Not sure if this belongs in inceldom discussion or offtopic as it does mention ER, Cho, and others, however this is largely secondary to the point I want to make. Anyway this article seems pretty ironic to me, as it talks about "misguided moral actors", despite the author being an example of exactly that, at least as far as I'm concerned.
In our modern age new technologies are able to generate and channel mass empowerment, allowing small groups and individuals to challenge states and other institutions of traditional authority in ways that used to be the province only of other states.
Consider a few short descriptions of agent subtypes motivated by consequentialist ethical theories. Unlike the other subsections above and below, this discussion is somewhat abstract given that few individuals have openly acknowledged a moral desire to annihilate humanity if doing so were possible, even though this prescription follows directly from certain moral commitments associated with forms of classical utilitarianism and negative utilitarianism.
(ii)Radical negative utilitarians(NUs). As Thaddeus Metz (2012)puts it, radical NUs accept the ethical theory of antinatalism as well as pro-mortalism, the view that it is often prudent for individuals to kill themselves and often right for them to kill others, even without their consent. It pretty clearly has these implications if one can kill oneself or others painlessly, but probably does so even if there would be terror beforehand; for there would be terror regardless of when death comes, and if death were to come sooner rather than later, then additional bads that would have been expected in the course of a life would be nipped in the bud.
So perhaps I've been missing something all along, but how exactly is negative utilitarianism misguided? The fact that it's not emotionally palatable for most people isn't an argument, and you can't use individual consent when the vast majority of humans don't respect this themselves(birth, mutilation of children, child rearing, indoctrination, opposition to suicide, etc), aside from in very specific and ultimately arbitrary contexts (female sexual selection), thereby breaking their own rules.
Secondly what the writer of the above paragraph doesn't seem to get is that while this scenario of ethical killing might make sense conceptually, it very rarely works out that way in reality, perhaps an exception would be the red button scenario, or two people on a hypothetical island. Beyond that you're almost certainly going to cause more suffering that you'd prevent, because the death of a person hurts everyone around them, even if we accept that death isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Not to mention that a particularly bad manner of death might well be worse for some people than letting them experience all other forms pain which await them preceding their natural death. Just because I can prove that pleasure is observably distinct from, and ultimately enslaved to suffering, this doesn't mean that there is a way to measure suffering which isn't entirely subjective. Meaning that while we can say pain/discomfort/suffering is bad, there is no intuitive way for me to discern the true level of suffering experienced by someone outside myself, I can only say for certain that it's something to be avoided, and that it can't be justified by it's intrinsic relationship to existence.
As for the argument that this reasoning suggests that we should commit suicide, well that part is mostly true. However as I was getting at before, your death would likely hurt others, making it less clear whether or not it's truly the right decisions in most contexts. Furthermore this point is largely irrelevant, as most people are incapable of killing themselves at all, and many others would find themselves unable to do so without help. So suggesting that suicide is within the best interest of everyone isn't useful if the vast majority of us lack the capacity to kill ourselves.
TL;DR Those are just some of my thoughts, but what do you think about this article? Personally I find it funny that the author imagines a doomsday device in the hands of ER, as he had trouble overcoming a door.
In our modern age new technologies are able to generate and channel mass empowerment, allowing small groups and individuals to challenge states and other institutions of traditional authority in ways that used to be the province only of other states.
Consider a few short descriptions of agent subtypes motivated by consequentialist ethical theories. Unlike the other subsections above and below, this discussion is somewhat abstract given that few individuals have openly acknowledged a moral desire to annihilate humanity if doing so were possible, even though this prescription follows directly from certain moral commitments associated with forms of classical utilitarianism and negative utilitarianism.
(ii)Radical negative utilitarians(NUs). As Thaddeus Metz (2012)puts it, radical NUs accept the ethical theory of antinatalism as well as pro-mortalism, the view that it is often prudent for individuals to kill themselves and often right for them to kill others, even without their consent. It pretty clearly has these implications if one can kill oneself or others painlessly, but probably does so even if there would be terror beforehand; for there would be terror regardless of when death comes, and if death were to come sooner rather than later, then additional bads that would have been expected in the course of a life would be nipped in the bud.
So perhaps I've been missing something all along, but how exactly is negative utilitarianism misguided? The fact that it's not emotionally palatable for most people isn't an argument, and you can't use individual consent when the vast majority of humans don't respect this themselves(birth, mutilation of children, child rearing, indoctrination, opposition to suicide, etc), aside from in very specific and ultimately arbitrary contexts (female sexual selection), thereby breaking their own rules.
Secondly what the writer of the above paragraph doesn't seem to get is that while this scenario of ethical killing might make sense conceptually, it very rarely works out that way in reality, perhaps an exception would be the red button scenario, or two people on a hypothetical island. Beyond that you're almost certainly going to cause more suffering that you'd prevent, because the death of a person hurts everyone around them, even if we accept that death isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Not to mention that a particularly bad manner of death might well be worse for some people than letting them experience all other forms pain which await them preceding their natural death. Just because I can prove that pleasure is observably distinct from, and ultimately enslaved to suffering, this doesn't mean that there is a way to measure suffering which isn't entirely subjective. Meaning that while we can say pain/discomfort/suffering is bad, there is no intuitive way for me to discern the true level of suffering experienced by someone outside myself, I can only say for certain that it's something to be avoided, and that it can't be justified by it's intrinsic relationship to existence.
As for the argument that this reasoning suggests that we should commit suicide, well that part is mostly true. However as I was getting at before, your death would likely hurt others, making it less clear whether or not it's truly the right decisions in most contexts. Furthermore this point is largely irrelevant, as most people are incapable of killing themselves at all, and many others would find themselves unable to do so without help. So suggesting that suicide is within the best interest of everyone isn't useful if the vast majority of us lack the capacity to kill ourselves.
TL;DR Those are just some of my thoughts, but what do you think about this article? Personally I find it funny that the author imagines a doomsday device in the hands of ER, as he had trouble overcoming a door.
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