S1E1: Out to Pasture (GaPJaxie)
"Once," Starlight said, "I took a class called 'The Philosophy of Magic.' I don't know what I was looking for. This was before Our Town. I was angry and confused, and maybe I thought it would help. The class wasn't great, but one day, the professor asked us a question. A hypothetical—you have a button you can push. If you push it, it will make all of Equestria eternally verdant, beautiful, good, just, etc. A forever perfect world. But it will also kill half of the ponies who are currently alive."
"Mmm." Twilight said nothing. They lay side by side on the hill out beside the castle, looking up at the stars. Twilight's wings were splayed out behind her -- she still didn't quite know how to get them comfortable when she was lying on her back.
"I got a little annoyed," Starlight continued. "A lot annoyed, actually. I said it was a stupid question. Sure, it sounds all deep and profound, but we all know the answer. We all know the correct answer because it's obvious. The point of the question is just to make the speaker feel clever."
"How'd the professor take that?"
"Pretty well, I guess." Starlight shrugged. "He said the point of the question was to highlight inconsistencies in your thinking. First you ask it with half of the population, then a quarter, then five percent, then one hundred ponies, then just one pony, and see where your answer changes. See where it stops being wrong. And I gave him this confused, incredulous look, and asked him what in Equestria he was talking about. The answer is yes. Of course I'd push the button. Why would having it kill less ponies change that?"
Twilight turned her head to look at Starlight, but Starlight was still staring up at the sky. And so Twilight waited, letting the silence linger until Starlight went on.
"The class," she said, "was a little surprised by that. So was the professor. So he started going up. At three-fourths, do you push the button? Yes. Nine out of ten? Yes. Ninety-nine ponies out of a hundred? Yes. Literally everypony in the world but me? Yes, assuming there's a way to fully repopulate Equestria. Then he tsks and the class mutters and I can feel ponies staring. He says 'that's very selfish, young mare.' And I shoot back, 'You didn't ask about everypony in the world including me.'"
Starlight smiled slightly. "He didn't like that. It wasn't how he expected the conversation to go. The whole class is mumbling again. So he says, 'young mare, the hypothetical you're describing would kill everypony in the entire world.' And I say, 'As long as there are new ponies around to enjoy that perfect world, why does that matter?'"
She shifted in place. "What makes us so great?"
Twilight cleared her throat: "I know some ponies who are pretty good."
"But, so good you'd destroy a perfect world just to have them? That seems selfish." Starlight cleared her throat. "Twilight. Princess. Sorry."
"Is there a reason you're telling me this?"
"Because..." Starlight waved a hoof at the sky. "Ponies tell me I need to be more empathetic. That to be a good guidance counselor, or even good pony, I need to feel ponies' pain. I need to want them to be happy. And I just don't see why. Does Applejack need to feel the pain of her trees? When she kicks them? When she prunes them? When she cuts them down? Phrase the question that way. If Applejack could push a button that would make her farm eternally bountiful by destroying half of her current trees, would she press it? Shouldn't she press it?"
"Ponies aren't trees, Starlight."
"Why not?"
For a long time, the two of them lay there in silence. Eventually, Twilight said: "If you don't understand it intuitively, I'm not sure I can explain it."
"Yeah." Starlight sighed. "So ponies tell me."
"You don't want to..." Twilight bit her lip. "You don't care about ponies?"
"Of course I do." She waved at the sky, her tone turning frustrated. "But do I care about ponies, as in the specific group of ponies I happen to know? Or do I care about the ponies, as in, all the ponies who are presently alive? Or do I care about ponykind, as in the three races collectively?"
"Those are all the same thing."
"No, Twilight, they're not the same thing." Starlight's tone turned short and snappish. "And you're smart enough to know they're not the same thing. But unlike me, you're a good pony, so you want them to be the same thing. You pretend they're the same thing."
Twilight started to speak, but before she could, Starlight cut her off: "Don't patronize me."
A snort escaped Twilight's muzzle, and she rolled back up towards the sky. But when she spoke, her tone was soft: "You can decide what you think for yourself. But I don't think you're a monster."
"I..." Starlight shut her eyes. "Thank you, Twilight. I'm... sorry." After a moment, she went on. "In that class, for my final paper, the professor asked me to justify my position. So I said, there's a way I want the world to be. I want it to be fair and just and verdant and kind. That is good. And it's right. And I must pursue what is good and right by the most effective means available to me. To do anything else is negligent. Anywhere in the world that somepony goes hungry, or suffers, or where unicorns abuse earth ponies or stallions abuse mares. Anytime anywhere something bad happens. That's my failing. My problem. I need to make it as right as I can as fast as I can. And if that means sacrificing ponies, so be it. What right do I have to harm the ponies of the future, just for the sake of somepony who happens to be alive now?
"So I wrote it, and he called me into his office, and he said that it sounded 'supervillian ish.'" She made airquotes with her hooves. "He pointed out that many dictators and dark wizards throughout history said the same thing -- that they had their goals and they needed power to achieve those goals. That the ends justify the means. But I didn't see why that mattered. Their goals were wrong. My goals are right. Stealing to feed a starving family and stealing to buy a nice wagon aren't the same thing. Someone who accrues power for bad ends is a tyrant. Someone who does it for good ends is, well. Princess Celestia."
A laugh escaped her. "So he asked, what absolute universal truth makes my goals 'objectively right' and the tyrants wrong? And I told him that was a stupid question. My goals aren't absolute; they aren't written into the fabric of the universe. But they're mine. And I'll accomplish them by whatever means I see fit. And dictators will accomplish their goals by whatever means they see fit. And the professor will accomplish his goals, just the same."
Starlight licked her lips, and finished: "There is no right or wrong. No universal morality. Only the will to power."
"That does sound supervillian ish," Twilight agreed. "Honestly, maybe more than ish. Maybe a lot."
"Yeah. That's kind of why I told you." Starlight laughed, and it had a nervous tinge under it. "Are you going to blast me with the Elements of Harmony?"
"Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow." Twilight smiled and lowered her head. "You could just stop believing those things, you know."
"I can't. Not any more than I can stop believing the sky is blue. They're right, Twilight. And they're so obviously right it took me a while to even understand that not everpony saw it that way. That other ponies can be that wrong. I thought that whenever anypony disagreed, they were being intentionally thick. Or they were just weak."
"So..." Twilight's smile brightened. "You think I'm weak?"
"Ha ha. No." Starlight rested her head back in the grass. "No, Twilight. I don't think you're weak. And I'm glad you don't think I'm a monster." She paused for a few seconds. "But tell me if I ever do anything to... you know. Change that opinion."
"I will." Twilight reached over to rest her hoof over Starlight's. "And hey, Starlight? Thank you."
Starlight said nothing, and for the rest of the evening, they watched the stars go by.
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The sad part is, she's not exactly wrong.
The pony you really have to watch out for is the one that asks "Which half?"
There is no power. There is only the illusion of power. The most horrible and overbearing dictator in history will still die before his 120th birthday.
Trees, with no ambitions whatsoever other than to soak up sunlight and shed seeds, will outlast them all by thousands of years.
And outside of this one tiny world, nothing cares they even exist. The quest for power is the penultimate delusion. All those who seek it are fools... who must be exterminated if we are to evolve to the next level of existence...
I had a comment, but forgot.
9033459
Oh god...
I completely understand!
After "Discord Teaches Philosophy" and it's sequel, I had no idea I'd find something as enjoyable to read like it so soon. Lo and behold....
So Thanos.
9033174
Neither was the professor who said she sounded like she would become a supervillain, you have to admit.
Oh, it is on.
You might think that I shouldn't get all serious about a lighthearted comedy that's not meant to be taken seriously. But, this isn't really a comedy. It really is a philosophical argument, and it would be cheating to dodge counterpoints by saying, "I was just kidding!"
This Starlight is a strawpony. She flops back and forth between different inconsistent views.
Insensitivity to numbers is an immediate, foolproof indicator that you're dealing with a philosophical idealist, e.g., Plato, Zoroaster, Hebrew religion, Manichaeism, Jesus, all Christian and Muslim theologians, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Hitler, etc. Idealists are firmly opposed to utilitarianism, the belief that right action is judged by counting all the costs and benefits. Idealists instead insist that to mean anything, morality must be "objective", by which they mean context-insensitive--where the number of people you kill is part of the context. Morality is determined by a ranking of different possible actions, and the ranking can never, ever change, regardless of context. Idealism assumes that the world is naturally perfect, and that after being brought to a perfect state, it will go on being perfect for the rest of eternity, and therefore you never have to make a utility calculation because infinity is larger than any number describing the losses needed to get there.
This is why Stalin said "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistics", why Mao boasted that he could throw tens of millions of lives away and still have the world's largest nation; why Marxists believe massacring a few million people based on their demographics alone is fine. It's why measuring sticks did not exist during the Middle Ages. Any application of numbers to thought corrupted any idealist hierarchy of ethics or aesthetics.
AFAIK, all idealist ethical systems so far have judged it acceptable to kill any number of people to help bring about paradise: Plato did in the Republic; all Jewish and Christian apocalypticism presumes it; it was official policy for the Catholic Church from about 325 to 1700 A.D.; Islam did in in the 7th through 10th centuries; Nazism did it; and Marxism is still doing it.
But the answer Starlight gives here is also compatible with the opposite view: empiricism and utilitarianism. Then the judgement can go either way, and it depends on your estimate of population growth, the utility delta between the present and paradise, the cost of transitioning to paradise, and your time-discounting function (which must be exponential to avoid infinities and dynamic inconsistency).
Valuing happiness is indicative of utilitarianism. So this would make her a utilitarian--but she has done no utility calculation, so she can't be. She holds to no philosophical view here: either she must make a utility-based argument and do the math, or she must make a virtue-ethics, deontological, or other "objective morality" argument, which is incompatible with justifying her belief with reference to enjoyment by ponies rather than by objective moral uprightness.
A few paragraphs ago, she justified her views by the happiness of future ponies; now she's saying she doesn't care about them.
This scenario is irrelevant to any conceivable philosophical viewpoint. Applejack's judgement here is purely economic, so either Starlight is making a utilitarian argument--which she isn't, because she doesn't do a utility calculation--or she's using measures of "bounty" to decide the question without being a utilitarian, which makes no sense.
Now she's an ontological monist (e.g., Vedic Hinduism, Buddhism) or a pantheist, the positions which might deny that distinguishing between ponies and trees is ethically relevant. This is incompatible with all her previously-expressed ideas.
Now Starlight is back to utilitarianism.
This isn't even a coherent argument. She justifies it with reference to utility for the ponies of the future, and "I need to make it as right as I can as fast as I can" is also justified by utility (implied by the claim that speed has value). Yet in that same breath, "as fast as I can", without reference to marginal cost as a function of that speed, implies that utility is irrelevant.
Now Starlight is a Nietzschian, which is incompatible with everything she stated previously.
And it's the wrong answer. The professor himself stipulated at the very beginning that the effect on Equestria the land would be objectively right: "If you push it, it will make all of Equestria eternally verdant, beautiful, good, just, etc." Starlight's goals can't enter into it.
9033459
I don’t think that penultimate means what you think it means
9249344
I object to your objection!
sportschump.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/lets-get-ready-to-rumble.jpg
Ahem.
More seriously, I think your above points misrepresent Starlight's position. She's a utilitarian throughout the entire story. She doesn't do the utility calculation explicitly because the professor's question could reasonably be interpreted as granting optimum utility. While the question the professor gave her is admittedly vague, she's interpreting, "eternally verdant, beautiful good, etc," as "a perfect world," IE maximized utility.
As for her being "Nietzschian," all she's stating there is that she doesn't believe in an objective universal utility calculation, only in subjective standards of utility which an individual can use to evaluate potential world states.
9262739
I hope this response doesn't come across as angry or insulting. This is an important issue to me, but getting you to understand my view on it isn't worth damaging our friendship, so please warn me if I get near that point.
She is not depicted as a utilitarian throughout. She makes many points in her argument that represent quite distinct, even opposed, philosophical positions, which people hostile to utilitarianism habitually accuse utilitarians of believing. At no point does she respond as a utilitarian would. To me, this is a hostile caricature of a utilitarian of the same nature as medieval Christian tales saying that Jews eat babies.
General problems
These are some of the things you're presenting as if they were part of utilitarianism, that are opposed to utilitarianism:
Specific examples
A utilitarian would never say that. Utilitarians count.
You're interpreting "optimum utility" as Aristotle would--as a thing at the top of a hierarchy which is guaranteed to be unique. The optimal utility is just a number. Other outcomes will have other numbers, which might be nearly (or exactly) the same. That utility was specified by the professor as a static utility, so it doesn't factor in the costs of getting to that state (e.g., how many ponies you have to kill), nor how long it takes, nor how many ponies there will be afterwards, nor how long this new perfect state will last before it collapses, all of which are needed to do the calculation to find out whether it's better than some other action, i.e, not killing everybody.
This is a very serious point. There are lots of people running around (for instance, Marxists) who have some ideal optimal-utility state in mind, and they think that because it's the optimal utility state, that justifies any cost in getting to it, and that once we get to it it will be a stable state because magic. Don't confuse those people with utilitarians. Utilitarians are not rationalists; they use real numbers, they understand predictions are probabilistic; they usually understand that changes are temporary.
If she's a utilitarian, why does she say this? This is a sociopath. A sociopath doesn't even have a social utility function, just a private utility function. What this is, is jumping on the bandwagon of people who slander utilitarians (and scientists) by saying "utilitarian/scientist => uses numbers => has no feelings or empathy".
Again: Not a thing a utilitarian would say. You have to do the utility calculation. The answer, supposing we value the apples monetarily, depends on the interest rate and on Applejack's time-discounting function. This the well-known "kill all the elephants" problem: Conservationists were trying to persuade African nations that, even if they saw "their" elephants only as an economic commodity, it would be more profitable for them to kill only a few elephants per year, and have elephants in perpetuity, than to kill them all now. But when they ran the numbers, they found that in most cases it was more profitable to kill them all now. This maps onto the farm example by equating "kill all the elephants" (take the short-term profits) with "leave all of the trees alive": the short-term income from the next few harvests, wisely invested, may give greater returns than a farm that is eternally bountiful.
Plus, a utilitarian would do a utility calculation, not an economic calculation. She knows that Applejack loves the trees she has now more than hypothetical future, equally-productive trees; this increases the utility of the farm's present state.
Someone who makes a snap decision based on a qualitative, natural-language statement is a rationalist (~ one who uses Boolean logic).
Again, not a thing associated with utilitarianism, but with nihilism. If she's supposed to be a utilitarian, why does the story keep injecting other completely orthogonal (but always despicable) philosophies into her mouth?
That's still a Nietzschian or sociopathic position. Don't depict sociopaths or Nietzschians and pretend they represent utilitarians. If someone wrote a story that was part of a larger drama, and it was dramatically useful to have a Nietzschian utilitarian, that would be one thing. But when a story is obviously presented as an exercise that's supposed to represent a philosophical position, it's deceptive to confound two or more entirely separate, orthogonal philosophies in a single character. It would be like if, in the middle of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor story, he had the inquisitor kick a puppy, because Dostoyevsky was afraid we might like the inquisitor's arguments.
I'm just gonna requote this, because it still stands:
Again: This proves she is not a utilitarian. A utilitarian would try to find the path to the new state that maximized total utility, integrated over time; that flatly contradicts wanting to do it "as fast as I can".
9249344
I think that piece only means that her decision-switching point is above 50% dead bodies (and from point of writing, pretty cool way of showing "haven't even thought it may be other way" collision of different views)
She just said that agents have preferences. Only Nietzsche-like thingie is that "will to power" sentence and it's indeed very out of place there.
Well, what he said was more like "vaguely right"
The fact that he believes in some kind of "objective right" became known only later, so interpretation of "state of high utility from the point of view of agent making decision (who is kinda like me)" is expected from someone for whom idea of morality from laws of physics is completely alien.
9313579
Hello!
If she'd meant that, I think she would have said
instead of
I think the teacher is also flip-flopping here; he presumes there is an objective right in posing the problem, then objects to what he thinks is Starlight's claim to be objectively right.
I was objecting that Starlight should have objected, "I didn't say the outcome could be determined to be objectively right; you did." That holds regardless of either of their beliefs.
9322080
That's actually a better interpretation of the story... but I think a lot of people will read it, take it as a serious critique of utilitarianism, and nod in agreement.
9351358
I'm not sure if I've parsed that correct, but if her switching point is above
\frac{1}{2}, then her decision doesn't change anywhere inside 0%--50% interval. So I kinda don't understand that piece. Moreover, in the story itself there's this:For a teacher I personally prefer a bit more cynical interpretation: kids are supposed to keep their mouths shut and soak up Great Wisdom, not undermine teacher's authority, so he decided to pommel annoying little brat with cleverest appeal to social status he could come up with. Which turned out to be not that clever
9351361 I'm pretty sure most readers will take it as I did- as a psychopath trying to explain their psychosis within a logical framework that can't entirely frame it.
9775839
I have to agree. I'm not bothering to look for consistency in her argument here simply because I have always accepted that she's a psychotic monster in canon. Seriously, who fucks with mind-control and brainwashing (with plans to screw over the Crown Sisters what keep the planet from dying) just because a friend hit puberty first and moved away for education? Look at all the worlds full of suffering and oppression and murder she created by doing so, just to try and get revenge on the mare who stopped her clearly evil, selfish reign? Starlight has the highest kill count (by responsibility) of any creature in MLP, even the old and ugly days where murder wasn't a rare thing.
9775839
I read it as a condemnation of utilitarianism by making the character a psychopath.
But I have some education in philosophy so I may be in the minority.
So a little while ago I reached the conclusion that Jaxie’s version of Twilight Sparkle really never progressed beyond the fandom’s interpretation of her back in Season 2. That is, the Twilight who would do something like accidentally cast a spell that transports her and all her friends to another universe where everypony’s sex is reversed. The one who’s blindly loyal to Celestia and would never go against anything she said. The introvert who is extremely unaware of social cues. And so on. Not just in this fic, but rather it’s something consistent across all his fics.
I think he doesn’t really get Starlight Glimmer, either. Like, he latched on to the idea that Starlight is some sort of Communist/Socialist/Marxist/whatever, and that’s basically fine. She did apparently pen a manifesto, and (if you’re an adult) you’d have to be a moron to not know what that’s an allusion to. So Starlight Marx makes sense.
But here’s the other problem…Starlight’s selfish. Or at least she was throughout Season 5, and much of Season 6 was her trying to get over that. I’m not really sure what prompted Jaxie to think that Starlight would sacrifice so much to make a “perfect” Equestria. This is the pony, after all, who decided to fuck over the timeline and was okay with the consequences when shown them based purely on having personally lost a friend and the turmoil that this personally caused her. She ultimately didn’t care how it affected others until very deliberate effort on Twilight’s part. And even back in “The Cutie Map”…
“They think they can come to my village and disrupt my life? Let's see how they like spending the rest of their lives without their precious cutie marks!”
I like anger. I think it’s the most honest emotion – that is, I think when you’re angry enough it becomes nearly impossible to hide who you truly are and what you truly want. When you’re angry you show what it is you actually value and care about. And ultimately Starlight reveals, in this line, that Our Town was ultimately her town, her coping mechanism, projecting her hurt onto others.
Basically I don’t see the justification for Starlight being willing to sacrifice so much for the good of others, when she was really only ever sacrificing things for the good of herself – and was ultimately quite open about this fact once she had been sufficiently incensed that lying was no longer possible.
Again, prior to Season 6, when she’s making a genuine effort to be different. But this chapter is an anecdote about her life before Our Town. So what’s the justification?
Last time I asked a similar question of Jaxie, his answer was “It’s my fic and I do what I want. Haters gonna hate”. Which I guess is an answer. It’s just not a very good one when talking about fan fiction.
Hm. My own depiction of a future ideal existence for people allows for bringing back the historically deceased, as we work out the issues with incorporating people with all of those historically different value systems, and preexisting opinions on how their continued existence or afterlives should go, without breaking. So "kill everybody alive including me" shouldn't be a deal-breaker... but it would be disturbingly meaningful if at no point I questioned how I was persuaded pushing the button would do all of this. I believe right now there do exist buttons that, if I pushed them, would (certainly enough to not argue about it) kill at least one person. I'm less certain not pushing those buttons would leave my potential victim(s) alive and also not kill somebody else. And while I can certainly believe there are ways to overwrite enough about my perception of the world and beliefs to convince me the professor's hypothetical button exists and is before me, eminently pushable, it's hard to believe the process wouldn't strongly affect the outcome of my choice in the matter... since it wouldn't really be all mine anymore.
So it's still kind of a stupid question.
9263854
Oh my goddesses, I love you.
The problem with questions of moral relativity like this is that they tend to erode empathy.
9263854
You gonna be at everfree? This reminded me how much I enjoyed talking to you at a con in the middle of the night and then magically producing a wild regidar so yall could both meet irl and then yall watching my secret 3am renegade room acid piano set, which means it must have been EFNW 2021.
Thanks for reminding me of a great memory :)
(Ph yeah and you were in the zentai suit lol
9775839
Do you consider antisocial personality disorder to be a form of psychosis?
11534387 For layman's definitions, yes; it's a mental illness that interferes with the perception of reality (i. e. by denying it). Strict clinicians would probably disagree in that hallucinations aren't involved and in that most antisocial personality types are able to function all too well in society.