What does a better world look like?

09 Dec 2022. By me.

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I don’t have a good coherent philosophical model of what an ideal world would look like, so I wanted to start building toward that by listing things that I would like to happen.

What I want is to get a framework for achieving a better world that doesn’t completely rely on understanding what “goodness” or a “good life” is. I think that this task fundamentally can’t get away from that question, but there should be some intermediate steps between answering “What should I do tomorrow?” and “Why do we exist?” which I want to try and figure out.

So, even though these goals are ambitious, I am pretty sure that most of them are instrumental goals with the final goal being “goodness”. We could build systems that achieve all of these things and still miss “the point”.

These goals are in no particular order.

More concrete goals:

• No deaths from preventable illness
  • If we know the cure for a disease, then it shouldn’t be a signficant cause of death
  • If we know how to prevent a disease, then it should be contained and eventually eliminated
• No racism, queerphobia, misogyny, classism, and other forms of bigotry
  • I’m not sure bigotry is well-defined
• No homelessness, starvation, and other issues of resource scarcity
  • This also includes speciesism

Less concrete goals (goals that seem good, but I don’t know exactly what they would look like or whether they’re corrolaries of better defined goals):

• Freedom
  • This one is also tricky because it should be balanced with things like healthy communities or the role of government
  • It could also extend from the “no bigotry” goal
  • Includes abolition, removal of the carceral state, etc.
• Fulfilling relationships
  • Could be a form of freedom
• Creation of art
  • Could be a form of freedom or elimination of resource scarcity
• Better stewardship of the planet
  • Athough I’m pretty sure that we should avoid runaway anthropogenic climate change, I’m not sure how we can extend the idea of stewardship of the planet
  • Does this include preventing natural dissasters? Does this allow for changing local weather patterns?
  • Could we have agriculture or offshore wind farms?
  • This could be a corollary of longtermism or eliminating speciesism
• Education and learning
  • Including scientific research, technology, and philosophy
  • Could also be a corollary of eliminating bigotry and resource scarcity
• Some form of longtermism
  • Caring about the future and future suffering, though longtermism in practice still seems fairly vague
  • Could be a corollary of “no bigotry”

And some things that might be important for some definitions of good

• Digital consciousness
• Interstellar travel or life beyond Earth