Re: Misanthropic Altruism (Philosophy)

On 8/1/26 9:01 AM, Wilson wrote:
> 
> "Your daughter’s smile is dearer to you than that of a stranger half a 
> world away. Of course it is. Human life is situated and embodied, and so 
> are our obligations and loves. But the ideology that holds sway over 
> many Silicon Valley elites diagnoses this preference for those near and 
> dear to you as an evolutionary defect. Instead, according to the 
> adherents of this worldview, every sentient being in every place, in 
> every time, holds the same moral claim on every other. This philosophy 
> is known as Effective Altruism (EA).
> 
> Scandals in the EA world, most notably the downfall of the 
> cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, prompted many effective 
> altruists to renounce the name in recent years. But the ideas endure. In 
> 2025, six EA-aligned grantmakers deployed $1.25 billion, and this number 
> is set to grow along with the success of the world’s leading artificial 
> intelligence company, Anthropic, which was founded on EA principles. The 
> firm’s founders have pledged to donate 80 percent of their wealth upon 
> the firm’s IPO. These wealth pledges, combined with the company policy 
> of matching employee donations, will create billions in philanthropic 
> capital, channeled through EA’s entrenched institutions.
> 
> Effective Altruism is the final flowering of utilitarianism, that 
> Victorian philosophy of calculating reformers, transplanted into Silicon 
> Valley boardrooms and granted the false vitality of billion-dollar 
> balance sheets. Because it is constitutively blind to what makes a 
> civilization worth preserving, its utopia will entail dissolving America 
> in the name of humanity.
> 
> Several historical developments help explain EA’s success. One is the 
> rise of mass media, which widened the circle of concern that once might 
> have encompassed only family and neighbors. By the beginning of the 
> 1970s, televisions were present in nearly every American home. Footage 
> of people suffering abroad became a regular fact of American life. In 
> 1972, the philosopher Peter Singer published "Famine, Affluence, and 
> Morality," the essay that would become EA’s foundation. His argument was 
> simple: If we can prevent suffering at little cost to ourselves, we 
> must, and it makes no moral difference whether the person we help is "a 
> neighbor’s child ten yards from me" or a stranger on another continent.
> Another precondition for EA’s rise was the modern pathologization of 
> traditional sources of identity — nation, religion, family, tradition. 
> Especially after World War II, such particular loyalties were recast as 
> the wellspring of fascism. Later generations, whose education 
> dispossessed them of everything particular, were prepared to receive the 
> EA program.
> 
> In his 1981 book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argued that every 
> culture is defined by its stock of "characters," the social roles that 
> embody its moral ideals. "Characters," he wrote, "are the masks worn by 
> moral philosophies." The twentieth century’s main character was the 
> bureaucrat, whose authority was derived from a seemingly scientific 
> knowledge of human affairs, grounded in the supposed incommensurability 
> of facts and values. The bureaucrat administers according to facts, 
> while values are condemned to the private sphere. His expertise cannot 
> be challenged. The standard of his authority is effectiveness.
> He flattens all goods into a single quantifiable dimension, converting 
> them into units like lives saved, suffering averted, and dollars per 
> outcome. The units’ apparent neutrality conceals a range of ideological 
> assumptions. The human "good" becomes a function of EA’s calculus. Then, 
> pretending value-neutrality, EA denounces defection as backwards, 
> unscientific, and immoral. Any challenge appears to spurn both science 
> and human dignity.
> 
> More recently, EA’s impartiality has expanded far beyond those currently 
> living, to what "longtermists" envision as 10^58+ potential future 
> beings — human and digital. These future beings’ existence depends on 
> the avoidance of human extinction. The longtermists consider AI the 
> dominant existential risk, and frontier development is concentrated in a 
> few American labs.
> 
> Some have taken the argument to its violent conclusion. Eliezer 
> Yudkowsky, the most influential of the doomsayers, wrote in Time that 
> nations should "be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike," 
> nuclear war notwithstanding. And since 2022, the Zizians, a cult that 
> splintered off from the same Bay Area rationalist scene, have been 
> linked to six killings.
> 
> Congress must treat the philanthropic apparatus of frontier AI as it 
> treats any concentration of unaccountable power. Lawmakers should demand 
> disclosure of the grantmaking networks that fund labs with national 
> security implications. They should condition federal contracts on terms 
> any defense contractor would recognize: Disclose the instructions and 
> value systems trained into the models, certify systems sold to the 
> government will execute lawful orders without an engineer’s veto, and 
> reserve the government’s right to audit.
> 
> The machines our government buys must serve the American people, not 
> some present or future humanity. And procurement standards should favor 
> open-weight models, which anyone can download, run, and test, so that 
> the nation never depends on intelligence a handful of labs can withhold.
> —William Thibeau
> 
> https://www.compactmag.com/article/misanthropic-altruism/
> 
> The philosophical and ethical question is, is it beneficial to value 
> those close to us more highly than others, 

no

> or is it better to value all human life equally?

yes

> 
> Is it even /possible/ to value all lives equally?

yes

> 
> Does attempting to see all life as equal inevitably lead to placing a 
> lower value on the lives of those close to us (both temporally and 
> physically)?

no

> 
> What about the lives of those who oppose the idea of seeing all life as 
> morally equal?

  > subethical beliefs self-resolve in fate
  >
  > #god

-- 
why are we god?
let's end war 🙃