I find diversity to be a terminal value in itself; a million weird magical gender creatures of the Bay Area are far more valuable than a million identical suburban clones with blue eyes, blonde hair and 99% perfect boring normative bodies and personalities, even if the subjective quality of life of the latter was slightly higher and they both caused the same amount of utility to outsiders.
My value as a human being is not predicated on how unique I am, fuck you very much.
In context, she was clearly talking about the creation of new people, rather than the moral worth of existing people. And it seems perfectly intuitive to me that diversity ought to be prioritized in addition to subjective quality of life: for instance, it seems true to me that having people with red hair and brown hair is superior to having only people with brown hair, and that continuing to have introverts is a good idea even though extroverts are happier.
That doesn’t make sense at all.
It certainly doesn’t make sense under utilitarianism. It’s like the exact opposite of utilitarianism.
I don’t think diversity as a terminal value makes sense either. @ozymandias271, are you talking about diversity-as-something-that’s-good-for-subjective-quality-of-life or diversity-as-something-that’s-better-than-subjective-quality-of-life? If it’s the latter, I don’t really know how that gels with utilitarianism either, though I’d be interested to hear your explanation.
I don’t think that was what OP was talking about, though. I think she was talking about her own preferences for a community, albeit in confusingly universal terms. The words “terminal value” lost all meaning long before OP got around to using them. As someone who has lived in the Bay Area, though, I have to say it’s nowhere near as glorious as she thinks, albeit still better than living in an extremely repressive/homophobic/transphobic place. Diversity of which neologisms you use to describe your gender or which pastel color you dye your hair is easy to find, but diversity of thought is as hard to come by there as anywhere else.
Here’s my actual explanation:
I consider this a natural consequence of a computationalist model of identity. If one runs a bit-perfect copy of me, the world gains no extra value at all. If one runs an otherwise perfect copy of me with just a few small changes, the world gains very little extra value because there is no magical limit where persons turn discrete. Thus given a fixed amount of instances of persons, value is maximized by having them be spread across as wide an area of mutually-compatible-person-space as possible. Furthermore, adding a new source of diversity not only introduces such people to the universe, but also introduces other people to such people as well, making their experiences more different from experiences previously had.
Left Coast weirdos are rare and precious and I want to see more of them because currently the absolute vast majority of people have their opportunities and diversity exposure constrained by not having such people and communities around. I also want to see more of people who think in different ways as long as their existence doesn’t impose things on non-consenting people; as weird as it might sound my moral system assigns extra value even to people I’m exceptionally repulsed by as long as they don’t harm others by voting against the right to be different (de jure or de facto), doing violence, subjecting children to reparative therapy etc.; I’d be perfectly fine with a NRx-only town somewhere nimby as long as innocent civilians are adequately evacuated and the problems with people having children in such environments are addressed. The University of Berkeley probably needs more conservatives, as uncomfortable as that feels (of course it can be alleviated by reducing the conservatives’ ability to impose their values on non-consenting others; I’m conflicted by no-platforming TERFs or anti-bodily-autonomy people because those people have historically been able to cause dramatic harm, but under an unchallenged sovereign system which prevents moral sentiments from turning into actual oppression I’d be the first to invite them to the most liberal campus in the country).
(via exsecant)
3 months ago · 105 notes · source: funereal-disease · .permalink
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This is exactly how I feel. Losing my mobility would be a horrifying hellscape for me, to the point where I often have...
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