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Notes -
As long as utilitarianism is taken to care about future people or even present people's future utility, almost any other ethical system can be emulated in its framework by having the right priors. The operational pattern is something like "I believe [per my prior] that following ethical system X will result in greater technological progress and societal flourishing; therefore by behaving as an X-ian today and convincing other people to also be X-ians, I am actually maximising utility in the long run". In this particular context, a version of this argument that I imagine could be instantiated (and I find fairly persuasive even though I am not, by the standards of almost anyone apart from people deep in SJ, right-wing) is that something among the lines of: "Average (and even median) utility was much lower in {1800, 1400, the stone age...}. Yet, if we had decided to stop and redistribute human wealth equally at those times to maximise local {average, median} utility, the accumulation of capital and centralisation of power that enabled in the industrial revolution/colonialism/transition to agrarian societies would have been prevented and those developments wouldn't have happened, leaving us in an egalitarian but comparatively miserable stasis".
To me personally, one of the more convincing arguments supporting "socialism now, but not when we lived in caves" is something something great stagnation; more than ever before, it feels like we have hit diminishing returns from concentrating capital to enable scientific progress/letting different systems violently duke it out so that the better, more capable one may build a garden on top of the pyramid of skulls/sacrificing to Moloch. Even if further progress is in fact possible, the possible futures don't necessarily look desirable in expectation, with a lot of probability mass being on something like varying AGI apocalypses and easier nukes. Better to switch from explore to egalitarian exploit now and cash out than keep taking the bet?
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