I've been following this critique (and the various debates it seems to have prompted) with great interest.
You see, when I first began to transition from being someone who mainly reads online to someone who also interacts online, one of the first groups/subcultures I encountered was that consisting of self-described "transhumanists".
Upon encountering these folks, I was mightily intrigued -- here, at long last, seemed to be a congenial community of science geeks who were all interested in many of the same things I was: life extension, robots, neurology, etc.
Additionally, many of the transhumanists I encountered seemed considerably more positive and appreciative of the sheer grandeur of existence than average -- that is, after years of thinking that I might very well be a rarity in my general tendency toward exuberance, here were a whole slew of other folks that saw conscious awareness and its interaction with the myriad patterns of reality as a good thing.
That was my first impression.
And -- it was a decent first impression, to be sure. I started communicating with people who seemed to have interests very similar to my own, and I really enjoyed the discussions I ended up in.
It wasn't anything I saw as a Really Big Deal. It certainly wasn't a "turning point in self-discovery" or some kind of grand identity revelation. It was more that I'd simply discovered that there were others who shared with me a particular set of interests and concerns. So I stuck around.
And now? Well, lately I've been doing a major round of mental housecleaning with regard to how I think about ethics, politics, and what it means to associate with a group.
I generally align myself only uneasily and tentatively with "subcultures" that aren't directly and concretely tied to something I'm a fan of (e.g., science fiction or Buffy), because part of me always feels like I'm "lying" if I call myself X, without truly understanding what X stands for.
Additionally, if I find a particular position to be consistent with the principles I hold, I don't bother running it through a "subcultural filter" before adopting it. Nor do I hesitate to reject things I'm told are consistent with my supposed affiliations if I don't happen to agree with those things.
I used to think this was "normal", but I'm beginning to suspect it's actually quite rare. One of the things I'm finding difficult to deal with in some of the discussions I tend to end up in is the apparent tendency on the part of many others to cling to rigid, abstract ideologies.
Basically, it seems sometimes like everyone is looking for a proper "ism" to adhere to and execute in their navigation of reality and of the various ethical dilemmas and decision cases it presents.
And -- I can't do that.
Literally can't.
Not because I've got some kind of elitist, "I'm above all that" attitude, but because my brain simply doesn't work that way. What understanding I currently have of the few "isms" I'm somewhat familiar with has not come from reading books or articles that introduce and explain the tenets of those "isms", but from first looking directly at the world and its patterns, and at how people behave in certain situations, and then (often by chance) recognizing some occasional correlation between a pattern I've observed, and something I read about in a philosophy article on Wikipedia, or on someone's blog.
This is not "anti-intellectualism" on my part (per my understanding of "intellectualism", which is probably limited to begin with) -- it's just that I think it's perfectly possible to process information in an intellectually robust manner without obsessing over what predetermined system one's ethical and rational tendencies adhere to.
I've found something useful in most of the philosophy I've read, though most of the usefulness has been uncovered after the fact of coming up with some observations about The Universe And How It Works. For instance, I was practically bowled over when I discovered the concept of "existentialism" at around age 20, because some of what I read in that literature so keenly seemed to reflect the sudden sense of transparency, vulnerability, and ephemerality I fell into at that age (the usual postadolescent "Wait, you mean I'm not invincible?!" stuff).
But: I simply cannot start with a description of some philosophy or abstract way of representing people as "resources" or "data points", or of representing reality as something to be fed into a "utility maximizing function", and figure out how to make decisions or behave from that point.
My friend Amanda wrote an article a while back entitled, Politics, Ethics, and Mental Widgets. This article expresses very neatly some of the cognitive aspects of understanding and discussing politics and ethics that can make certain kinds of discourse inacessible to some of us.
Amanda writes:
I have a confession to make that might startle some people: I’m not capable of holding a complex ideology — what I call a set of abstract mental widgets all connected to each other in the sky — in my head. If I try, it falls apart rapidly. I can’t sustain it, I can’t even fully build it, and I certainly can’t believe in it. I used to try, because I thought that it was a measure of my stupidity or something that I couldn’t. And my brain turned to mush every time and I got really frustrated and miserable. I’ve since learned that that’s simply not my strong point and there’s no way on earth I could do it and would be better off putting my cognitive resources somewhere more useful.
My experience is very similar to hers -- I do not, and cannot, hold "complex ideologies" in my head, at least not under the heading of "complex ideology". Sometimes I end up coming up with something that turns out to resemble an existing complex ideology or "mental widget set", which makes me compelled to occasionally try and identify with that existing ideology (for the sake of having common terminology with which to discuss certain ideas I've never before been able to put in terms anyone else can relate to).
But really, I think this might tend to mislead people at times into thinking that I'm much more capable of grokking abstract widget-systems from the "top down" than I actually am. I know that there have also been times when I've misled myself via sloppy pattern-matching of things I think to ideological constructs that look like they're similar to what I think.
Amanda continues:
It seems, though, that for some people it’s either easier or preferred (it’s hard to tell which) to memorize all the proper mental widgets, and to violently force the world (or at least make a serious attempt) to bend to the shape of the widgets.
This doesn’t mean that people who apply mental widgets this way always get things wrong, or that I and others like me always get things right, or that I always disagree with people who use mental widgets (whether both of us are right or both wrong). We’re all fallible human beings, and sometimes mental widgets can provide a shortcut to the right answer. But overall the mental-widget approach to ethics and politics strikes me as far more violent, hateful, impractical, disconnected, and damaging, even if it’s also aesthetically pretty from a certain standpoint and fits very well into academia.
In many respects, I see Amanda's point regarding the "violent, hateful, impractical, disconnected, and damaging" nature of the "mental widget" approach to politics and ethics as very pertinent to something in one of Dale Carrico's latest posts -- something that very nearly made me exclaim aloud, "Yes, that's exactly it!" Dale writes:
it actually seems to me that what little general public traction bioconservative discourse actually gets (since the fact is that almost everybody actually champions healthcare in the service of longer healthier lives, and since most people who live in secular multicultures actually prefer them to police states) derives from its appeal to people's very sensible anti-corporatist and anti-militarist attitudes. Bioconservatives commandeer what should be a technoprogressive critique in the service of their own actually socioculturally reactionary aspirations. Since my own critique of Superlative Technology Discourses foregrounds this very connection of so much prevailing "pro-technology discourse" with elitism, reductionism, indifference, and exploitation it seems to me it actually functions to deprive bioconservative rhetoric of its one current advantage as a technocentric analytic framework.
Superlative technocentrics themselves typically respond to bioconservative formulations instead by misframing all of this as what amounts to a battle between Science and Religion, in which they cast themselves in the role of the Champions of (a reductively and monolithically misconstrued) Science and all of their foes as champions of a fundamentalist or New Age religiosity (misconstrued as a matter of epistemology when fundamentalism is more usually and more crucially a matter of politics) -- all of which has the misfortune of being both mostly wrong and also completely stupid.
The way I interpret Dale's observation here, and relate it to Amanda's observation noted above, is that "superlativity" discourse in many ways represents a grand Battle of the Widgets. In the misframing of technodevelopmental discourse as an episetmological argument between the self-proclaimed defenders of rationality and their perceived opponents (who are assumed entrenched in backwater dogmatism and the rudest of intellectual poverties), real people stand to get hurt, or neglected, or simply disregarded.
I am, like Dale, quite concerned about the "elitism, reductionism, indifference, and exploitation" that exists in some ostensibly "pro-technology discourse" -- even though I've long considered myself an enthusiast when it comes to neat gadgets and nifty machines. And it's not devices I take issue with, but the conclusions about reality (and people) that are sometimes drawn from their existence and how these conclusions are applied to individuals.
For instance, if you consider IQ tests to be a kind of technology, the manner in which many such tests are administered and interpreted can quite literally decide the course of a person's future -- there are, for instance, people living in squalid and/or abusive institutional conditions right now on the basis of a test score. This is preposterous. But no matter how preposterous, our present culture functionally enables it through defining, in the form of a grand tapestry of mental widgets, some persons as nonpersons (or sub-persons, or "persons with low mental age") via a number on a test that supposedly indicates their level of awareness or capacity for complex thought, or something.
This is only one example of what I see as a damaging form of reductionism. And it is only one symptom of a problem I've had for a long time with transhumanism, though I realize it is not a problem unique to transhumanism. I've actually seen more frightening and hateful and fearful statements coming from more mainstream sources than from nominally "transhumanist" or "futurist" sources -- but, and this might be an aspect of the superlativity critique that some are missing -- for a movement that wants to consider itself at the forefront of radical positive change, transhumanism isn't doing enough (in my estimation) to avoid slipping into stodgy parochialism.
The way I see it, anyone who can't tolerate a world in which Deaf, autistic, or otherwise-atypical persons continue to exist is not prepared to deal with a world in which forms and functions vary beyond the dreams of generations of sci-fi and fantasy authors. Anyone who cannot see anything other than the standard set of normative human abilities as a means to a "good start" in life is going to have a seriously hard time with a world of prostheticized and implanted and exuberantly decorated beings such as the very technologies they claim to encourage may bring.
I've at times been horrified to see important issues like disability rights (which are really very much civil rights, and strongly tied to concepts of morphological liberty) being framed by some as a battle between the "progressives" (who, for some reason, are expected to agree with Peter Singer on how to deal with disabled children), and the "disability activists" (who, for some reason, are often considered "reactionary" without anyone really bothering to consider what they are actually saying.). Can't one be a progressive disability activist? And can't one discuss the ethics of a very difficult dilemma without being relegated to the "extremist" camp for merely raising questions like, "Well, how valid are concepts like 'mental age'?" I should certainly hope so!
Per my own philosophical tendencies, I'm much more about people choosing for themselves which of their "limits" they'd like to push or overcome via modification than about some grand council ("We") deciding which factors constitute unacceptable "inequalities" and working to systematically eliminate them. Too many people in general seem to lack the ability to tell the difference between equality and sameness. As a result, even very well-meaning folks can end up overly dazzled by ideas like "maximizing the utility function of the universe" in ways that ignore and harm individuals who might, you know, have a different take on matters, or who are simply not in much of a position to have their thoughts heard.
The post of Dale's I quoted above describes precisely the weird sense I've gotten at times, wherein I've found myself dissatisfied with the dismissal of certain important concerns as "luddite". I've found myself seriously pondering at times where, if anywhere, I "belong" on the philosophical spectrum as someone who supports "weird" ideas like cryonics and consensual self-modification (to the point of someday finding it commonplace for people to replace functioning natural parts with mechanical ones if they happen to like the mechanical ones better), but who also finds it abhorrent that potential parents might ever be coerced or pressured into using genetic techniques to assure a nondisabled neurotypical child. And at this point I'm at the stage of realizing that it doesn't matter whether there's a word to describe where I sit in relation to anything or anyone else. I don't need a widget to tell me I can't support X so long as I support Y, or that in order to be a "real X" I need to support Z, even if Z conflicts with my principles.
"Progress", in my mind, is not something that can be found in imagining a world full of shiny, normal-plus people running around enjoying shiny superlative luxuries that everyone will somehow magically have access to once the "anti-technology" folks see the light. Rather, "progress" consists in the making of consistent, simultaneous improvements in scientific understanding, innovation, and ethical reasoning. Progress is only partly about building objects; it is also about cultural self-examination of the sort that enables people and groups to see how their apparent "objectivity" is often grounded not in revolutionary vision, but in status-quo-supporting theories about people and reality.
Therefore, I would hope that any group expressing a desire to seek and enable extreme levels of morphological freedom (as well as opportunities to self-modify or keep non-normative forms) would naturally understand that a proliferation of mutually exclusive, yet equally rich and valid, life paths -- not a race of superlative superpersons all meeting 2007 fashionability criteria -- ought to be the direction of thrust into the future. And I wouldn't say that transhumanism (at least in its usual formulations) can't stand for some critique in this regard.
9 comments:
I liked this post, but I don't see the connection between ideological narrowness and utilitarianism. Would you mind elaborating on that a bit?
As a long time denizen of the web ((started in '96 and dove in head first)), my experiences are that you are not at all unique in this situation of finding a group with your interests, then as you come to know them, finding areas and people within, and without that interest that you find difficult to deal with.
This I have experienced in roleplaying and gaming groups, political groups, special interest groups, as well as fetishists groups. In my experiences, you can not change what a person believes or espouses through logic, and rarely through underhanded emotional manipulation and mind games. What is more feasible though is making it clear that there is someone out there who does not care for, or truly disagrees with the stance they hold on some issue. Over time, one of two things will happen I noticed, one, the more such individuals the other finds who disagree, and the more real life nudges them, the softer their opposition will tend to become, or two, they will isolate themselves through a combination of obnoxious behavior or ceasing communication except with those who can be considered part of their social circle.
This process though is hardly as easy, or as inevitable feeling as the above might make it seem. If you don't have or don't develop a thick skin, I would not be surprised if you cease interacting with your current online persona within two painful years.
Anyway with regards to disability rights, a few years back I posted to special interest group what I felt was the acceptable limits of medical alteration
1) The subject must mentally competent and a mature adult except in cases where death or years of pain or depression are the most likely outcome of the alterations not being made
2) the modifications must not be such that prevent a person from functioning in a world that is built to suit a normal five to seven foot biped with two arms and legs or into a form that is functionally identical to his or her current state
3)the person must be no more capable of inflicting harm than some who is leaving a kitchen with the tools in said kitchen
4)((I'm no longer sure where I stand on this one, but the abuse potential if it's discarded are a factor in my beliefs)) Barring emergencies are to be no alterations to the shape and size of the brain and its contents
5) no alterations that reduce a person's ability to function in society are to be permitted. This is mainly aimed at ensuring the person remains able to do his current and future jobs, those who would alter themselves in ways that would qualify them as handicapped, and those would use the alterations as a means to commit effective suicide.
Areas I am, and remain undecided on include: the right for parents to alter their children to prevent birth of deformed, clinically insane, or mentally retarded children; the right for those whose judgment capabilities have not reached full potential to consent to alterations outside cases where death or extreme distress are the likely results; the right for parents or guardians to have alterations performed where the cared for individual cant understand the concept of such alterations; The right for someone to remain in a state that requires society make allowances to accommodate them, in cases where altering that state are readily available; The right for an individual to be augmented to the extreme that the majority of the human race in comparison is crippled and retarded.
To elaborate on being allowed to retain current states, my view is that person can be whatever he or she wants... until I have to pay for them to remain so, or treat them differently than I would a generic human being so that they can function. So if someone wishes to remain deaf, or not have a lower leg replaced/added in the first place, I don't care. If someone wishes to remain under the effects of down's syndrome, or to remain frail due to the effects of aging and has a helper to tend them, I'd be a little less sanguine about it, but the imposition on me is minimal in that case. If someone insists on being allowed to keep weighing a ton without other modifications to handle the load, and cant support themselves as a result, or to be partially lobotomized, they are crossing the line. As far as extreme augmentation, while I don't object to the idea, the consequences of such not being easy and affordable to the masses to acquire aren't ones I am comfortable with.
I fully expect to see in a decade or two, elves, furries, klingons, devils, and the like holding jobs and living otherwise normal lives in our society, and hope to be allowed augmentations to my senses, healing capabilities, and overall physical fitness
Lhuhikwdwoo said:
If you don't have or don't develop a thick skin, I would not be surprised if you cease interacting with your current online persona within two painful years.
Oh, don't worry. My skin is extremely thick -- I'm not about to turn tail and disappear because of ideological conflicts with people who otherwise share many interests (at least in the technical sense) with me. Mostly I ignore "community drama" because I find it both uninteresting and incoherent; usually I just sit back and wait for other people to stop arguing.
However, there's a difference between egregious drama and well-deserved critique, and one thing I see as crucial is that people who consider themselves to be part of a given community have the presence of mind to maintain critiques from the inside when they are warranted.
I think one thing a lot of people perhaps don't realize is that if you're involved in a community that is largely discussion-based/topical, you are probably going to have to express disagreement with those you might consider to be friends eventually. If you're in a group of people that all agree with each other all the time (and in which disagreement is considered "being mean", etc.), you're probably in a cult, in which case you should run for the nearest exit. :P
I'm not afraid to argue with people or point out their argumentative flaws just because I like them, and I would see it as a sign of respect if someone saw fit to argue with me in that way.
Regarding your comments on disability rights: it really is a tricky area, but the good news is, you don't have to come up with some generalized ideology for dealing with very difficult or "fringe" cases. If you're ever really in a position to decide something about someone else's future or living situation, etc., you're going to have to consider the variables of that specific situation.
Personally I don't even try to anticipate what I'd actually do in those cases -- I just figure that there are certain principles I will likely adhere to no matter what (such as the idea that people are always ends unto themselves, rather than means to an end) and that these principles combined with the practicalities of the situation will inform my actions.
One final comment: you said at one point: my view is that person can be whatever he or she wants... until I have to pay for them to remain so, or treat them differently than I would a generic human being so that they can function.
This sort of bothers me, though I am willing to give that I might be misinterpreting something here. What you're suggesting here seems to imply that only "generic humans" should exist and that accommodations shouldn't be offered to nonstandard persons. I had a few accommodations in college (e.g., a quiet room for test-taking) and believe me, some teachers gave me a VERY hard time about that to the point where I didn't insist on being allowed the accommodations I was supposedly permitted by law.
Accommodations are not a zero-sum game -- I mean, I'm sure that back in the day, the idea of having women's restrooms in an engineering firm would have been considered a "special accommodation", but think about the fact that making facilities and such more accessible to different kinds of people also enables more people to work (and participate in civic activities, etc.).
It's a good investment to make society and its structures more flexible. And this increase in flexibility should not be considered an "imposition" on anyone, but a recognition of the fact that all different kinds of people are pretty much always going to exist, and everyone is going to need to compromise a bit to account for interpersonal differences. Atypical people do a lot of "accommodating" of the more "generic" people in their midst all the time, and yet this is scarcely recognized.
nickptar said:
...I don't see the connection between ideological narrowness and utilitarianism. Would you mind elaborating on that a bit?
Well, from what I understand of utilitarianism (and I'm not all that great with "isms", as I tried to explain in my post), it often seems to posit that there is "one road" in all situations likely to lead to the "best" outcome. The ideological narrowness comes in when people start applying their own personal utility functions to the rest of the world, without putting in even a modicum of effort to get to know people who might have different notions of what constitutes a positive vs. negative outcome.
You read the big "torture vs. specks" discussion on Overcoming Bias recently, right? That was a very good example of what I see as utilitarianism-induced ideological narrowness. There was basically a presupposition of utilitarianism in the original posing of the question -- e.g., it was only possible to get the "right" answer (according to the original poster and others) via applying utilitarian decision theory. So instead of being a real question about what each respondent *really* saw as a better or worse option, it was a theory question dependent upon a respondent's assumed (or required) familiarity with a particular formulation of decision theory.
And I saw a whole lot of muddling going on in that thread between satisfying the "right answer" per the presupposed theory, and making a qualitative (opinion!) statement regarding one's personal notion of which situation was truly "better" or "worse". As if somehow, the notion of deciding what to value was completely disregarded.
Utilitarian formulations tend to bother me because they over-abstractify reality to the point where you have bizarre conundrums of having to support a terrible course of action (something that actually harms people!) in order to satisfy what amounts to an equation. I'm not saying there's no utility in concepts of utility (heh), but rather, that I don't see why anyone thinks that ANY "ism" is somehow capable of providing right answers or best courses of action in any given situation.
One final comment: you said at one point: my view is that person can be whatever he or she wants... until I have to pay for them to remain so, or treat them differently than I would a generic human being so that they can
function.
Admittedly my experiences here have been a bit limited, old people, grossly fat people, people in wheel chairs, blind people, the very rare deaf person, people who seem normal until you get past the five to six conversation topics they've trained themselves for, people who while functional in body have a face that provokes reactions from staring to queeziness, people who are loudly stupid (not the ones who disagree with me, but ones that in a previous century would been the village idiot).
Till now, all of the above have either been born or created by accidents or violence to be as they are, with no chance to correct the situation. Taking that involuntary situation into account, in the past few decades allowances have been made part of enforced law to allow all of the above access to common facilities as well being encouraged to socialize rather than be shut away.
Going forward from now, nearly all of the above can be changed, so that a cost of changes vs cost of accommodations issue will arise. This forum itself presents a situation where correction to some norm is lightly encouraged. Spell a word incorectly and hte word chekc will kick in, and in mos of the cases, turn my straight inmoddified tyoping into something that reflects well on me. Admittedly it is not as imposing or demeaning as saying that someone who is used to living in a wheel chair should be gently urged to get and use a cybernetic prosthesis, but the intent is the same.
Still most of my comment is not aimed at those above, or those who undergo changes that have no impact on their ability to function, such as gender changes, extreme tattooing, or mild misuse of psychoactive drugs. No, it's mostly aimed at those who seem interested in using alterations that will soon be possible to become less able to function (such as extreme levels of genital alterations, the type that would require a wheel chair or exoframe to remain mobile) and the far murkier area of whether to alter the brains of those who cant conceptualize the idea to the point where they can, and those under the effects of down's syndrome, or tourette's once brain function and alteration is understood enough to actually correct those syndromes.
Still that level and kind of difference is what I view as cases where my rights are being infringed upon by another. The person in the wheel chair is not doing so, nor is the person who sits at the entrance of a mall's food court and is overbearingly stupid in a friendly way, even if such is alterable.
Borderline for me are situations such as the person that elects to have his wheel chair replaced by a prosthesis that turns him into a centaur, or that becomes impossible to deal with because the meds he takes to retain any empathy interferes with his sexual prowess. Either he cant function in society or he took changes that put his rights to move about as he wished, above the rights of others to not be inconvenienced in order to allow him that right.
Beyond borderline, once technology reaches a point where most of the negative effects of tourette's syndrome can be removed yet the potential patient insists its his right to remain untreated, or some acquires a roo/raptor form body shape, yet doesn't pay the price for the gear that allows him to function in a human form world.
I've always considered myself a transhumanist for my simple "To be more than human is to be human" philosophy. Well that is since I found out transhumanism existed. When I was young I still liked the idea of replacing my improbing parts of my body I wasn't happy with and with cyborg bodies/limbs were a reality I would probably choose ones that looked mechanical purely because I prefer the look of them the so called "meatware". And lets not even get into added functionality deviating from the biological components.
I've always tried avoiding trying to say that I think the world should be "X" (X being my vision of the future). Except for in my occasional bouts of megalomania where I rant about creating a better world through various generally evil means. The changes we hope to see are only going to come about when someone puts money into it. Whether it becomes legal or not doesn't matter.
If it becomes illegal then we'll see body modification/improvement done by back alley surgeons with garage made parts/genetic mods for exorbiant fees under the control of criminal gangs.
If it becomes legal than it may end up like plastic surgery is today or with basic life extension just being part of your basic health insurance. Depending on the degree of possible cybernetic parts we may even see "body loans" or something similar to pay for other body mods.
It's good to read this. I'm somewhat of the opposite, in that I find it both easy and aesthetically pleasing to systemize my own rationality and worldviews. I don't think I do this for the sake of or in a manner which lends itself to cultural identification with known ideologies and groups terribly well; I tend to end up combining ideologies and rationalizations in uncommon ways, which makes perfect sense in my head but pegs me as an outlier when I interact with groups professing these ideologies or 'isms'.
But I do find value in exploring various established ideologies and incorporating things I find into my own personal systematizing ideology, including analysis of fringe cases, hypotheticals, and abstractions, etc; so on this basis I found it pretty interesting to read your defense of opting out of this sort of discourse, and I think it makes perfect sense. I can fall into the trap of thinking otherwise sometimes, but ultimately this is a form of thinking that I do not because I think it is the only or necessarily best way of interacting with the world but rather stemming from what Dale Carrico would classify as aesthetic goals of self-improvement and private perfection. While the pursuit of these goals is often characterized by public modes of reasoning and discourse, including group identification and deliberation, in order to produce ethical and political beliefs, the drive to structure the discourse in this systematizing way rather than simply dealing with the world on it's own terms is a matter of aesthetics. It's important for me to remember that sometimes, so as to prevent that value from propagating into the other, more public modes of belief which it influences.
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On another note:
In way of a brief defense of utilitarianism, I feel a need to point out that utilitarianism proper is a incredibly vast array of possible ethical positions, which share only a few central ideas: consequentialism and some notion of utility. The issues of how to best manage and define utility can be played around with in a ridiculous number of possible ways, which can produce the narrow, unifying and exclusionary sorts of discourse and conclusions you seem to have encountered, but which, under my own understanding and formulation, have driven me to explore and embrace issues of diversifying culture and forms, consensual self-modification, rights of marginalized and differently abled and functioning individuals, etc.; in short: many of the same values which I continue to inform, support, and reaffirm through reading your own writing, among others.
Which is a long way of saying that utilitarianism is a nearly uselessly broad category of possible 'isms', and that more specification and analysis is needed to narrow things down to the particular forms which you've been encountering.
Anne,
"Utilitarian formulations tend to bother me because they over-abstractify reality to the point where you have bizarre conundrums of having to support a terrible course of action (something that actually harms people!)"
Unfortunately, without such abstraction the world ends up a rather nastier place. If people base their altruism on intuition and emotion without an abstract element then they will end up giving substantially on the basis of affinity groups rather than purely helping people, e.g. curing diseases that have afflicted family, supporting the relative poor (rich by world standards) in one's town, giving to relief efforts for the disaster of the day without regard to the effectiveness of the donation, promoting one's ethnic or religious group (or neurodiverse population), etc.
Each of those causes, which are inefficient in helping recipients live better lives (by their own lights) compared to helping people avoid HIV or malaria in Africa, will give a warm glow, but if everyone channels their charitable impulses into such things then a lot more individual African kids (real people all!) will suffer and die.
When utilitarian calculations suggest unpleasant tradeoffs, sacrificing the well-being of some to save or benefit others, rejecting calculation is not simply 'respecting persons' and resisting actual harm. There are people on both sides of the tradeoff, and it's worse for many people to suffer or die than for one to do so.
What did you think about this Overcoming Bias Post?
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/scope_insensiti.html
I agree with Stephen that consequentialism encompasses a vast range of normative views, depending on what one values: consequentialism prescribes how to act given a definition of value (which can include diversity, autonomy, etc). I am also very wary of bad outcomes from an over-narrow consequentialist definition of the value to be maximized.
My apologies to both of us for remembering only rarely to look in on this blog.
Your relationship with widget systems is much the same as mine. I now approach every clique, party, faction, or whatever with the certainty that if our relationship progresses far enough, we'll come to an impasse. My experience is that any widget system inevitably comes into conflict with common sense and ordinary experience, and that most widget systems at some point demand that their adherents do wrong. Not me. Nor, obviously, you or Amanda.
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