Is genocide worse than anthropocide?

Here's an intuitive idea: It's bad to murder one person. It's even worse to murder two people. It's worse still to murder three people. And so on, until you arrive at the worst form of murder: genocide, which is the systematic killing of a group of people, usually based on religion and/or race.

If one genocide is bad, then two genocides is worse, and so on. But what if you committed genocide against all groups of people? That would be anthropocide, the killing of all humanity.

Clearly then, anthropocide is basically the single most evil thing that someone can do, short of throwing everyone in hell and torturing them forever.

(As an aside, I feel like torturing a single person for eternity is worse than anthropocide, because the former is an actual infinite of intrinsic badness while the latter is not.)

Anthropocide is clearly far worse than genocide. And yet, if someone did commit anthropocide and instantly and painlessly killed everyone by pressing The Button, no one would know. No one would know and no one would ever find out or care, assuming there is no afterlife.

In the case of genocide, however, many people go through the hellishness of that experience, and the survivors and families are traumatized. To a lesser extent, everyone who hears about what happened is haunted by the genocide too. 

Genocide purely adds to the problems of humanity, but anthropocide, technically, solves all of humanity's problems forever. So how is anthropocide worse than genocide?

Maybe this is just the old Epicurus argument against the badness of death in disguise. When death isn't here, there is no death to be feared. When death is here, there is no me to fear it. So whence the fear of death? Or put another way: When death isn't here, there is no death to harm us. When death is here, there is no us to be harmed. So whence the harm of death?

Alex Pruss suggests there are distributive goods and bads. [https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-epicurean-argument-on-death.html] 

These are goods and evils that cannot be located at a particular time, but nonetheless appear over a stretch of time or over one's life as a whole. I suggest that harms involve the loss of flourishing, while being impoverished is to have never flourished in the first place. The unborn are impoverished (assuming they would have lived a good life), but the unborn are not harmed by not being born. But it might sound strange to say impoverishment is not a harm. But it seems to me worse to lose something than to never have it in the first place (notwithstanding the common wisdom that "it's better to have loved and lost"). I suppose it depends on context: How painful is it to lose the thing in question versus how good was it to have it for a time?

In the case of one's life, it's not painful at all to lose your life because you have no conscious awareness of being dead. The badness of loss is realized when the loss is consciously experienced. 

If impoverishment is not a bad thing, then it's mysterious why God would create people. Presumably, God creates to maximize flourishing. But that implies that had God created nothing, the world would be a worse world compared to the one where God does create. You might say that God has options to create from a variety of perfect worlds. Perhaps one perfect world is one in which God creates nothing, and another is one in which God does create people. Maybe God, in his perfection, must create all perfect worlds, and so we live in a multiverse (Klaas Kraay's arguments to this effect come to mind).

Setting God aside, if impoverishment (i.e. a lack of flourishing) is not bad, then why would couples ever have kids? Presumably, couples have kids to maximize flourishing. This allows us to say that even though death or not-being-born are not experienced, they are still bad in the sense that their badness generates reasons for reasonable creatures to act according to those reasons.

I want to say badness must cash out eventually in terms of conscious experience, but maybe badness instead is anything that generates reasons in a fully rational person to avoid, disable, prevent, cure, or otherwise act against the badness in question. Bad conscious experiences certainly generate such reasons, but unconscious deprivation or impoverishment generates those reasons too. (Though this might leave it mysterious as to how unconscious bads generate those reasons. Even worse, it might just be circular: "I have a reason to avoid death." "Why?" "Because death is bad." "Why is death bad?" "Because it generates reasons to avoid it." It's perhaps then better to say something like: the difference between conscious flourishing and conscious not-flourishing is self-evident, and it's self-evidently the case that conscious flourishing is better. Deprivational evils are comparative evils, and comparative evils are as self-evidently bad as intrinsic evils.)

So if deprivation theory explains why death is bad, then deprivation theory explains why anthropocide is worse than genocide. Anthropocide, while not generating the reasons pertaining to intrinsic evils that genocide generates, still generates a vast amount more weight in the reasons from deprivation, or failing to maximize flourishing. So a fully rational person, cognizant of all the facts, would choose genocide over pressing The Button if forced to choose.

But is that true? Imagine you polled the world on whether we should collectively commit genocide against a group of people, say, Lithuanians. I'd imagine that 99.99% of people would vote no against genociding Lithuanians. But if you asked the world whether we should press The Button, I'd imagine that fewer people would vote no. I imagine that roughly 75 - 95% of people would vote no. Counter intuitively, we seem to acknowledge that there is something more pointless and gratuitous about genociding Lithuanians compared to killing everyone. Even nihilists who would press The Button uncoerced would not vote to genocide Lithuanians, I would think. 

There are existential reasons in favor of anthropocide that do not apply to genocide (at least, according to some forms of nihilistic thinking). In fact, it's exactly the existence of heinous evils like genocide that motivate the nihilistic reasoning behind wanting to press The Button. But even if there are unique existential reasons in favor of anthropocide that don't apply to genocide or murder, those reasons are surely overwhelmed by reasons pertaining to deprivation / comparative evils. Maybe deprivational reasons, being more abstract, are not as emotionally compelling as the visceral reasons against genocide, despite weighing far more.

Four Problems with Kant's Ethics

In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says the following:

"Understanding, wit, judgment, and whatever else the talents of the mind may be called, or confidence, resolve, and persistency of intent, as qualities of temperament, are no doubt in many respects good and desirable; but they can also be extremely evil and harmful if the will that is to make use of these gifts of nature . . . is not good." (393)

My first problem with Kant's ethics is that he provides no analysis of good and evil.

My second problem is that here he calls these virtues good and desirable. But good in what way? Good on what basis? An obvious answer is that virtues are good because of their good consequences.

Consider what Kant says here:

"To be beneficent where one can is one's duty, and besides there are many souls so attuned to compassion that, even without another motivating ground of vanity, or self-interest, they find an inner gratification in spreading joy around them, and can relish the contentment of others, in so far as it is their work. But I assert that in such a case an action of this kind – however much it conforms with duty, however amiable it may be – still has no true moral worth, but stands on the same footing as other inclinations, e.g. the inclination to honor, which if it fortunately lights upon what is in fact in the general interest and in conformity with duty, and hence honorable, deserves praise and encouragement, but not high esteem; for the maxim lacks moral content, namely to do such actions not from inclination, but from duty."

For some context, Kant says we perform actions out of three possible motivations: from duty (respect for law), from immediate inclination (feeling or desire), or from a means to an end.

Kant gives the example of a shopkeeper, which we can adapt to show these three motivations:

1) The shopkeeper who does the right thing, treating his customers fairly, purely for the sake of business. This is doing the right thing but for a reason that's not morally praiseworthy.

2) The shopkeeper who does the right thing because he wills the good of the customer and he delights in their flourishing. That sounds like having a good will, and Kant would say from the outside it's indiscernible from having a good will, but technically this motivation is without any moral value on Kant's view. The reason why is because in this case the shopkeeper is doing what comes naturally to them; they are acting on inclination or desire. They happen to desire something good. But had this person desired differently, they would have acted differently, and so there is no guarantee they would have done the right thing. There is nothing praiseworthy in doing what it was you wanted to do in the first place. (Obviously, this is not true. Clearly there is something praiseworthy about having a good desire, because what kind of a person has good desires? A good person.)

3) The shopkeeper who does the right thing not out of a means to an end or out of inclination, but out of respect for law. He does the right thing for the right reason, which is what it means to have a good will. Doing the right thing because it profits you, or because it satisfies a desire or staves off a discomfort is doing the right thing for a selfish reason (which can be evil or morally neutral). It's only when you do the right thing out of duty that you do something morally praiseworthy.

In all three cases, the shopkeeper acts in conformity with duty, but only in the third case does he act from duty, and it's only this action that has any moral value whatsoever.

So if all that is true, then again, on what basis is it true that "an action of this kind . . . deserves praise and encouragement, but not high esteem . . ." It sounds like Kant is saying these good actions deserve moral praise, and yet deserve no moral praise. Which is it? If the only source of moral value is a good will, and virtues, happiness, and good inclinations all come apart from a good will, then in what way are these things morally good? Would Kant say something can be good and yet not morally good? But in what way is a good action good if not morally good?

Again, it seems obvious to me that actions from good inclinations (but not respect for law) are good because of their good consequences.

So Kant,

1) Fails to analyze good and evil;

2) Calls virtues, happiness, and actions from good inclinations good and deserving of praise, and yet has no basis to call these good.

3) But the problems do not stop there. My third problem is that Kant says an action from an inclination has no moral value even if that inclination is good. But I think this is clearly false, again because a good person is the kind of person to have good inclinations.

4) My fourth problem is the problem of inclination itself and how it relates to respect for the law. Respect for the law is supposed to be a special inclination, but what makes it an exception to the rule? Doing something to satisfy a desire apparently has no moral value, unless that desire happens to be to do the right thing, to do your duty. But it seems to me impossible to avoid the idea that all human motivation is ultimately grounded in the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain. Even the person who acts with the special inclination of respect for the law, and does the right thing for the right reason, must have the desire to maximize their happiness, and acting from duty does this either in the delight of one's identity as a good person (the happiness of self-admiration), or in the avoidance of the discomfort of conscience.

Wouldn't Kant have to say, to maintain his position, that the person who acts from duty does so without any feeling whatsoever of the avoidance of the discomfort of thinking of oneself as a moral failure? I think that it's psychologically impossible for humans to act in any other way except to satisfy inclinations. (When we act against an inclination, really we are just servicing an opposing and yet stronger inclination.) It seems obvious to me that even the person acting from duty is acting to satisfy an inclination.

But if that's right, then there's nothing morally wrong with acting to satisfy an inclination as long as it's a praiseworthy inclination, and if my objection 3 goes through then we must admit of morally praiseworthy inclinations anyway. The other option would be to say that all actions are inherently selfish (trying to pursue happiness or avoid discomfort) and thus have no moral value. But that's clearly a mistake, because what kind of inclination a person has clearly says something about their character. The better the inclination, the better the character. If it would bother you to not do the right thing, then good! That shows that you are the right kind of person. In fact, it is exactly this inclination of feeling bothered by wrongness that we point to as one of the prime indicators of a good character.

More problems are to come, and if given the chance I will show just how completely and deeply my moral system departs from Kant's.

Oliver Crisp on Closer to Truth - A sin against an infinite being is an infinite sin?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_El29ogZdV8

Why think our actions have this kind of connection where the magnitude of the evil depends on the kind of creature you're sinning against? Is killing a baby not as bad as killing its parent because the baby is a lesser creature and the parent is a greater creature? 

And yet if anything our intuitions say preying on the powerless is the greater evil. So far from sinning against a greater being resulting in a greater sin, we might think sinning against a lesser being involves the added evil of abusing one's power or of taking advantage of someone's weakness.

Also, people, when they sin, wrong someone here on Earth. Their intentions of harm are directed at other humans or animals (or at themselves). So how is God meant to be wronged by these evils that aren't directed at him? God certainly can take offense to them, but why would murdering someone count as wronging God such that now the murder is infinitely bad? And what are the boundaries? Is shoplifting infinitely evil? Telling a lie so you don’t hurt someone’s feelings?

If God is infinitely offended by our sin, then doesn't that make God infinitely sensitive? Where's God's strength? If God is impassable, then God can’t be offended at all. If it’s a matter of accruing some kind of moral debt, then for the metaphor to make any sense, God is in full control to wipe away that debt. (Why  would human sins brought about by the very limitations God stuck them with accrue a debt in the first place, I have no idea.) If it’s a matter of justice, then it’s a kind of justice I cannot make sense of. (If God wants justice, all he has to do is attach survival structures to virtue and truth. You might say this violates free will, but it doesn’t violate free will any more than free will is already violated, and even if it does at some point we have to ask whether free will is worth the cost.)

Why would God be so offended by something so little? If someone sins out of ignorance, then God understands the origins of that sin. So God knows how not personal that sin is. Why would God take such offense from something that's not personal?

Imagine if someone were to bump into me aggressively on the street and knock me to the ground, and say "Move idiot!" as he walks past. I could choose to be horribly offended by this, or I could guess that there's something wrong with this person and move on and shrug it off. It would be a failure of mine to care too much about why this person did what they did, or to take it personally when there is no reason to.

God, as the greatest possible being, should be very good at shrugging things off. But like Kuhn suggests, a God who takes everything way too personally is petulant. It looks quite silly for such a begrudging God to create creatures who he knows will do nothing but commit crimes of infinite magnitude.

Does it sound loving for a God to put us at such massive risk?

Ben's Law

If you let someone speak on his or her moral system long enough, always, without exception, it will eventually sound like consequentialism (even if they explicitly reject consequentialism).