So, I'm working on a video about Total Utilitarianism (the capitalization is important, it's a subset of utilitarianism) in the context of Eliezer Yudkowsky, the "Torture vs. Dust Specks" problem, and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, and I realized exactly why people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk flock to Yudkowsky's form of Total Utilitarianism. The central thesis of Total Utilitarianism is that the most important ethical imperative is maximizing total utility across the whole world, regardless of how the utility is distributed among humans, who become nothing more than interchangeable value containers. This leads to a scenario which I call Eliezer's Capitalist.
Imagine that you have 269 people (nice) who each have a single utilon.1 Let's call this Scenario A.
According to the maxim of Total Utilitarianism, this scenario would be worse than Scenario B, where half of those people — 268 people — have 3 utilons each, and the other half have 0, since the total number of utilons has increased, so more happiness/quality of life exists! A < B.
Now imagine Scenario C, where half of those people — 267 people — have 7 utilons each, and the remaining three-quarters have 0. Once again, the total number of utilons has increased, so Scenario C is better than Scenario B. And by transitivity, since A < B and B < C, A < C, and so C is the best-case scenario.
And you can keep doing this, on and on and on, until you reach an arbitrary scenario Z, where a single person has 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,423 utilons, and everyone else has 0. This scenario still has one more utilon than Scenario Y, where two people have 590,295,810,358,705,651,711 utilons and everyone else has 0. And by transitivity, this means that Z is, under Total Utilitarianism, the best-case scenario, since Z > Y > X > … > C > B > A. It doesn't matter how many people live in miserable squalor, so long as a single person's happiness and quality of life outweighs that misery in the cosmic scale of Total Utilitarian logic.
No wonder billionaires flock to this. It's the easiest way to make their wealth-hoarding look ethical.
- A utilon being an arbitrary unit of utility, which in this case we can consider as something along the lines of "happiness" or "quality of life".