Alec D. Walen (Rutgers School of Law; Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey - Department of Philosophy) has posted The Atrocious Conclusion: An Argument Against Totalism on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
We should burn all the fossil fuels that can be easily reached as quickly as we can, and then, once we’ve made good progress on that, we should start an all-out nuclear war. This is the Atrocious Conclusion that a commitment to totalism-based longtermism—as exemplified by Will MacAskill’s recent book, What We Owe the Future—implies if certain plausible empirical claims are correct. To avoid this Atrocious Conclusion, we need to do more than argue about empirically debatable premises; we need to reject totalism. That is, we need to reject the argument that the world is better if it contains more total utility, and in particular better in a way that has a significant impact on what we ought to do.
It has long been known that utilitarianism could lead to morally unpalatable conclusions, even worse than punishing the innocent, in extreme cases. But typical thought experiments that develop that criticism are based in fantasy stories disconnected from anything like the life we lead. Utilitarians can rightly question whether such criticism is realistic enough to be properly assessed. One reason to consider the Atrocious Conclusion is that it is not a fantasy. It is far from clear that its empirical foundations are correct, but they are at least in the realm of the plausible. It thus provides a realistic and compelling basis for rejecting totalism, even as part of a pluralistic moral world view.
Highly recommended.
