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.
Yes, Ozy’s interpretation is correct. I don’t want the future to be tiled with copies of the “most optimal” people and find it really creepy when some vulgar utilitarians are like “let’s eradicate all deviation because this one neurotype is the happiest”.
It doesn’t apply to already existing people, other than that I do endorse attempts to increase diversity in next generations and am strongly opposed to normativities that would aim to diminish human variance, although not enough to be willing to coerce (as reasonably understood) people to not do such things if that’s what they actually want for themselves. (Basically the same as with gender; I want to destroy the mechanisms that pressure people to conform but don’t think any specific person is wrong to do gender-normative things.)
(Also, something like this seems like a possible solution to the issue of adjusted life-years devaluing people with disabilities; if a discontinuity between now and possibilities is allowed, I could count losing my legs for 30 years as a loss of X preference-adjusted-life-years and thus a thing to prevent, but a paraplegic person’s life-year would still be treated as just as valuable as mine. The naive formulation probably breaks somewhere but it seems like something like that would catch the intuition that groups X and Y should be treated as equally valuable even if it’s also worthy to prevent members of group X from becoming members of group Y if they don’t want to.)
Thank you for your explanation! That perspective makes more sense now, though I’m still not sure I fully subscribe. I apologize for any hostility on my part.
I really like this bit:
if a discontinuity between now and possibilities is allowed, I could count losing my legs for 30 years as a loss of X preference-adjusted-life-years and thus a thing to prevent, but a paraplegic person’s life-year would still be treated as just as valuable as mine.
This is exactly how I feel. Losing my mobility would be a horrifying hellscape for me, to the point where I often have nightmares about becoming paralyzed. But that most definitely isn’t so for everyone, and it is never my place to tell existing paralyzed people that they should be unhappy.
I’m really glad to see this sorted out; I definitely should debug my communication to reduce the incidence of such things in the future because looks like we both freaked out pretty massively from what was basically an accident in me getting overenthusiastic and careless, and it is v suboptimal.
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...
victoriabutterfree reblogged this from ozymandias271 and added:If dysphoria really is the cause of my depression, then creating dysphoric kids seems monstrously cruel. It’s not okay...
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