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.
@socialjusticemunchkin the problem I have with this is that the methods here are shaping people’s preferences, not merely allowing them to be fulfilled. If I create someone who values the speed of light being 2 m/s and will be miserable as long as it isn’t, that’s just cruel, no matter how much you value diversity. I should admit that I’m one of those strawman hedonic utilitarians who just wants to tile the world with pleasure. I also want to make it clear that the reason I feel weird about aiming for “diversity” in the next generation is because the act of creating a person is inherently nonconsensual. If someone decides to create me with crippling depression, there’s no way I can tell them that I’m not okay with that. I just get dropped into a world in which I will inevitably be miserable with no say in the matter. People should be created in such a way that will make hem happy, not in a way that will make us happy. Sorry this is just a personal hot button issue for me, because I’ve had suicidal thoughts basically all my life, and I hate hearing people say that they want to create more of my neurotype. I’m not anyone’s fucking art project and I shouldn’t have to suffer for the sake of ~diversity~.
Okay, second addendum: diversity doesn’t outweigh happiness that significantly. I definitely don’t support creating miserable people; that’s why I specified that transhuman postgender morphological freedom utopia in which trans people are not miserable. Similarly, I want neurodiversity accommodation utopia so autistic people aren’t miserable. I won’t pretend to have a mathematical formalization available, but basically I think avoiding the births of people who would be predictably miserable is desirable, but avoiding the births of diverse people just because their lives would be slightly more difficult is bad. Crippling depression destroys far more value from suffering than it creates from exploring person-space, so it shouldn’t happen. Strange and novel neurotypes that don’t suffer significantly from it (real-world example for calibration: autistic people in very autistic-accommodating environment and not having massive issues) may have a little bit less hedons than Most Adjusted Person, but they explore person-space and thus are IMO preferable. Diversity is A terminal value, but not THE only terminal value.
I’m very much in favor of creating only not-terribly-unsatisfied preferences, but I prefer to create people with preferences for exotic morphologies and behaviors as long as such preferences are satisfiable and don’t cause harm to other people. Again, I won’t pretend to have it all figured out but it basically means “create the lives worth celebrating (and only those lives), even the weird ones, and if you can’t create them all try to avoid clustering too hard in any single location of person-space because you miss out on good things otherwise”
3 months ago · 105 notes · source: funereal-disease · .permalink
rocketverliden liked this
coffeespoonsposts liked this
greensunzenith liked this
airportwifisucks liked this- airportwifisucks reblogged this from neoliberalism-nightly
neoliberalism-nightly reblogged this from antinegationism- neoliberalism-nightly liked this
greenrd liked this
socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from wirehead-wannabe and added:Okay, second addendum: diversity doesn’t outweigh happiness that significantly. I definitely don’t support creating...
daniel1112222 liked this
akemiazula reblogged this from funereal-disease and added:As with all things diversity is yet another variable. In an ideal/designed universe there tends to be a particular...
cantdanse liked this
soilrockslove liked this
hatefollows liked this
theicalife liked this
sullyj3 reblogged this from wirehead-wannabe- sullyj3 liked this
dieya105 reblogged this from isaacsapphire
hybridzizi liked this
consulo-cuniculos liked this
wirehead-wannabe reblogged this from funereal-disease and added:@socialjusticemunchkin the problem I have with this is that the methods here are shaping people’s preferences, not...
sarcasmisdeadisgone liked this
shuffling-blogs liked this
lilli-sturmreiter liked this
ilzolende liked this
squaredcoin liked this
empathy2000 liked this
thetransintransgenic liked this
thatfreecracker liked this- socialjusticemunchkin liked this
woodswordsquire liked this
funereal-disease liked this
garmbreak1 reblogged this from cyborgbutterflies
exsecant reblogged this from voximperatoris and added:I don’t think diversity as a terminal value makes sense either. @ozymandias271, are you talking about...
theunitofcaring liked this
isaacsapphire reblogged this from funereal-disease and added:Kinda interesting how the Bay Area gender diversity is the one praised, not eg. The genetic and cultural diversity of...
- funereal-disease reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:
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...
multiheaded1793 liked this
antinegationism reblogged this from ozymandias271 and added:Diversity doesn’t really make sense to me as a terminal value. I’m seeing two arguments upholding it as such but no real...
prudencepaccard liked this
lizardywizard liked this
sidneyia reblogged this from fierceawakening and added:blonde and blue-eyed: just as bad as cishet now
ozymandias271 reblogged this from funereal-disease and added:It is my understanding that a negligible percentage of people become LGBT in adulthood and therefore plastics can be...
metagorgon liked this
ghostofasecretary liked this- Show more notes