There is an intellectual movement called “rationality” which, if one has any connection to the tech world, is difficult to avoid in the Bay Area. Closely related is “effective altruism”, which is the rationalist philosophy applied to ethics and the question of what is to be done.

From an intellectual perspective, there is nothing very interesting here. It is a fresh coat of paint on a 400 year-old metaphysics, a 250 year-old epistemology, and a 300 year-old moral philosophy.

This movement only deserves special attention in light of its role as the ideology of many of the technology workers in the AI business, as well as the philosophy which ran through the FTX fiasco (“effective altrusim” was Sam Bankman-Fried’s personal philosophy and stated motivation for attempting to accumulate billions by any means necessary)

Rationalism is a movement comprised of many individuals, so I can only speak in general terms about their philosophy. Most adherents I have encountered ascribe to some version of utilitarianism as their moral philosophy.

Utilitarianism says we should define a real-valued function on the states of the world, and then act (as individuals typically) to change the world state in such a way as to increase the value of this function. The unanswered questions in this framework are many. How do we define such a function? How can we ensure the world state is observed accurately enough to make good judgements about the function’s value at a point in time? On what time scale are we trying to increase the value of this function? Is a temporary dip in its value justified if that leads to a greater value in the future? Etc., etc.

There are two deeper problems however which allow one to totally discard utilitarianism as a philosophy for action.

The first is that the premise of linearly ordering states of the world by compressing them into a single number is absurd. The state of the world is not a number. It cannot be represented in any natural way as a number and attempting to do so will lead to disaster as surely as giving bomb-diffusing instructions in the form of an interpretive dance.

The second is that the theory offers no guidance on how this function should be defined. As a result, it tends to be defined in a way reflective of the ruling class ideology of the society. Let’s see an example of this.

I spoke with a rationalist last weekend who said that he believed the more people living a good life that we have, the better, and on that basis endorsed the idea that we should be growing the population. This idea, that “‘1 happy person good’ implies ‘2 happy people better’”, is in my view nothing more than an ideological reflection of the ethic of capital. In capitalism, increasing consumption is socially necessary due to the social need to exponentially increase the scale of production. In every age, what tends to be deemed “good” is what perpetuates society. Under capitalism this means “increase in consumption is good”, which really just means,“increase in consumption is necessary to perpetuate capitalist society”.

This then receives a pseudo-scientific rendering in the utilitarian ethic which says “the total utility of the world is the sum of the utilities of individuals”. If one person consuming a basket $B$ of commodities is good, then $n$ people each consuming the same basket is $n$ times as good.

This person also told me the ecological catastrophe produced by the exponential growth inherent in capitalism was not a problem because we are only using a fraction of the sun’s energy, and we could simply harness that (through capitalist development presumably) to provide a abundance for an ever-increasing number of people. That someone could be led to accept an idea in such radical contradiction to the actual experience of accelerating ecological degradation over the last 300 years of capitalist development points to a basic hole in the way of thinking.