In a rejection of moral realism, I recognize that a person's choice of moral theory is just that... a personal choice. Thankfully, evolutionary psychology has secured us a population of people who are generally pleasant and compassionate, some of which are utilitarians. However, I always wonder what people would do if they were anti-utilitarians, or people who set out to maximize disutility, making the universe as sad as possible.

So I ask, what would you do if you were an anti-utilitarian? What are top anti-utilitarian projects? I ask this mostly for the fun of it, but I think answers could have potential impact in helping us think about utilitarian projects and how utilitarianism is defined.

Presumably you’d still have a large crowd of AUs arguing about whether or not to promote human extinction, given the chance that it could lead to either vast suffering or happiness

Those who didn’t think such questions were the be all and end all of consequentialist anti-ethics would prob still follow similar mirror logic re the world as us, to wit that if you live in a first-world country, you can probably achieve more with money than direct action, since for eg you’d still have a replacement effect if you tried to work for unethical companies. There aren’t any charities dedicated towards maximising suffering, so your best bet might be to give all the money to arms manufacturers, tobacco companies etc.

Alternatively, you might just spot the emerging EA movement and do your best to try and combat it, perhaps by funding vocal critics (other charity evaluators who use much worse metrics?). One other option might be to try to tarnish key players in the movement, eg by finding or manufacturing some dirty secrets held by some of the foremost characters. Since they’re a pretty well behaved bunch (in part precisely because of the risk to the movement that doing anything underhand would pose for just this reason), you might have to go under cover and try either to provoke them into doing something that could be held against them, or just become a prominent figure yourself, then out yourself (probably not openly), and then ‘mishandle’ the situation as much as possible, to maximise the damage you caused.

So in other words, up to some unknown (to us) point where you decided the time was right, you might be indistinguishable from a utilitarian. The ethical equivalent of grue

I can think of a number of useful activities:

* Donate money to advertising firms that specialize in promoting animal products.
* Write articles in popular newspapers and magazines about how animals don't matter and/or eating animal products is okay.
* Proselytize for religions that tend to promote callousness to the suffering of certain groups (I think Islam is the best candidate, as it seems correlated with the oppression of women).

It appears that you can't just hurt people around you, because then you lose influence. You can do a lot more harm by doing it in ways that are generally considered acceptable or even admirable.

Another strategy is the opposite of "get rich and give": make a lot of money, then buy a large plot of land and lots of animals (perhaps rats). Make sure they aren't protected by animal cruelty laws. Then cram as many of them as you can onto your land and find various ways to cause them pain. This is probably enough to counteract the work of at least one good utilitarian.

I was going to write some stuff about trying to increase existential risk, but as Arepo said, it's unclear whether that would actually be a bad thing.

Perhaps we should create a charity to promote pro-suffering memes.

I would try to develop an sadist AI who tries to create a maximum of conscious minds to inflict suffering on them as long as possible. I propose to place some psychopaths on top of all singularity organizations and make sure that those psychopaths are really interested in torture and not only in dominating the universe or destroying humanity. Brainwashed Christian or Muslim fundamentalists who think they were the hell-punishing deity they believed in before are also good candidates for a cost-effective-sadism leadership position in the singulitarian network.

Elijah wrote:Humphrey, by talking about this you are probably leading to its creation in some branches of the UWF.

Yes, there is a very small probability of that happening, but also an equivalent probability that he prevents it by talking about it. To think that merely typing the possibility into an internet forum raises the probability in one specific direction is an illusion of control.

Elijah wrote:It's not a small probability. There are googolplexes of branches in the UWF.

You're right that the Bayesian probability is not small [that many-worlds is true and that the creation of a sadist AI happens because of Humphrey's comment in some Everett branches if many-worlds is true]. But there seems to be a roughly equivalent Bayesian probability [that many-worlds is true and that the creation of a sadist AI is prevented because of Humphrey's comment in some Everett branches if many-worlds is true].

You wrote in another thread:

Recall that i'm not a strict utilitarian,. Therefore I think that if you are obligated not to do X where X is bad, but you are not (as) obligated to prevent X.

I think moral obligations are fiction but causality and hedonistic utility are real. Another way to look at it is to classify that an omission is itself an action, i.e. a deliberate choice with causal consequences, even if it looks passive.

Elijah wrote:Humphrey, by talking about this you are probably leading to its creation in some branches of the UWF.

I have to admit I did not think much about many-worlds-theories. To me, the presumtion of a multiverse its a contradiction to Occam's razor. I would like to know why talking about this will lead to its creation more likely than to its prevention.
I thought this post also as criticism of singulitarianism which alone makes my anti-utilitarian scenario possible. When promoting singulitarianism you're always risking a non-zero probability that an Sadist AI could take over the universe.

If talking aout hell-branches will create some does talking about religius hells also create some? Shouldn't we then rather invest more energy to fight religious views containing something like eternal damnation?