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Why should anyone care about humanity in the abstract?
Because sentience is the source of beauty, growth, belief, and all good in the world. Humans may very well be the only sentient beings in the galaxy, or universe. We can't tell from a sample size of one.
It would be a shame to lose all good things, therefore humanity's survival is good. Without humanity the idea of good would be lost, potentially forever. I would ask you why not care about humanity in the abstract?
«Humanity in the abstract» guarantees nothing more than the existence of complex machines with some reward functions; this kind of «the idea of good», by itself, doesn't do anything for me. To automatically value the existence of estimators of value is mind-boggling idiocy, circular reasoning and probably a category error, in my opinion – it straight up doesn't compute. Even utilitarians tend to recognize that they're bootstrapping a formalism from baseline human intuitions, for satisfaction of baseline human intuitions.
Because a) states of the Universe have inherent aesthetic and moral value that can be appreciated in advance, and b) I assign no value, and in some cases negative value, to beauty, growth, belief and good things enjoyed by my enemies and moral abominations, to the extent that they have access to those notions at all. I'm not alone; google «Heaven and Hell».
Thus, it's not «humanity» but only «humanity that's aligned with me» whose survival matters. To make it clearer: friendly humanity surviving > empty and dead Universe > Universe populated by very satisfied but unfriendly humanity, paperclippers, orgasmium and other sorts of radically misaligned scum, in no particular order. With all this implies.
Less abstractly, this is a somewhat radical way to claim a stake in the future. I refuse to cooperate with clever defectors who will try to sell me, and others, on cooperation in the name of some utopian humanity stemming from them and inheriting their, but not my own and not anyone else's, values and individualities. This includes opposition to their ghoulish and duplicitous propaganda of utilitarian altruism, which inherently devalues individuality and agency, in favor of quantification of sensations experienced by... oh, don't worry about that, it's not your business.
I opt to make it my business.
Interesting critique of utilitarianism at some parts, but I can’t wrap my head around this:
I can understand not wanting your enemies to prosper etc, and forming a sort of game theory strategy of defecting in advance when it seems the only other option is to get rolled over eventually. That being said… from your first bit about essentially seeing humans as robots that are not inherently worth anything whatsoever, does that mean you would welcome human extinction?
From what you’ve written it seems like under your worldview an asteroid hitting Earth tomorrow would be overall good because it would kill more of your enemies than people who’s worldview aligns with yours. Am I mistaken here?
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