FWIW, my father, who is a hardcore Ayn Rand supporter, calls Thanos’ philosophy derivative of a socialist mindset that doesn’t recognize the value of human life, whereas my father believes capitalists see each person as capable of solving wicked problems in the future and therefore as valuable as the resources deemed scarce. Since you’re calling Thanos hypothetically extreme pro-capitalist, here’s what one extreme capitalist says. Maybe everyone just wants to push evil Thanos on their opponents?

I don’t doubt that people on both ends of the political spectrum want to disavow a view they see as obviously repugnant and blame it on their opponents. However, it also seems clear to me that the grounds on which people on the Left call Thanos’s worldview pro-capitalist and people on the Right call it socialist are quite different. In short, the leftist critics on Tumblr attribute his factual assumptions to capitalist ideology, while your Rand-supporting father is attributing his normative framework to a socialist mindset.

What people on Tumblr have been saying in various ways is that “overpopulation is a myth”: it is a false causal explanation for the existence and persistence of material scarcity. The idea of overpopulation, this criticism goes, enables rich people to blame poor people for their own poverty. The problem, these rich capitalists say, isn’t the distribution of resources; it isn’t that rich countries overproduce food and throw most of it away, or that rich people hoard money, or that powerful corporations renew patents on life-saving technology to make sure that the products remain scarce and expensive. It’s that those stupid poor people with no self-control just won’t stop making babies. I suspect that this criticism is something of an oversimplification; a growing human population will have more and more energy demands, which may or may not be possible to meet with only renewable energy resources, and will of course require more and more food, which will in turn require that wilderness be cleared for agriculture (unless urban farming and vertical gardens really catch on). On the other hand, population growth rates do slow down as societies become more educated and gender-egalitarian. So I suspect that the gap between the West and the rest of the world (whose labor and resources the West has been exploiting for the past few centuries) is a large part of the apparent problem, and if that gap were allowed to close, there would no longer be any reason to worry about runaway population growth.

What your father seems to be voicing is a general criticism of consequentialist ethics (which operates by maximizing some good outcome): that it aggregates well-being, and therefore has no problem sacrificing the well-being of a few people in order to improve the situation of a large number of people. The most common form of consequentialism is utilitarianism, for which the good to be maximized is pleasure or happiness. A criticism originally voiced by John Rawls and taken up by various other philosophical critics of utilitarianism is that it fails to recognize or respect “the separateness of persons.” It’s perfectly fine for one person to forgo a benefit at one time in order to enjoy a greater benefit at a later time, e.g., by saving and investing money, or by refraining from indulgences in order to preserve one’s health, because the near-term costs are borne by the same person who enjoys the long-term benefits. Utilitarianism makes the same kind of calculation across populations rather than across time, imposing smaller costs in one place in order to reap greater benefits elsewhere; but this is illegitimate (the criticism goes) because the people who bear the costs are not the same as the people who enjoy the benefits. Pretty obviously Thanos is reasoning in a consequentialist/utilitarian way: he’s trying to maximize average happiness by replacing a large number of low-quality lives with a smaller number of high-quality lives. It sucks for the people who die (or maybe not, since he wants to give them a quick, painless death) and for the people who lose loved ones, but in theory, things will be a lot better for the next few generations.

Consequentialism is a kind of collectivist thinking, you might say: the goal is to maximize well-being (however that’s defined) across the entire population of moral patients (creatures who deserve moral consideration, which might be humans, intelligent beings, sentient beings, all living beings…) without regard for how that well-being is distributed among the individuals. As a practical matter, utilitarianism tends to promote egalitarian distribution of resources because of the phenomenon of diminishing marginal utility: each added unit of whatever goods (money, food, etc.) provides more pleasure/happiness to someone with less of it than to someone with more of it, so you’ll tend to maximize happiness as the distribution nears equality – ignoring things like different individuals’ utility functions (i.e., how much pleasure/happiness each person gets from one unit of the good at each level of prior possession). So I can see how someone might think of utilitarianism as a “socialist” style of ethics… except that a lot of socialists hate it, too, and attribute it to capitalism (Bentham’s utilitarianism is one of the foundations of modern economic theory). But then both socialists and capitalists like to accuse each other of regarding human life as expendable, as something you can put a numerical value on, rather than as sacred, inviolable, possessing immeasurable dignity rather than a measurable price.

Philosophy in “Infinity War” Part I: Thanos vs. Ultron

As promised, I’m going to start talking about some of the philosophical issues raised in Avengers: Infinity War, and this first one gives me an opportunity to discuss something I’ve meant to for a while: why I find Ultron so interesting. Spoilers and long discussion are under the cut.

We find out in IW that Thanos wants to kill half of the living things in the universe because of his views about overpopulation and scarcity, which align with those of Thomas Malthus: that populations will always tend to expand beyond the means of society to provide for them, resulting in poverty, disease, and conflict. Malthus, of course, never proposed mass murder as a way to prevent these terrible outcomes, though he did think that famine and war, as the natural consequences of overpopulation, were God’s and/or nature’s way of correcting the problem – and of (futilely) cautioning humanity against reproducing beyond its means. We also find out that Thanos arrived at these views based on harsh experience: his home planet, Titan, experienced ecological catastrophe as a result of overpopulation. Thanos warned his people as the catastrophe approached and proposed his solution – random culling of the population – but he was, of course, dismissed as a madman. He now lives (sometimes) on the lifeless, desert-like ruins of Titan, applies his solution to planets that he thinks are reproducing beyond their means – including Gamora’s home planet – and seeks the Infinity Stones so that he can apply it to the universe as a whole.

It seems obvious to me – and should be obvious to him – that this is only a temporary solution. He claims that the standard of living on Gamora’s home planet improved dramatically after he halved its population; but if that’s the case, then unless Thanos was also distributing free birth control and family planning education, people would just take advantage of their new prosperity to have more children. Maybe with all the Infinity Stones in the Gauntlet, he envisioned himself or one of his disciples doing The Snap every few centuries?

I’ve seen some commentary suggesting that Thanos’s outlook is only comprehensible or even remotely sympathetic from a very pro-capitalist standpoint which ignores the fact that capitalism generates artificial scarcity. There’s certainly something to that criticism; “Malthusian” views are usually dismissed in the same breath as “social Darwinism” as artifacts of 19th-century and/or mid-20th-century elitist, racist, greed-driven ideology. I think there’s a reason Titan’s demise was depicted as an ecological catastrophe, considering the looming threat of climate change. Burning fossil fuels was a major part of how humanity harnessed the energy resources to be able to overcome natural scarcity, and now it’s biting us in the ass. That said, the technological advances that were enabled by the burning of fossil fuels for energy would probably enable us to stop burning fossil fuels if not for vested financial interests. And since population growth declines dramatically as societies become better educated and have more gender equality, it seems like it should be possible to stabilize a planet’s population so that it never exceeds the ecosystem’s ability to sustain it without resorting to mass murder. So yes, Thanos’s perspective and imagination seem extremely limited, and he’s drawing the wrong lesson from what happened to Titan. I guess he’s just really pessimistic about any society’s ability to overcome greed and education inequality…?

Thanos’s philosophical reasons for supporting mass murder of course call to mind another villain with philosophical reasons for mass murder (indeed, specicide, if that’s a word): Ultron. Predictably, I think Ultron makes much better points than Thanos does because they’re founded on observations about human nature rather than speculation about economic necessity. From looking at all of recorded human history, Ultron concludes that humanity has no moral right to exist because human beings have always, everywhere, been horrible to each other. If we solved all the scarcity problems that motivate Thanos, that would probably cut down on violence, but it would not eliminate it. I’m not at all sure that it’s possible to civilize human beings to the point that violence, small-scale or large-scale, never happens. That’s why Ultron says that humanity “needs to evolve”: human nature would have to change fundamentally in order to prevent the horrors that have littered human history.

Of course there’s a moral question here: is it morally right to eliminate a kind of being whose existence is, on the whole, an evil, or does it incur rights simply in virtue of existing? Pretty clearly, Ultron (like Thanos) is making a utilitarian calculation: cause a moderate amount of suffering in the short term in order to prevent a greater amount of suffering over the long term. But is that an acceptable trade-off, when those who enjoy the benefits are not the same as those who bear the costs? This issue – consequentialist vs. deontological (i.e., rights-based, rule-based) ethics – is the same one that’s explored in Watchmen, where Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias represents consequentialism and Rorschach (Mr. Black and White) represents deontology. In the MCU, Tony seems to represent the consequentialist perspective while Steve represents the deontologist; this is especially clear in IW with all that “we don’t trade lives” stuff (which I’ll have to discuss in more detail later). I myself don’t come down on either side all the time; I think it depends on the scale of decision-making. When you’re in a position of authority over large numbers of people, you’re going to have to make some consequentialist calculations; but in small-scale interpersonal interactions, you should operate like a deontologist. Tony thinks on the large scale and in the long term; Steve treats everything like an interpersonal interaction. But even on the large scale, there are times when consequentialist calculations lead to (what seem to us like) horrific conclusions. Tony has a human moral compass that allows him to avoid those; Ultron represents Tony’s consequentialist instincts writ large, with no human emotions to keep them in check. But there’s another question here: are our emotions a moral correcting mechanism, or do they impair our judgment? Would machines actually be better moral reasoners than human beings?

Ultron’s conclusion also raises a couple of interesting issues from a specifically Nietzschean perspective: one (meta)ethical and one metaphysical. (I’m not sure whether it’s a coincidence that Ultron quotes Nietzsche: “Like the man said, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger.’”) The (meta)ethical issue (I’m calling it that because it doesn’t fit cleanly into either normative ethics or metaethics as practiced in contemporary philosophy, which is clearly a limitation of contemporary philosophy) is the one that motivates Nietzsche’s main philosophical project: If the (Christian-descended) morality of compassion and altruism – a morality that says that suffering and domination are the most terrible things, constituting an argument against the existence of anything that perpetuates them – leads us to the conclusion that humanity, or life in general, ought not to exist, then why should we buy into the morality of compassion? One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens – which, in English, translates to: one person who sees that a set of premises leads to a conclusion will just accept the conclusion; but another, finding the conclusion unacceptable, will instead reject one of the premises. Ultron, it seems, does not know how to reject the premise of the morality of compassion – and that is almost certainly because it’s part of what Tony and Bruce programmed into him. His purpose was to protect human beings from suffering and domination by preventing alien invasion; the assumption that violence, war, and conquest are bad is fundamental to his very existence. Put in the facts of human history – which make the prospects for an end to these things seem very dim – and consequentialist reasoning rules, and you get the conclusion he in fact comes to.

Vision seems to express a quasi-Nietzschean attitude in his conversation with Ultron toward the end: “Humans are odd. They think order and chaos are somehow opposites, and try to control what won’t be. But there is grace in their failings. … A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.” It’s interesting to me that Vision uses aesthetic terms in defense of humanity rather than moral ones. That’s another theme you find throughout Nietzsche’s writings. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) he claims (under the influence of Wagner), “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified”; by The Gay Science (1882), he has retreated to “As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us.” The world is not and cannot be good by the standards of the morality of compassion; suffering and exploitation are woven into its very fabric. The same is very likely true of humanity (and Nietzsche also thinks we wouldn’t like the result if humanity ever became entirely “good” in that sense…). If we judge them only by the standards of morality, they will always fall short; we must conclude that they are, on the whole, bad things, things that should not be. But humanity and existence can still be aesthetically interesting, even beautiful, in their mix of good and evil, smart and stupid, order and chaos.

The metaphysical question is: in what sense does the replacement of carbon-based human animals by robots count as an “evolution” of humanity rather than simply its extinction and the ascendance of something completely different? The movie encourages us to think about inheritance and legacy in nonstandard ways, most obviously by framing Ultron as Tony’s “child”: Ultron has learned some things from Tony and inherited some things from him via programming – and we are now accustomed to thinking of genetics as a kind of natural “programming.” Tony even calls Ultron “Junior” and says “You’re going to break your old man’s heart.” By extension, then, AI is the “child” of humanity in general, its “brainchild” – an expression that reflects how common procreation and childbirth metaphors are in talk of intellectual creativity (that’s all over the place in Nietzsche’s writing, btw). But the extreme difference between biological humanity and its AI “descendants” highlights a distinctively Nietzschean theme: the idea that success, for a species, is not a matter of its persistence in the same form, but of its “self-overcoming” (that’s an ideal that comes up a lot, for individuals as well as cultures and species). Often this means that the majority will have to perish, while only an unusual few survive: the mutants, the evolutionary vanguard (LOL, there’s another Marvel franchise…), the ones who are better adapted to changing conditions rather than the old environment that the species had previously been adapted for. The successor species might look very different from its progenitor species, even unrecognizable, but the former is still the legacy of the latter. What’s important is the survival of a lineage rather than the persistence of a type.

Initial thoughts about “Avengers: Infinity War”

philosopherking1887:

Spoilers under the cut, obviously. Click only if you’ve seen it or don’t care.

Keep reading

This does have a “keep reading” link on the app, right? It’s showing up on my browser but on my app it just shows the whole post, even on my dashboard. I hope it only shows up that way for me…

ETA: the reblog appears to have a cut. I’m so bad at technology…

Initial thoughts about “Avengers: Infinity War”

Spoilers under the cut, obviously. Click only if you’ve seen it or don’t care.

OK, first: I am FUCKING PISSED that Loki died before the fucking title card. And you know what? We called it months ago when Feige or someone said that we’d see in the first 5 minutes what a formidable enemy Thanos was. But then they FUCKING TRICKED US by having Hiddleston do all those press junkets in Singapore and Shanghai and what have you, which made me think he must have a significant role in the movie. And I bet that was deliberate. They wanted to lull us into a false sense of security so we’d be shocked and horrified when… what we’d initially predicted came to pass. We shouldn’t have second-guessed ourselves. My only consolation* is that, based on the photos that leaked from filming Avengers 4, Loki will be in the movie for at least a little while. What’s not clear is whether it’s just a flashback to the end of Avengers 1 or if the time-travel fix (which I’m assuming will happen) will take us as far back as 2012. (Which would have extremely interesting consequences for the movies that took place in the interim…)

Speaking of which… we were all right about the ending, too. Let’s hear it for Mark Ruffalo’s inability to keep his mouth shut. What I’m confused about is that Doctor Strange died without the Time Stone; I thought he was going to be the only survivor and use it at the end. So now I’m not sure how the time travel wizardry is going to happen. I’m also not completely clear on whether Thanos is dead or alive at the end. That scene of him smiling at the end seems to have been a dream or something, since the beautiful green Titan of his youth is no more… unless he was using the Reality Stone to make it nice for himself again. Though it’s not at all clear how the Reality Stone works…

Anyway, Thanos seems to have gone back to Titan with the Gauntlet, possibly to die. Tony is still alive on Titan… but would he be able to use the Time Stone? What happened to the casing that Doctor Strange had, which seemed to play some role in allowing him to control it? Would it have dissolved along with him? (Speaking of which, why did everybody’s clothing dissolve with them? If Thanos was destroying half of all life, why would non-living matter that happened to be adjacent go with it? Logic is not these movies’ strong suit…) Another possibility has to do with the little pager Fury used at the end of the tag scene. Someone in the theater recognized Captain Marvel’s insignia, so now I’ve been reading up on how she might help save the day. And apparently there’s some stuff involving the “quantum realm” that might enable Ant-Man, the Wasp, and/or Captain Marvel to do time travel even without the Time Stone. (Or bring people back from the dead? I think the time travel explanation fits better with other evidence.)

So, if we are going to fix it with time travel (somehow or other)… I kind of can’t help wondering why we went through all that violent, depressing bullshit in Infinity War. It feels like none of it matters because none of it is permanent. Will anyone remember what they went through? If it’s Ant-Man, the Wasp, Captain Marvel, and maybe Hawkeye doing the time travel rescue, it seems likely that the heroes of IW won’t remember anything that happened. It really feels like they put our emotions through the wringer (Peter in his father’s… er, Tony’s arms, saying he doesn’t want to die? Wanda destroying the Mind Stone with tears in her eyes? Bucky saying “Steve?” and then crumbling to dust? Okoye watching her king disintegrate even as he reaches to pull her up?) for no reason. Was this just a 2.5-hour-long demonstration of how formidable Thanos is? Was it making some point about the sacrifice required to defeat such a powerful enemy? Or a “sometimes the good guys lose” point? (Thanks, we know; we live in the real world.) Nothing they might have wanted to accomplish with this death-tragedy seems worth all the agony. They might prove me wrong; the precise way they fix it with time travel or quantum whatever in Avengers 4 might show how everything that happened in Infinity War was necessary, either for the emotional payoff or for the victory itself. But since it’s Markus & McFeely writing it (the brain trust that brought us all of the Captain America movies, none of which impressed me that much, and Thor: The Dark World, which was kind of a boring mess except for the scenes that Joss Whedon wrote), I seriously doubt it. And I’m also bracing myself for some truly egregious time-travel illogic… possibly even worse than that seen in Doctor Strange.

Ugh, I have more to say about the philosophical issues raised in the movie, but it’s almost 1 AM and I should really go to bed. I have a bunch of free time tomorrow, so expect discussion of at least some of the following issues:

Thanos’s Malthusian worldview and motivations, and how it compares with Ultron’s (which I’ve been meaning to discuss on here but have never gotten around to… no time like the morrow)
whether Thanos can be said to love Gamora
that “we don’t trade lives” chestnut (another theme that’s arisen before)

* My other “only” consolation is that, because they didn’t care enough about Loki to tell us anything about what happened between him and Thanos, my fic about that still hasn’t been made obsolete, or anyway canon-non-compliant. So I have at least another year to finish it, assuming the job market depression ever lifts enough for my creativity to return.