The view from utopia

They say in heaven, loves come first

1.

I want you to think about three possible conditions.

In condition A, you are omnipotent. If you are a theist, and imagining this pains you, you can imagine instead that God has given you a universe or domain in which you are, so to speak, ‘omnipotent’. If you think the concept of omnipotence is incoherent, imagine some kind of commonsense capacity to make non-contradictory things you want happen.

In condition B, you are in control of an infinite amount of computational power and create a simulated world to any specification you like. (Assume, for the sake of argument, that you think the simulated people count as people with experiences).

In condition C, our species has expanded out through the galaxy and is colonizing our lightcone. Because there is no life out there, it’s all being turned into computational mass- computronium. For some reason, you have been given the choice of what will be done with all that computational capacity.

What kinds of worlds would you create? What is the view from utopia like? It is my contention that we should think about this more, and more explicitly, because more than any other thought experiment, it clarifies what we hold good to be. Spend 15 minutes right now, pull out a pen and paper, and start thinking through it. Decide what you think the ultimate good is. It shocks me how few people, including philosophers, have tried this. Isn’t this the spring of ethics?

2.

Thinking like this is clarifying. It seems to me a lot of views taken seriously by philosophers look absurd from here.

Consider hedonism, the view that the best life is a life full of pleasure and free of pain. Now combine this with the very plausible view that a good universe is one with lots of people living good lives (welfarism). So what should we create? Rows and rows of people, onto eternity, blissed out on something like heroin. This isn’t a very good universe at all, welfarism seems right that welfare is a very important part of what makes a universe good, so something must be wrong with hedonism’s account of welfare.

Now consider the desire satisfaction theory. What it is for a person’s life to go well for them is for them to get what they want. Combine this with welfarism again. What should we create? Rows and rows of people who intensely desire merely to sit still, sitting perfectly still.

Now there are ways to modify both these theories or the welfarist premise, or the interaction with the welfarist premise to avoid this outcome, and there are objections to those modifications in turn which bring us back to these morbid conclusions. Regardless of how the game plays out this is at least quite a shot over the bow for these theories of the good life. I think it’s one they never recover from, although playing out the full dialectic here would take too long.

I think these theories looked plausible because they are plausible at the margin. In the main, if you make people happier, things will be better. If you give more people what they want, things will be better. But this is only true at the margin, it is not true in a universal sense. Because it is true at the margin, hedonic and desire satisfaction utilitarianism are good enough for certain kinds of government work, and in this world, pleasure and desire satisfaction are generally indicators of the good, because they are, to a degree, good things in themselves, and because they tend to track other good things like flourishing. Indeed I think the government should move closer to hedonic and desire satisfaction utilitarianism in practice, but in the final instance, the theories themselves are bankrupt.

3.

So what would I do? I think I would create complex lives. They would, overall, be very pleasurable and happy lives, but there would be struggles and the overcoming of challenges. Problem-solving, from the scientific to the philosophical. Adventures. The creation of art. The combination of possibilities. Rich friendships, romances, and family relationships, including those far beyond the nuclear family. Furthermore, there would be a tremendous diversity of lives and ways of being.

I would also give people chances to strip themselves of their own memories of their lives in utopia and enter more difficult worlds, so they could try to win virtue and wisdom, before once again waking up to the reality they really lived in. Autonomy and choice would be encouraged- doubtless, some would misuse choice, but it would be important they had it. Superstimuli that would permanently trap them and destroy the beauty of their lives- like infinite bliss machines - wouldn’t be present.

It’s tempting to say, “Well, shouldn’t you give it to the people themselves to decide what you should do democratically?”. The answer is, sure, I could, but that kind of democracy won’t get me out of the decision, because in the way I initially set up their lives, I will have, for the most part, determined how they’ll vote. Having been created this way, I would strongly suspect they’ll want to continue being this way. Because you create the lives, you can’t really delegate the choice.

When I think about the details of this world, it becomes clear to me that at the highest possible level, the aesthetic and the ethical are inseparable. The kind of evaluation I am performing over lives in a universe is simultaneously ethical and aesthetic- I can’t exactly prove this, it just feels both aesthetic and ethical. Up at these heights, these two stop being properly distinct, in some sense I can’t quite express.

I have complex feelings about this because some of the worst things that have ever been done were done by people who merged aesthetics and ethics prematurely. To speak somewhat metaphorically, they merge at the limit of the good and the beautiful, not down here, in the muck.

But again, what would you do?