if EA rebranded as Effective Anti-Malaria organisation the arguments about it would become a lot more pertinent and a lot less interesting.
punks worry themselves sick about summoning a computer djinn, meanwhile they brag about summoning an army of the dispossessed without even planning who it’s against
Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism or eudaemonism, all those modes of thinking which measure the worth of things according to pleasure and pain, that is, according to accompanying circumstances and secondary considerations, are plausible modes of thought and naïvetés, which every one conscious of creative powers and an artist’s conscience will look down upon with scorn, though not without sympathy.Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (via enskog)
They say “you can’t take it with you”. Of possessions, at death. Implicit suggestion being you should shift energy away from accumulating them towards accumulating… memories? happiness?
But if you can’t take it with you, at least someone else can inherit and use it. Whereas your memories and happiness…
That’s part of why I don’t fuck with the whole EA utilitarian thing. Hedonism is a consumer good. Considering how regularly you need to refresh your happiness, it’s not even a consumer durable. Why the fuck would you maximize for that, at the expense of the charismatic capital goods - the standing waves of meaning that are culture and social technology - that can be generated through denying happiness, through inflicting repressive force?
The other part, and this is going to sound simple as hell but took a whole Ivy League grad seminar on political philosophy to get through to supergenius me, is this - let’s accept, arguendo, that you’ve got a morality that correctly distinguishes good from evil.
Why prefer good to evil?
The Christians have a reason - doing so wins the favor of the most powerful being in existence, that controls all earthly events and can bestow afterlives of eternal pleasure or eternal torment at whim.
That’s the point of a god, to slap together out of pure storytelling charisma a kludge of an instrumental force to prop up your morality.
That’s what Nietzsche was on about when he said that God is dead but it has not yet reached the ears of men - that too many athiests haven’t followed things through to their conclusion.
A lot of attempts at humanistic philosophy try to build a Big Other out of humanity to serve the same purpose - because people will only like and help you if you’re good and thus good is necessary to the conduct of human endeavors.
But it’s the people who go around most strongly insisting on any particular vision of good and evil - social activists, imagine - who can most readily name the most instances of people creating, and attaining and maintaining control over human endeavors specifically by doing “evil”.