Death is the biological fulfillment of the promise of equality; equality with the non-biological, physical world. Materialism beyond individualism leads to the equality of dirt and humans; consistent treatment between nonhuman and human worlds. The end logic of equality is the overcoming of all life boundaries, all distinctions, and all separations until Singularity or death. -–Heisman, Mitchell
Return to the unconscious flux where differences are no longer perceived.
A death wish masked as a metaphysical ideal.
Emancipation from multiplicity, or not, we are only liberated from the awareness of divergence not from its presence. The hope for a return, after death, to an imagined singularity expresses a deep and unacknowledged hatred for oneself and all that made it possible.
Can you say more. A statement like “whatever else the good is, it cannot be X” both leaves ‘the good’ undefined and narrows down the set of things that it could be. I see my argument as making that sort of claim.
I have made many arguments for the positive version (i.e. arguments like “X is good”) this thread, and my claim here is that the negative version (i.e. arguments like “Y is incompatible with good”) is better justified by those arguments. This is my fullest exposition of the positive version; here’s a tldr of the negative version:
“The good” can only be coherently defined by reference to its function
As an evolved trait, its function was instrumental towards the survival and reproduction of our ancestors
Antinatalism, the position that we should not reproduce, cannot be compatible with any coherent definition of “the good”.
Again, note that this claim constrains good and does not define good.
Restated this way I see a counterargument to your contention that functional morality makes morality tantamount to increasing evolutionary fitness, in the form of a counterargument to my claim that reproduction is a moral good:
Morality’s function was not to increase survival and reproduction, it was merely instrumental towards that end. Previously I’d described its function in terms of cooperation and group cohesion; why shouldn’t we describe ‘the good’ solely in those terms, and leave other evolved traits to deal with reproduction? While it may be that evolutionary fitness is maximized when the sum of instincts motivating an individual points in the direction of reproduction, that doesn’t entail that every instinct must point in that direction. If reproduction hurts cooperation or group cohesion, morality should motivate the individual away from reproduction – that is its function.
I’m not sure I’m convinced by that, but I think it’s a strong counterargument to my claim in this thread. In any case, I think it shows how functional morality is distinct from evolutionary fitness.
Instincts are morally neutral. A “gets it right” moral choice/decision orders the instincts according to self=other. Instincts are our default programming. Unconditioned (¿so how’d it get there?) response. DNA has error correction.
Ah, I see what you mean. In that post, by “get it right” I only mean that they could label behaviors the way that the human moral instinct labels them, and therefore they could convincingly ‘pretend’ to be moral even though they don’t have a moral instinct in the way I think you mean.
I don’t think functional morality has a straightforward answer to whether artificial intelligences can be moral agents or moral patients. For moral patiency, I think this goes to the counter-argument to my position that offered in reply to @PZR: if morality is about the group and only the group, then an artificial intelligence can be a moral patient to the extent that they can be a part of the group; if instead morality’s grounding in evolutionary fitness constrains it, then maybe what happens to artificial intelligences would always be amoral and at most instrumentally good or bad.
For agency, it seems to test the way “morality” is defined under functional morality, but it’s colorable that an AI trained to do the things humans call morality is behaving morally in the same sense that humans are. Said differently, if morality is-what-it-does, and an AI has a module that does what human morality does and it calls it morality, it is morality.
Should Jim Jones be beatified then? Think of the hundreds of people, among them hundreds of children, saved from hell by his actions.
Of course I don’t think you actually endorse child murder, but I hope you see how it follows from what you’ve said: if children are in hell, we are not only justified in removing them from hell, but we are morally blameworthy if we do not.
No, I don’t endorse child murder. Harm is precisely the reason the world is hell. How are you coming to the conclusion that child murder follows from abstaining from reproduction?
If the world is hell, and we can spare someone from hell by murdering them, why shouldn’t we murder them? Is being murdered more harmful than being in hell? Suppose it’s done swiftly and stealthily so that they don’t feel it or see it coming, that seems very low harm, and reduces the harm of being in hell.
Please, say more. You seem to base your claim in some concept of harm, but how can it be that life itself is a harm, and so creating life is wrong, but also ending life is a harm, and necessarily a greater harm than life itself, so murder is also a wrong? Does all of the harm of life happen at the moment of birth, so once birth has happened, there’s no ongoing harm?
Are you appealing to Benetar’s asymmetry, so that life’s pleasures matter after birth and not before?
I understand if you think this line of reasoning is troubling, and I reject it: creating life is good and destroying it is bad. That seems consistent to me.
Are you saying that any and every person is doing moral good, just by virtue alone of having children? If I produce fifty mouths to feed complete with diaper disposal, am I doing the world more good than creating just one or two babies? Or how does this moral aspect of babymaking work?
Well… ceteris paribus, yes. I will bite that bullet.
To be clear, I don’t think reproduction is the only moral good, or that being a moral good means it is always the correct action. If having your fiftieth kid means you can’t support your other 49, the net effect can be negative. But that dynamic isn’t unique to reproduction; even pure distilled utility has its utility monsters. Where two outcomes differ only in that one leaves us with more human beings, that is the better outcome, and it makes no difference whether we’ve saved the life or created it.
Given why the moral sense exists, and what it means to feel that something is moral or immoral, ceteris paribus, reproduction is a moral good.
But you avoid clarifying your position: how can both giving and taking life be harmful?