Pretend you’re an Effective Altruist. Go put on some goggles and imagine what it would be like to evaluate every major life decision you make based on a utility calculation that assumes all beings are roughly equal in their importance to you. I’ll wait.
Are you still allowed to paint, or sing? How can you justify that when you, and maybe a handful of others, are the only ones who will ever see pleasure from it? At the very most, you could justify them as strategies for keeping yourself sane long enough to throw yourself back into optimising the distribution of malaria nets to people in developing countries or something. They aren’t allowed to be real, meaningful activities in their own right, of course.
…
‘All morality is aesthetics.’
Insufferable, yes, but this quote has something real to say.
And a bit later on:
If altruism is mostly authoritarian selflessness plus a normal need for power plus a normal need for love and beauty, then acknowledging the deeply selfish origins of altruism is necessary and, to be honest, actually fine – and pursuing altruist projects is a fundamentally creative act. From this perspective, a totalising value-framework like EA or the modern cult of productivity is a hack that is likely both suppressing our innate, worthwhile desires and offering us security via some kind of ‘right answers’, that might be useful as training wheels, but not when we are courageous and trying to express the best and deepest parts of ourselves.
You’ll have to actually read the thing to get what she means by altruism being “authoritarian selflessness,” etc. Reminds me of this.
[Link] “Art as the starting point” (Autotranslucence)
https://autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2019/11/26/art-as-the-starting-point/ (a)
The opening:
And a bit later on:
You’ll have to actually read the thing to get what she means by altruism being “authoritarian selflessness,” etc. Reminds me of this.