[13of40]

I'm on the fence about whether I agree with this. The way I see it, if you look at beavers, ants, or trees, they change the landscape but they do it based on behaviors that are encoded in their genes. That means a beaver can create a lake, but its descendants have to be able to live with that using the same slow-changing genetic programming, otherwise they die off. With humans, we can adapt new ways to live in the altered environment, even if it would have been incompatible with the lives of our ancestors. If we kill off all the salmon and whales, for example, within a generation or two we can pivot to factory-farmed chicken and petroleum. Once we've tapped that out we can do soy protein and windfarms.

I say I'm on the fence because on a longer time scale, that kind of mental adaptation might not be that much different from genetic adaptation and we'll still have to find equilibrium or die out.

As far as the ethics question goes, if we use the most basic model and say that the ethical thing is that which promotes the most "good-life-years per capita" versus "bad-life-years per capita", where capita means one of the sentient residents of the planet, there are a few ways to look at it:

1. Ethics is just a fiction that humans have made up to support the prisoners' dilemma style of cooperation game we play, and there's no real answer.

2. The billon or two twilight years of our planet are better spent in rough equilibrium, where tigers exist, but most animals get some time to stretch in the sun, nuzzle their young, etc.

3. Life in equilibrium is actually cold, brutal, and short for most of the sentient animals involved, so providing a higher level of comfort for a population of ten billion people is better, even if it eventually crashes.

4. The experience of a human counts more than that of an animal, so a high human population with a decent standard of living for a long enough time pushes the needle past what a much longer natural equilibrium would achieve.

[throwanem]

I saw you palm that card! Utilitarianism is anything but "the most basic model" of ethics. If you want to argue from it, do so honestly rather than try to smuggle it in as an unexamined postulate.

[13of40]

Do you have another model that changes the answers?

[throwanem]

Do you care first to justify the assertions you made on the back of yours? I realize it's a common utilitarian habit to believe the quantification they do is meaningful outside the purely reflexive sense, but that is a belief, requiring as much substantiation as any other before it's taken to model anything about the world.

[13of40]

I don't think I actually asserted anything, but let me give a shot at explaining:

The model is that higher values of G/B are better, where G is good years per capita and B is bad years per capita, so the ethical thing to do is maximize G and/or minimize B. I called this "basic" because even though it tends to fall apart when scaled up, I think it captures what most people think of ethics. It's good for making tactical decisions about things like "should I punch that guy" or whatever.

For #1, where ethics would be just a fiction we made up to support a social game, what I mean is: People in a group have to play a prisoners' dilemma game where they find a balance of cooperation and sharing of resources. One way to reach that balance is to assume good will and treat others like you want to be treated. (Right up until someone violates that, then it's hyperbolic response time...) If ethics is just something people made up to get everyone to maintain that balance, then higher G/B being better is rooted in the same fiction.

For #2: My definition of G and B included good and bad experiences by animals, not just people. That means it's possible that over a billion years or so you could still achieve higher G/B by going back to a "natural" world inhabited by sentient but less intelligent animals.

For #3: It could be that the G/B in a natural world would actually be lower than if it was dominated by humans, because several billion people being able to live out their lives before the crash could result in a big enough G value to outweigh the eventual suffering.

For #4: If life as a human counted more towards G than the same amount of life as a beaver, then it could be a force multiplier for #3.

[throwanem]

All of which follows from this assumption, which I'll grant you were slightly more overt about than the one I criticized:

> The way I see it, if you look at beavers, ants, or trees, they change the landscape but they do it based on behaviors that are encoded in their genes.

Having neatly begged the question of whether a distinction between "human" and "nature" has meaning - in the direction that it does, and on the basis of an understanding no more current than the behaviorism of the 1930s and 40s - you then proceed into the implications of a lot of arithmetic manipulations whose relevance you have declined to establish. So the complexity is wasted, at best without meaning and at worst deceptive by giving the impression of valid reasoning where none exists. (Soundness without validity isn't worthless, but where you aim to describe reality it certainly becomes so.)

To be clear, I don't assume you set out to deceive anyone here or anywhere else. But I have seen the identical technique on occasion deliberately used to that end, and much more often seen people so enthralled with the complexity of their reasoning as to totally overlook the vacuity of the premises from which it proceeds - not always, but mostly, and certainly by all appearances here.

This doesn't render the method totally useless; in my experience, people who hew strongly to it do a good if overly verbose and probably inadvertent job of explaining their own ethical judgment of the world. The trouble is, that's all it's any good for.

[13of40]

I apologize, but I'm trying to parse what you're saying and I can't seem to find the meat. I understand you're trying to insult me or whatever, but are you trying to say anything relevant to the topic?