Not sure what is the case? I’m not claiming people don’t do bad things, merely that they don’t do them because they are bad (very often). Factory farming isn’t a counterexample to that: people don’t do it because it causes suffering. Of course it does show people are (collectively) prepared to cause very large amounts of suffering in pursuit of other goals. But there’s no obviousgeneral reason to think that the side effects of people pursuing their goals that they don’t really care about will tend to be bad things more often than good things. Whereas when people do deliberately promote things because of their moral value they (usually) promote the good not the bad. So most of what people do looks just random in terms of whether it promotes the good (for anyone other than their friends and family, and perhaps society as a whole when they participate in trade.)) Whereas people do occasionally attempt to promote the good. Since people pull either at random or in the right direction, the best guess (before you look at the specifics of our track record) is that people will do somewhat more good than harm.
To be clear I’m not saying any of this proves, the future will be good. Just that it provides moderate starting evidence in that direction.
I’m still kind of unconvinced.
If we were talking only about human populations, sure then I’d agree, most efforts seem intended to provoke good things.
But when you look at other species ? I think if you look at the things we do to factory farmed animals or wild animals or animals we just harm because of pollutions or climate change or deep see mining when it starts, we’d label all of that to be bad if it were done to humans.
I’m more interested in actual track record rather than intentions. Our intentions don’t match up super well with ‘overall good in the world increasing’.
One important reason we might do more bad than good in the future is because animals are far more numerous than humans, and most likely dominate from a moral standpoint (besides maybe artificial sentence). Most importantly, our goals are often opposed to theirs : finding more energy, using fossil fuels, using chemicals for making goods, eating meat, making silk, clearing a forest for agriculture and cities… So as we aggregate even more energy, it’s unlikely that our actions are going to be beneficial to animal’s goals given our own objectives.
Not sure what is the case? I’m not claiming people don’t do bad things, merely that they don’t do them because they are bad (very often). Factory farming isn’t a counterexample to that: people don’t do it because it causes suffering. Of course it does show people are (collectively) prepared to cause very large amounts of suffering in pursuit of other goals. But there’s no obviousgeneral reason to think that the side effects of people pursuing their goals that they don’t really care about will tend to be bad things more often than good things. Whereas when people do deliberately promote things because of their moral value they (usually) promote the good not the bad. So most of what people do looks just random in terms of whether it promotes the good (for anyone other than their friends and family, and perhaps society as a whole when they participate in trade.)) Whereas people do occasionally attempt to promote the good. Since people pull either at random or in the right direction, the best guess (before you look at the specifics of our track record) is that people will do somewhat more good than harm.
To be clear I’m not saying any of this proves, the future will be good. Just that it provides moderate starting evidence in that direction.
I’m still kind of unconvinced. If we were talking only about human populations, sure then I’d agree, most efforts seem intended to provoke good things. But when you look at other species ? I think if you look at the things we do to factory farmed animals or wild animals or animals we just harm because of pollutions or climate change or deep see mining when it starts, we’d label all of that to be bad if it were done to humans.
I’m more interested in actual track record rather than intentions. Our intentions don’t match up super well with ‘overall good in the world increasing’.
One important reason we might do more bad than good in the future is because animals are far more numerous than humans, and most likely dominate from a moral standpoint (besides maybe artificial sentence). Most importantly, our goals are often opposed to theirs : finding more energy, using fossil fuels, using chemicals for making goods, eating meat, making silk, clearing a forest for agriculture and cities… So as we aggregate even more energy, it’s unlikely that our actions are going to be beneficial to animal’s goals given our own objectives.