[Link] Totalitarian ethical systems

A transcript (a) of Ben Hoffman in conversation with a friend.

Relevant excerpts:

Mack: Do you consider yourself an Effective Altruist (capital letters, aligned with at least some of the cause areas of the current movement, participating, etc)?
Ben: I consider myself strongly aligned with the things Effective Altruism says it’s trying to do, but don’t consider the movement and its methods a good way to achieve those ends, so I don’t feel comfortable identifying as an EA anymore.
Consider the position of a communist who was never a Leninist, during the Brezhnev regime.
...
Ben: Yeah, it’s kind of funny in the way Book II (IIRC) of Plato’s Republic is funny. “I don’t know what I want, so maybe I should just add up what everyone in the world wants and do that instead...”
“I don’t know what a single just soul looks like, so let’s figure out what an ENTIRE PERFECTLY JUST CITY looks like, and then assume a soul is just a microcosm of that.”