have access to social services helpful to the elderly, you may just end up depending on your children. Discouraging childbirth might also be useful in more industrialized nations, because each individual uses much more non-renewable resources/creates more pollution/etc. in those environments…but those environments tend to have fairly low birthrates anyway, and can often have risks of becoming inverted pyramid societies in which a small percentage of workers funds a large retired segment of the population due to low birthrates or low immigration…so either way there are pros and cons.
So, I’d say this is an issue of which the right path to dealing with will depend largely on one’s culture and other circumstances. There’s a famous South African philosopher and anti-natalist who is quite fond of discouraging procreation in general: David Benatar. I think he might be better off judging what’s best for his culture than mine.
As for my culture though, I live in the wealthy western world in which having children is a luxury that tends to cost parents many, many more resources than they gain from it…and even in terms of assistance in old age, the money saved from not spending it on children might improve one’s life in one’s old age more in many circumstances than having children…so here, I’m simply interested in discouraging people from having children if they don’t want children. I want not having children to be the default choice, if people don’t know if they want them or not. In this way, I figure, what children are born will be born to parents who desire them the most, and I’d say that’d be the most likely way of increasing the positive life experiences of humanity in general. Such a tactic would please parents…result in better lives for children, and presumably, the better of a life the child lives in the more of a chance there could be that the child improves society as well.

But regardless of those sorts of cultural-specific issues, I’d definitely argue that when thinking about whether or not to create a new life, before considering the new life as a feeling person, we should think about the question as if we’re considering building a new, non-sentient tool. Is the tool/life form more likely to assist the world than harm it, or, at bare minimum, it’s parents? If not…don’t create the new life form. If so, then we can move onto step two in which we think about whether or not the life form will likely lead a life that is happy enough that its happiness level is above whatever threshold there is that life is not worth living if the happiness level of the life form is below.

So are the anti-natalists right or wrong about the view that, ideally, life would have never been created? And to what extent is it wrong to procreate?

Well…I don’t know exactly.
However, I think humanity has a more important goal for the foreseeable future than maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering for ourselves…even if it would be better for our entire species to go extinct. I think that humanity has a moral obligation to spread outwards into the universe to radically improve it.
Why? Because we have minds and consciences and the ability to become more skillful at moral philosophy and psychology and sociology and taking care of our basic needs through scientific and cultural evolution so we don’t need to steal or prey upon the week…and I think we have minds that crave purpose, and because I think an endless sense of purpose can be achieved through striving to become progressively better people.
So, I’m quite optimistic about the future of humanity, and all intelligent, spacefaring alien life too for the same reasons I’m optimistic about humanity, and can envision no possible future in which we should not exist, even the most pessimistic anti-natalist visions…at least unless we find other spacefaring, intelligent life who could uplift reality in our place…because without us, I’d argue the natural world is ruled by the mindless and uncaring witch Mother Nature. She gave octopi the instinct to procreate, and set a trap through this process, through which they’d die after procreation, and I’d say that reveals just how beneficial the natural way of things can be for life.
It’s often a misconception that it’s life’s goal to procreate. That’s evolution’s goal…not life’s goal. Procreation doesn’t inherently benefit life. Only increasing pleasure and reducing suffering does that…so that’s life’s goal. That’s why it can sometimes be wise to never have children.
I want humanity to wander through the universe, becoming the conscientious, ruling minds this universe deserves but does not appear to have…so I think our most important duty right now is to survive as a species until we can escape Earth and expand elsewhere…and if the anti-natalists are correct and all life should go extinct? Well, humans would need to be around to drive it into extinction, and if that’s the most logical path, we’ll presumably discover that someday and follow through…until or unless we find some other spacefaring species to take up our universe-saving cause in our place…or perhaps work in cooperation with us.
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How might the “threshold” of happiness, below which it’s best to no longer live, work? (and more about whether or not the anti-natalists are correct)…and aliens

(trigger warning…a discussion of non-consensual sex and cannibalism and mass destruction of life, including humanity and intelligent nonhuman animals, and other unpleasant topics lies ahead).

So, how do we know when it’d be best to die, or to never have lived, to an individual being, from its perspective?
I would assume we can feel it. I’ve never felt it…but there’s nobody to judge when that should happen aside from ourselves. I think that’s an important thing to remember. Even if anti-natalist utilitarian calculus says I should die…I don’t think that necessarily makes them correct. Even if we experience far more suffering in life than pleasure, that’s not necessarily the same thing as saying we should die. The worth of life is a hazy issue in this way and many others.
I will repeat though, when it comes to the creation of new life, that new life can’t benefit from being brought to life, so there is no reason to create new life unless it assists previously existing life or life that will exist more than it harms it.
Now, we have our goal of improving the universe.
I’d say that’s a goal all feeling, intelligent life throughout the universe will have. They’ll all grow to perpetually understand steadily more of something along the lines of Pooperscootian Utilitarianism, and, morally speaking, their goals should become more similar to each other time regardless of whether or not 2 species were born in the same galaxy…because the goal is to a build moral codes that every feeling life form wants and would agree upon (see part 2 for further explanation), and the longer a species is around, the more they should (I’d think) be able to discover more truth about the nature of reality, and filter away more illusions.
So, we’ll have a lot of potential replacements for humanity…but not necessarily in our galaxy. There is the Fermi Paradox argument that points out how long the universe has been around and poses the question of why, if aliens exist, haven’t they spread over the cosmos by now in clearly visible ways such as building massive Dyson Swarms of solar-energy collecting satellites around every star? One answer could be that humans are the only spacefaring members of our galaxy…so there’s a sound chance it’d be up to us to save the galaxy.
Now…why does the galaxy need saving?
Well, to answer that question I’m going to describe how I see the animal world as functioning using a rather unsettling scenario.
Imagine that there are two groups of severely retarded human beings, with the people with the highest I.Q.s having, perhaps, that of 5 year olds, and the vast majority having significantly lower I.Q’s, and all of them lacking the human capacity for language – the ability to use a finite number of symbols to communicate an infinite number of thoughts – that allows us to understand such complicated concepts as we do. Half of them have red shirts. Half of them have blue shirts. They periodically cannibalize and have sex with each other…keeping in mind that their intelligence is low enough that they don’t even associate childbirth with pregnancy. Many will probably not even associate cannibalism with harm to their fellow life forms.
So they’ve been eating each other alive and engaging in non-consensual sex with each other and dragging children into existence without pausing for one second in several hundreds of millions of years to consider whether or not they should, and they’ve been starving and dehydrating and freezing and drowning as well periodically, and there’s basically no way they’ll ever be able to escape from this gladiatorial arena they’ve been forced into without the help of the rest of humanity.
If the red shirts cannibalize more blue shirts than are given birth to through non-consensual blue shirt sex for long enough, we have what we’ll call an extinction event. If the blue shirts do the same to the red shirts, we’ll call it the same. We’ll call this a bad thing…if we’re similar to most people.
If the red and blue shirts cease cannibalizing each other, their numbers will skyrocket until many of them will starve to death from resource shortages, or many will die from disease until their numbers reduce again. We also call this a bad thing…if we think similarly to how most people do.
If just enough red shirts and blue shirts cannibalize each other to counter the childbirths through non-consensual sex they engage in…we have what we’re going to call pleasant words like “harmony and balance in nature,” if we think like most people. We’re going to call that a good thing. I’m not sure why we’re going to call that a good thing…but we’re going to do so.
In case you haven’t guessed, the severely retarded human beings represent animals in the wild that would feel pain similarly to how humans would…such as various mammals and birds, and maybe other animals as well.
So…should we leave them in their natural state of cannibalistic non-consensual orgies over hundreds of millions of years?
Well, I’d say…if you currently care about assisting basically any human being on Earth currently, so that’s a pretty easy answer.
We have no choice but to improve existence for them, or else we have little to no reason to care about any morality.
So, how do we go about improving existence for them?
Well, the first thing I’d argue is that we can’t do much to anything for them now…except maybe ending factory farming. Aside from that, any species we assist would just mean more prey for predators that consume more prey, or more predators that consume more prey, and it doesn’t halt the endless cycle of destruction called the natural world at all.
So now, we can end factory farming (I’m not against eating meat in general…because there are circumstances in which I’d argue meat-livestock could lead better lives than livestock in the wilderness…although, the more meat we buy from farms, the more demand there is for factory farming) and we can do what we can to assist humanity to survive as far into the future as possible so that eventually we can assist animal life in more complete ways.
I’d say that long term survival should be our primary goal.
So, let’s pretend it’s several centuries in the future and humanity finally has the power and resources to really alter the animal world for the better in noteworthy ways beyond just ending factory farming. How might we go about achieving that?
Well, many of the organisms are carnivorous on other organisms that can experience pain, so they’d all, at bare minimum, either have to be euthanized or taken in by humanity as pets and given some replacement foods if we can’t alter them dramatically.
Then we’d need to sterilize many of the herbivores and predators that prey on simpler life that can’t feel pain so as to avoid overpopulation.
These would be short term solutions too though, and the longer we’re on Earth fixing Earth’s environment, the longer it will take to find other potential planets with unintelligent life to fix.
Another option could be finding a way to, perhaps, genetically engineer nonhuman life on Earth to feel less pain…but that might not be possible, or it might not be possible that it works in a manner that gives them the will to survive…or it might require an incredible amount of time and resources.
There’s a third option too. We could destroy the vast majority of life on Earth, ideally painlessly and suddenly…perhaps with some kind of disease or something, or we might nuke the planet from orbit. Then we could leave Earth and perhaps destroy the whole planet and mine the rubble at some point in the future.
I would think nuking the planet from orbit would require much less time and resources than the other strategies.
The primary benefit of destroying all surface life in this way (there’d still be simple life underground…but probably none that could feel pain) would be preventing their endless procreation.

Question: but isn’t it a bad thing, to the organism, to be destroyed?

Answer: Often not…especially if it’s painless and they can’t comprehend death.
That’s keeping in mind that the vast majority of species on Earth won’t be able to comprehend death.
Do tigers comprehend death, for example? I have no idea how it could be possible that they could. They’re rather solitary animals. I tiger might not have ever seen another tiger die, and it’s not like they have a system of communication complex enough to describe any thoughts about death they have to other tigers. Plus…think about how you comprehend death. When I think about death, and the oblivion that could come with it, that requires words to make sense of the various concepts involved with thinking in complex ways about death – words that tigers lack.
Tigers have no advanced communication system the way humans do. Even if we euthanized people in their sleep, the ramifications would be terrifying for humanity. Were that legal, there’d be mass chaos. Were the murder not caught, we’d see mass fear until they were.
So, I’d argue, a tiger doesn’t care about death. It’s tempting to humanize animals…but really, I’d argue death is mostly a human concept, and extinction is entirely a human concept. Most species live in a world in which what they care about is feeling good and avoiding feeling bad…and death means no feelings at all, so it’s not a negative thing for them.
So, what I’d say sudden, instant death, such as from nuclear explosions, that drive the tiger species into extinction would accomplish for tigers as well as other life forms, when accompanied by either sterilizing herbivores or destroying them, would be fewer animals being eaten alive and fewer organisms being born into environments where their lives really only result in the perpetuation of a cycle that definitely looks to me like it results in much harm for life, completely unnecessarily.
Now…what about social organisms, like elephants?
Well, an elephant might be able to miss its deceased elephant pals. That’s not an issue if they’re all destroyed at once painlessly though.
Now what about species like bottlenose dolphins that are both social organisms and may actually be one of the few species besides humans to practice language and be able to comprehend very complex topics…like fearing their own death, as a result?
I’d argue that could be, in many ways, like instantly destroying some isolated group of humans who can’t communicate with the rest of us. I’d definitely argue that our main identifying trait is language. It allows for our creations that make us so unique, both mental and physical.
So…would it be okay to nuke all humans simultaneously?
Certainly not if you get caught beforehand and stopped, or seem likely to, because that will terrify humanity and we’ll have to punish you to discourage it. The prospect of that being possible would lead to long term fears, and possible nihilism due to uncertainty about the future, so it would be in our interest to discourage that….
….But dolphins don’t have the level of knowledge to understand those types of risks, so even if they have the capacity to understand death, their less knowledge actually makes instantly destroying them not cause them harm in the way the known possibility of that of that would cause to humans.
Now, we could perhaps argue that if it’s acceptable to destroy organisms that can comprehend death, that increases the acceptability of destroying humans though, which would cause more fear…or something like that, as an argument to not destroy organisms that can comprehend death without their consent. I’d still say we’d need to modify them or their environments to lead improved lives somehow.
We could also perhaps make a similar argument for not destroying organisms that can comprehend death without their consent that my worldview makes for certain sex crimes. To repeat a paragraph from part 3:

It would seem to me that someone who follows act-based utilitarianism might note that sex crimes against a sleeping person that don’t damage the sleeping person, and that won’t go caught, would lead to no suffering for the victim, and only pleasure for the perpetrator, and therefore you could argue that act-based utilitarianism would encourage such sex crimes. However, if a moral code encourages engaging in such sex crimes, I’d suspect that would greatly frighten society, and therefore cause more suffering than if we had a rule forbidding those types of sex crimes…so, I’d argue that in that type of instance we’d temporarily use rule-based utilitarianism rather than act-based utilitarianism, with the rule forbidding those types of sex crimes. I see rule-based utilitarianism as a last resort though, and act-based utilitarianism to generally be more preferable, because act-based utilitarianism focuses on specific actions and therefore will, I’d argue, be much more nuanced and accurate in terms of maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering, in general.

If the fears resulting from the risk of destruction of humanity could result in sufficient harm to be undesirable, we could use Rule Utilitarianism to implant rules against certain forms of destruction of life to decrease that fear…such as perhaps banning the destruction of all life that can comprehend death.

So, these four threads involve an overview of my worldview: Pooperscootian Utilitarianism: a moral code that strives to become something that’s universally desired by all feeling life, and so can provide unified goals for all life to have.

Thanks for reading.
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