It seems to me Alexander is doing roughly the same thing I accuse Rothbard of in my libertarian moral psychology post (https://chefstamos.substack.com/p/towards-a-better-libertarianism), i.e., starting from an ethical theory that seems prima facie sensible to him and then just straight up refusing to engage seriously with its implications or philosophical objections. Which is fine if someone is doing ethics for their own personal benefit, but I'm not sure why I should care what they think about ethics if they write off obvious objections as "philosophical muggings" (I'm sure Rothbard would have appreciated that term).
Nice essay. Admittedly, I have trouble getting past "How are you even measuring all these people's utility, much less adding it up and doing summary statistics on it, then figuring out how your actions will impact those numbers", but your examples helped keep interest.
I also applaud you for addressing Scott's (and Hanania's) rather repugnant recent tendency towards "Hell with it, I do what I want, but will keep calling it morally right!" It is one thing to say "Look, I don't know what the big picture effects are, but I am going to try and do what seems best within arms reach of me anyway," and quite another to say "I have this extremely strong sense that I can accurately decide whether it is better to add or remove a few million people in the future, but I don't feel the need to follow that process to its logical conclusions if I don't like them." Apparently all the cool kids are just arbitrarily deciding on what it is to be good and refusing to ever examine those decisions. Very disappointing.
It seems to me Alexander is doing roughly the same thing I accuse Rothbard of in my libertarian moral psychology post (https://chefstamos.substack.com/p/towards-a-better-libertarianism), i.e., starting from an ethical theory that seems prima facie sensible to him and then just straight up refusing to engage seriously with its implications or philosophical objections. Which is fine if someone is doing ethics for their own personal benefit, but I'm not sure why I should care what they think about ethics if they write off obvious objections as "philosophical muggings" (I'm sure Rothbard would have appreciated that term).
Nice essay. Admittedly, I have trouble getting past "How are you even measuring all these people's utility, much less adding it up and doing summary statistics on it, then figuring out how your actions will impact those numbers", but your examples helped keep interest.
I also applaud you for addressing Scott's (and Hanania's) rather repugnant recent tendency towards "Hell with it, I do what I want, but will keep calling it morally right!" It is one thing to say "Look, I don't know what the big picture effects are, but I am going to try and do what seems best within arms reach of me anyway," and quite another to say "I have this extremely strong sense that I can accurately decide whether it is better to add or remove a few million people in the future, but I don't feel the need to follow that process to its logical conclusions if I don't like them." Apparently all the cool kids are just arbitrarily deciding on what it is to be good and refusing to ever examine those decisions. Very disappointing.
Great post. I enjoyed reading as your intellectual chainsaw ground up the strange pragmatico-utilitarianism they are trying to push.