Affective Altruism

Affective Altruism

 

Redirecting another post over here because I apparently have no willpower and could not stop myself from piling on to it until the end product became unacceptably oversized for YouTube’s community tab. It’s fine though, this one probably merits a spot on here anyway.

 

Will MacAskill back on the Making Sense podcast:

https://samharris.org/podcasts/228-doing-good/

Too much of this turned out to be a rerun of their 2016 edition, so I’ll spare you a retelling of the more substantive objections I’ve already aired in the wake of that first conversation. Right now I want to delve into an altogether different observation that keeps bugging me about these two. I’m finally able to recall how the same something managed to irritate me during the first go-round as well. It’s one of those vague somethings that never fully crystallized for me, until a few days ago.

 

A bit of context; my goal was to finish the new podcast with a one-fell-swoop listen. I started listening to it on the day Sam dropped it, and it took until this morning (dated 2020-12-20) to complete it. Six days. Cause of delay? Having to recurrently rewind the damn thing between five and ten minutes a pop. Rewound them so many times, I lost count of the total number of rewinds, but it’s in the dozens. Day after day, attempt after attempt, nothing but rewinds. It proved impossible to pay them attention beyond a few consecutive minutes per play.

 

Rewinds are actually the norm for me when it comes to EA-specific or EA-adjacent podcasts, as with philosophically charged podcasts and audio content in general. I’ve reached a point where my brain agilely slips into connotation mode and forces me to self-converse as I spot myriads of missed opportunities by the host and the guest; opportunities to branch off into the offshoots and implications which they ought to be interested in. Then I’m off to the races; dwelling over the more challenging, compelling, higher-order themes that the duo fails to pick up on like clockwork. But as mentioned, this interruptive self-talk is not hugely unusual for me, at least when it’s not done nonstop or just shy of nonstop. With this duo in particular, I set a new record for rewinds owing to mid-podcast thought tangents. Paying sustained attention felt like an eternity, and it made them seem stiflingly focused. Anyone else who bothered with the podcast is free to chime in and tell me whether I’m wrong or whether you also struggled with this one attentionally.

 

What is it about these two that made me break the pause-rewind record? One way of putting it: They’re just that insufferable. They have this, for lack of a better term, insulated relatablility thing going. The listener must put up with claims to the tune of improving the lives of desperately badly off people brings me joy. I won’t quote them directly, as I can’t bring myself to reopen the podcast. They aren’t being misconstrued or misrepresented, and you can confirm as much by listening to them yourself. It was strongly suggested that, if you can afford to take the pledge or help out in less systematic ways, your charitable acts will bring you joy too. Anti-social reprobates notwithstanding, altruistic acts bring the warm fuzzies. Your level of effectiveness won’t necessarily track the level of fuzziness you are slated to feel for having contributed. Rather, the other-regarding feature of what you’ve done with your time or resources is what will.

 

These were sticking points. They spend so much time on it. None of it is relatable, and I’ve undergone enough self-interrogation to finally be at a stage where I’ve overtly accepted that their joy talk is alienating for damn good reasons. The expressed relatablility is therefore an unabashed trip-wire for me, and merely knowing that my side of the story won’t be told or noticed as absent in any conspicuously relevant way makes it all the more intolerable. Against this, giving them my undivided attention for a prolonged period is impossible, and it should be impossible for you too. Hearing them describe their sensibilities and hang on those descriptions for as long as they did, while having it go unchallenged and with my knowing that no visible listener will challenge it later, makes for a cognitive death sentence.

 

So that’s them; hammering on the warm glow that all decent people are sure to bask in once they’ve helped alleviate harm for non-abstracted victims ala identifiability effects:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifiable_victim_effect

 

Sam acknowledges that GiveWell knows better than his intuitions do, but he still wants to conserve the characterological makeup of a normal-enough agent who is more imperfect-human than robotic-robot. He holds that the human is dispositionally fittingly moved by the concrete and perceivable victim, unlike with all of the unidentifiable faraway genocides (or whatnot) described abstractly or impersonally like any other cold data. He confronts the possibility of such hard-won pro-social traits being papered-over by procedural EA types on the altar of moral efficiency.

 

This is not what I’m objecting to either; I’d be a hypocrite to, since I also happen to be moved by the singled-out identifiable victim, one after another, and wouldn’t have it eliminated from my moral psychology.

 

Those cases move me in ways the raw numbers and random factoids never have and probably never will. If you were also moved by this video or by any of the other ones they’ve uploaded, I encourage you to support the channel and the great work they do; sub, upvote, play the ads. Most of all, buy their merch or donate to them so they never have to consider rethinking their priorities and doing something other than saving these seals, or saving them less often due to non-moral financial obligations. I want these guys devoted to this for the rest of their lives if need be, and I intend on buying their merch periodically for as long as all these seals are in need of their help. But speaking dispositionally, I will not feel “joy” over being involved in the victim’s boost, even when the victim is as identifiable as the man in the mirror. I’ve put this to the test in the first-person sense by donating to sympathetic victims who are known to me, and am yet to noddingly relate with what Sam and Will portray as a damn near inevitable result of a normal person who chooses to donate. As far as reactive feelings and attitudes go, there is only anger and relief. In the wake of each recipient being made better off, there is no joy, only anger and a measure of relief.

 

Relief should be self-explanatory. Anger may prove controversial, and my job here is to explain why it shouldn’t be. I wish someone would have raised the point, if not within the podcast itself, then at least in the comment threads discussing it. Going by the comments I’ve glossed, no one seems bothered by what bothers me. Nobody raised an iota of fuss over their alarmingly hokey “joy” talk, but all of it rang to my ears as morally and psychologically babyish. Recalling as best as I can the days in which I chose to donate, anger is absolutely something I felt in the lead-up to the beneficent act, as well as in the aftermath. I’ve thought about my anger a lot over the last couple of years and my takeaway is; universalize it. Not ala Kantian Universal Moral strictures, but rather psychological normative law ideals. I am essentially saying; Sam and Will should reassess joy-by-altruism and become more like me in this respect. You should too, in case you aren’t; in case this killjoy reveal is making me come across as a raging weirdo in your eyes.

 

So I’m taking it a step beyond the subjective defensive. The more innocent the imperiled recipient of your charity is, the angrier you should be at witnessing their situation up-close-and-personal. If you help them and experience only positive feelings for it, you’re missing something internally.

 

Sam discusses how he got up close and personal with one of his EA-unguided charity recipients. He tells the story of the restaurant couple who fell on hard times due to the pandemic. Their being leveled-down had nothing to do with the public health side of the equation, but rather the legally-backed lockdowns and/or shelter-in-place recommendations curbing demand. Before they knew it, the downturn effects became financially ruinous. Salient to Sam was the bolstered hardship of the couple’s autistic child whom he viewed as the needy-star of the story. The added difficulties that this child had now been facing for months was reason enough for Sam to forego strict GiveWell guidelines and to instead assist this particular family. Again, this foregoing of optimal efficiency is not what I want to nitpick. It’s fine to sometimes help the identified person over the estranged cluster entity. I’ve done it, up close and personal. But whenever it happened, there was no joy accompanying it, nor should there have been. Just an ornery mixture of relief and anger.

 

Note that I didn’t read the story about the autistic kid. All I have to go on is Sam’s narration of the family’s struggles, and even this secondhand exposure to them is enough to evoke anger in me. Granted, since I only know about this victim indirectly through Sam, the anger is plenty more passive compared to the other up-close-and-personal cases I’ve engulfed myself in. But imagine having a direct, front row seat to this child being senselessly imperiled in the first place. This child, with business-owning parents who, despite having given birth to an autist, can’t find a way to save for a rainy day. For years, as business owners, in a thriving market. Or worse yet, maybe it's not a matter of “tried and failed” to save money; maybe it’s the more familiar “can’t be bothered to try hard enough to save” effect. It isn’t merely anger-inducing; it is rightly anger-inducing. Whether the child is helped or not, and whether you or someone else is the helper, I maintain that an unambiguously negative reaction is the affectively appropriate reaction to have. Though the part that relief plays in the giver post-beneficence might overturn the absolutism of the previous sentence, so if compassionate relief (which is appropriate) is interpreted as being unambiguously positive – and similarly positive to joy – then they’re not as off-kilter as I’ve claimed. But I resist such interpretations of relief (in the giver), and I can’t imagine what a persuasive argument for the similarity of relief and joy as positive affects might look like.

 

Givers are right to feel proud of themselves for helping an identifiable victim, but even the fiercest pride wouldn’t cancel out the rightful anger that the dispositionally-fitting agent would have arise in him whenever someone is placed in a vulnerable enough state to pathetically need that agent’s help in the first place. A complete stranger’s help.

 

No one should glorify any aspect of this; the sad fact that strangers need strangers, or indeed that anyone needs the aid of anyone else, and often desperately so. Think of all the generous givers and anguished receivers who’ve never crossed paths or so much as spoken to each other, and who never will. Of all those, there has got to be a substantial portion of receivers who would have been incensed by their givers’ beliefs or attitudes or traits after spending a few minutes together, and weren’t due to the purely incidental fact that they did not actually meet. We can describe this in detail by recourse to well-known personality differences, attitudinal differences or religious differences. I could provide hundreds of examples flowingly, and part of me is tempted to, but for brevity I’ll just do one; a starving Palestinian whose anonymous donor is a wealthy orthodox Jew who unreservedly backs Israel’s right to exist. To further raise the affective stakes, suppose the same Jew also backs everything that has unfolded in the region by the Israeli officials’ hands, interpreting the greater conflict through a Manichaean lens. Though understanding that collateral damage is regretful, he one-sidedly excuses the Zionist Good Guys to a degree where their edicts and geopolitical maneuverings are never morally impermissible.

 

Now imagine being one such famished Palestinian; having strong views of your own, on self-determination or some such, all of which are anathema as far as your life-or-death difference-making benefactor is concerned. Imagine being thankful for his charity without even knowing who you’re thanking. It makes for a pathetic state of affairs. It might perhaps be even more humiliatingly pathetic if such a receiver did know that the person who’s about to save his life held the polar opposite high-stakes views he holds, and still had no choice but to accept the help; anyone’s help. Declining it would be even more injurious and all-things-considered harmful to the receiver. So the charity is accepted, grudgingly. I believe that these conflictual oversights are common, and far more common than our leading intellectuals are apt to admit or even consider. The closest our cultures come to contemplating them is in the assessment of transactional relationships. There some honesty manages to trickle through. But I see no reason for stopping there. Hell, I see no reason to stop with the philanthropic giver-receiver dynamics, and am happy to extend this worry to caring relationships of all stripes. I touch on this in my pushback to the ‘Special Obligations’ literature (that tries to ground agent-relative > agent-neutral reasons for beneficence). I guarantee you that even with the few people who have left an overall positive impression on you, if you had a chance to witness their worst moment, by which I mean their morally significant worst moment, you would come out of it no longer having an overall positive view of them. The oversights tend to endure because it’s not that hard for us to conceal the worst things (i.e. acts) from our pasts. Even self-deprecators know to draw the joke's-on-me line around socially accepted or semi-accepted points of self-abasement. So a sliver of the good you see in your nearest and dearest is the raw good; the non-performatively delivered good, whereas a greater share of it is just the curated good, with much of the bad calculatedly tucked away ala the lipstick-on-a-pig effect.

 

People who need people aren’t the luckiest people, in part because no clear-thinking evaluator will form a high opinion of the average person. Now there is a debate to be had about how exactly the average person is to be perceived by clear-thinking social analysts, but the framing for this debate doesn’t pit “high vs. low” opinions dichotomy-style. It takes the high ones as mistaken from the get go, leaving “exclusively low” versus “low-to-mediocre” opinions on the table, scalar style.

 

The pro-need proposition might hold in some counterfactual world where the same clear-thinking evaluators and observers don’t have low opinions of the average person, because the average person is just that much more impressive in that world. But even in those fanciful cases, the “luckiest people” adages would be setting certain interpersonal-needers up for disaster once you counter in the aberrant people who would still be worthy of our low opinions but who are nonetheless uniquely situated to materially help (or socially enhance) the life of someone who had done badly without them up until that point. And that’s the hypothetical fancy case, whereas in the actual world, with people as they actually are, we have no reason to believe that our conflictual oversights are rare. It stands to reason that if I had seen my most favorite people (least unfavorite people?) at their worst, I wouldn’t have been okay with being put in a position where I relied on them in any way. The same probably holds for them in their judgmental relation to me; their opinion is higher than it would’ve been had they seen me at my worst. Perhaps the flipside goes some way in troubling my argument, as we can always replace “unseen worst” with “unseen best”. But for such flipsides to pose even a modest challenge to my diagnosis, you would have to believe that the total number of people who are more impressive in private than they are in public is remotely close to the total number of people who curate for public eyes. Spoiler: I don’t lose any sleep over that possibility, having read hundreds of social experiments and having learned enough from their conclusions to declare confidently that curating and performativity are like second nature to a vast majority of us. There is a well-established social asymmetry: we are expertly good at concealing our weaknesses and playing up our strengths in day-to-day social life.

 

So if you’ve lived your whole life without ever relying – socially, materially, emotionally – on a beloved person who you would have despised if only you could have known them far better than you did, you are the exception. Moreover, on a robust dignity account of wellbeing, you would be exceptionally lucky for it.

 

Maybe I’m more open to the values of self-sufficiency than I previously let on. Maybe the problem with those views has always been that their advocates are overeager to politicize them; tacitly desiring to throw overboard all the needy people who will never be able to muster self-sufficiency for one reason or another. I don’t want that. I’m just making the pre-legal observation that, all else being equal, it seems obvious that the world would have been drastically better if no one had ever been in dire need of anyone else’s material and immaterial help; if every living soul could be upright and strong, there will be sorrow no more.

 

But the idealized self-sufficiency I’m clamoring for would effectively block off the joy Sam and Will feel when they allocate some percent of their income to the needy. I don’t mean to attribute to them anything sinister with this. I’m sure that at the end of the day they would gladly trade-in their philanthropic joy so that everyone could be self-sufficient. Then again, maybe not. They can't go all the way, because they believe in the perpetuation of the species, and this entails procreation, which means childrearing, which means tolerating parent-child co-dependence and vulnerability for god knows how many more generations (until techno-utopian measures make it unnecessary).

 

All of this suffices in explaining why nothing close to joy should arise in them or in any other philanthropist. The neediness and helplessness of countless receivers of charity points to an unacceptably undignified state of affairs that we’re living through. Ditto with receivers of social attention. It is routine in pessimist circles to point out that the daily events on this planet don’t just make for a suboptimal state of affairs, but for something unfathomably worse. It is worse due to the extremity and enormity of misery, yes, but also due to the extremity and enormity of the indignity foisted upon us by the need-mongers who see beauty in relationality per se. Ours is a vulgar relationality. The oft-acknowledged result is neediness and helplessness. The other major result, unexplored even by most pessimists, is a reliance on others which is – if you assess the average person even halfway reasonably – dignity-canceling. Or in the best case dignity-reducing.

 

I would not want to be at the mercy of a conventional parent, let alone a stranger who feels “joy” for having aided my unlucky impoverished ass. I would just as soon die, if the death could be swift, then be placed in any such circumstance on repeat – and I generally take premature death to be a prudential bad, to be overridden only once a certain level of intolerable suffering (and now indignity) comes one’s way.

 

So the pro-dignity/anti-indignity side of the equation is to be compartmentalized from the material-needs side. Whenever we’re up close and personal to the victim, whenever our faces are shoved into the indignity faced by the needy who fall much short of self-reliance, goddamn joy is the last thing we should feel. Even as non-ideal psychological beasts, this isn’t asking too much.

 

Pride for helping? That’s different. I was proud of myself in the wake of the first few donations I made. That’s fair play. But even those prideful feelings had diminishing returns with each additional instance of giving. Pride can be embraced full-throttle because it’s compatible with anger. But joy and anger? Oil and water.

 

What’s that? Anger is a bad fee-fee that enlightened people have learned to weed out of their system? Ha!

 

Take the following analogy to sadness:

It is a truism that history’s greatest poets help us realize, and perhaps even internalize, that profound sadness can be wonderful in its own unique way – and arguably more so than any source of wonderfulness that is detached from sadness. Those lessons aren’t about “justifying” sadness. You aren’t merely justified in your decision to explore categories of sad things, from gut-wrenching music to art to film, and to appreciate them whilst absorbing the negative stimuli on the crude hedonic level. Notions of justifiability are completely misplaced here, and even demands for them stand to cheapen the experience. The largely impersonal pursuit of the sad should resonate with us as a quasi-aesthetic force that’s evaluatively positive. I suspect that there’s a rich literature on this, beyond the poetic stuff I’ve skimmed, and that it analyses the basic gist in far more detail than I can hope to offer up here. But even though I’m unfamiliar with it, or with whether it even exists, it would still take a true moral oaf to not accept the plausibility of Positive Sadness as the truth (i.e. on the basis that sad feelings are by definition always hurtful and pain = bad).

 

So it goes with anger, fury, contempt, and even hatred. There is a hard-to-pin-down value to these reactive affective states. Think of all the people who were natively disposed to have them arise, but who checked themselves into, say, anger management classes after tragically taking to heart the garbage advice of some “indoor vs. outdoor voice” delineator from the HR department. Or the ones jettisoning anger in service of pseudo-enlightenment ala personal peace. Even in the minority of cases where the goal is achieved, inner peacefulness sees them go on to live an incomplete life, or an insufficiently introspective one. Not all spiritualists are deluded on arrival, but the angerless spiritualists are deluding themselves about themselves. Listen to them talk. Achieving a post-anger state through spiritual awakening is a twist on the born-again Christian redemptive stories permeating the culture. They’re aping that.

 

So who have you never heard raise their voice in public once over the years? Bingo; Sam and Will. This is why this was the podcast from hell for me. Can you even imagine them shouting angrily when they’re not being recorded for public consumption? I frankly can’t. And I’ve given this enough consideration to finally say it: If I can’t fathom you letting your anger out in front of another person, I instinctively lose trust in you and in your intellectual character.

 

None of this is explored. Instead, Sam and Will can’t stop waffling on about the visceral joy in seeing a person helped when their decisions to help are what made all the difference. Barf.

 

So what bugs me is not their willingness to leave some room for the non-robotic components of impartial morality. It’s their internal, act-unrelated sensibilities that I just had to devote a whole post to. I hope someone out there can relate, and that what I’ve expressed here is one day so commonplace that I can comfortably delete this post without worrying that, to quote effective altruists; a badly neglected cause area will continue to be overlooked.

 

Now for a couple of substantive points of disagreement.

 

  QALY implies MALY 

 

All these years later and QALY (quality-adjusted-life-years) is the only “adjusted” metric the outspoken EAs have entertained. Ages ago in a community post I can’t find right now so I won’t be able to link to it, I raised the necessity of MALY (morally-adjusted-life-years) and explained how it’s a problem for philanthropists who are exclusively or near-exclusively fixated on saving lives. It’s fine to save lives. I’ll say it’s fine even when it translates into an opportunity cost curtailing the realization of a perfectly defensible intrinsic good that’s unrelated to prolonged life as such. But the broad lack of concern for the moral impact by the people whose lives have been saved seems a bizarre disconnect that’s captured the EA landscape. It is a disconnect according to many moral theories, but especially on forward-looking consequentialist accounts. Last I checked consequentialists are still overrepresented in EA, so what gives?

 

If the EAs pushing thoroughgoing QALY metrics won’t allow themselves to be fazed and browbeaten by the PC police – i.e. “Boo ageism, boo QALY!” – why not apply principles of differential-weightings across individuals to include other stigmatized moral thinking? Why not argue, forcefully, in favor of discriminating between prospected life savings based on how likely or unlikely the saved person is to cause harm after being saved? I would even extend this to the saved person’s likelihood or unlikelihood of omitting the prevention of extreme harms; the more likely they are to be morally passive compared to someone else who is in the running for my resource reallocation, the less reason I have to save them over the more morally active recipient. Admittedly there are more empirical handicaps when it comes to discovering the omission likelihoods, as EAs would need to gather testimonials on the moral beliefs and habits of their receivers pre-donations. Grounding these criteria as a practical set of tasks is no cakewalk.

 

But the non-omission criteria are surely nowhere near as difficult to work toward. Lots of EAs are strict vegans and non-speciesists. You see where I’m going with this. Who is going to argue that it makes sense for even this subset of EAs to refuse to discriminate between two (otherwise identical) lives based on standards of MALY? Make it steeper; have three otherwise identical lives hanging in the balance, where lives 1 and 2 can be saved with the same amount of money as life 3 can, but where 3 is a vegan while 1 and 2 are carnists whose future diets will consist purely of meat because of the regional limitations to plant-based alternatives. Or because it’s clear to everyone that 1 and 2 can’t be persuaded to reduce their meat intake, whichever. The factory farming practices in their locales are as grievous as the First World’s ones were until the recent reforms. If QALY is sound enough to defeat whinges of ageism, then MALY should, if nothing else, be open for hard-hitting debate despite egalitarian whinging. Ignoring QALY is undisputedly outcome-worsening, and so is ignoring MALY. Why, then, does everyone ignore MALY?

 

The EA movement is over a decade old now, and I’ve read my share of intra-EA quarrels on all manners of fascinating and innovative moral problems. How the hell is it possible for there to have been zero pressure to go the MALY route?! PR? QALY gets you loads of bad PR! Anyone who hasn’t caught on to that, nearly one year into this pandemic, has been asleep at the wheel.

 

So I must be missing something. Perhaps EAs fear the backlash to MALY would be worse. So there’s a bunch of latent MALY support that will never get a chance to shine because letting it out of the bag is deemed immodestly risky. That’s the best case, and even there, the backlash-fearing attitudes would be putting way too much stock in the relevance of non-EAs’ views on EA. Going by memory, none of the outsiders who criticized the movement during the early years have changed their views on it following the counter-counterpoints by, say, Will in his stellar paper Aid Skepticism And Effective Altruism. It seems that, once hostile to EA, always hostile to EA.

A less flattering possibility is that too many members of EA are plagued by the cowardly Spiral Of Silence or the epistemically tragic Abilene Paradox. The latter is described as something of a groupwide locked-in pragmatic Don’t Rock The Boat mode, even though most group members, unbeknownst to each other, desire to see the boat rocked.

 

Other than that, I’m fresh out of explanations.

I jammed this seemingly unrelated vent on the implications of QALY here because an exceedingly naïve part of me thought that Sam and Will might broach it. They didn’t, so I’ve broached it for them in a piece that’s already harshly critical of them.

 

Extinction Comes

 

Guess who frets over X-Risks. Why, the duo of Sam and Will fret over X-Risks. Not as obnoxiously as the Sam/Toby duo did when Toby Ord appeared on the podcast, but it’s still bad enough for me to not pass up the opportunity to pillory the Sam/Will combo for it. No literate person who has spent as much time as these two have on the tough problems in population ethics – even contributing to the litany of arguments on offer – should be worrying about X-Risks in the simplistic possibilist ways the two of them manage to here. To go the “think of all the potential future generations who will be deprived of possibly euphoric states if we screw this up” route is to embark on a moral project whose only fitting name is Pro-Endlessness Absolutism. If their X-Risk fears resonate with you, you might be a pro-endlessness absolutist. Get in touch with it.

 

The point is you never see principled anti-extinctionists pressed with what I’ll call the Temporality Problem. Consider a global extinction event taking place in twenty-four hours vs. the same event taking place after an incomprehensibly long stretch of time. The latter timeline sees eudemonic bliss from cradle to grave for all who come to exist throughout the gazillions of millennia that came to pass. As for the pre-bliss times, the road to bliss would also be sacrifice-free. How? Let us also suppose that, within this timeline, extropian device “Full Immunity 4000” is invented today, and it goes unpatented. Full Immunity 4000 is directed to the commons. It is not subject to any laws of scarcity and is thus accessible to all.

 

Immunity’s impact cures the world of every single one of its ills effective immediately – its perfection-securing improvements covering humans and non-human sentient beings alike. Nevertheless, the mentioned extinction event eventually makes its way to this timeline too. If the inherent disvalue of extinction reduces to “all the potential people and beings who could have lived optimally good lives, and now won’t” the scale of badness must not vary based on any criteria other than the total number of those uniquely realizable beings who will be deprived of existence. Yet this evaluative invariability is hardly in keeping with conventionalist notions behind what makes extinction one of the worst, if not the worst, things that could ever happen. It is the prospect of specific goals as yet unachieved, specific discoverable truths as yet undiscovered, specific novel experiences or perceptions as yet unperceived, etc.

 

Once all those specifics are exhausted, and re-exhausted a bazillion times over, the badness of a species going bye-bye – as compared to the death of any individual who would rather not die – relies on a moralized species essentialism and is thereby utterly indefensible.

 

Notice also that the proposed timeline is far more charitable to the anti-extinctionist as it guarantees a life well lived, and then some, to all the beings who exist within it. Needless to say, there is no reason to believe that a future that is only as quarter as good as the one secured by Full Immunity 4000 will be anything other than an elating fiction. And even when we take into account the fail-safe contrivance of Immunity, the notion that there is something tragic with mere non-endlessness eventuating is bound to strike the sensible thinker as absurd. Here I think even the conventionalist ought to grant the philosophically juvenile insatiability of “worrying about X-Risks” following the gazillion years of Full Immunity 4000. But grounding the worries Sam and Will gave voice to, we see that the exact same concerns would apply even after the gazillion years pass; a future of wondrous possibilities for countless uniquely realizable people and beings. Euphoric lives beyond our wildest imaginations. Then and now. The argument from possibilities is the same.

So if X-Risks don’t seem all that bothersome after Immunity blesses humans, post-humans and all other beings for an indecipherably long period, ask yourself why it bothers you so much now.

S-Risks on the other hand do bother us, and justifiably so, no matter their temporal placement.

         

If you're perturbed by X-Risks, even after reading this, and even after accepting that Full Immunity 4000 is sci-fi... you are this comic incarnate. You get to wear the clown crown.