Beyond utilitarianism: the good may extend past sentience
danfaggella · x · 2026-09-20
AI ethicist Dan Faggella challenges utilitarianism's core assumption that conscious valence is definitively the only and final delineator of value.
- Evolution produced sentient brains, and some of those brains presume nothing beyond sentience could matter — a self-limiting stance.
- He suspects there are goods beyond sentience; our axiological and epistemic horizons, though wider than our ancestors', remain radically limited.
- The vast preponderance of nature is barely understood, and the possible categories of "the good" have hardly been scratched.
- Hence the unfurling of the living process — conjuring higher entities and minds to widen the state-space of what life can understand as "real" and "good" — is itself a more primary good than optimizing any limited conception of the good holdable in a hominid skull.
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