Greene, Kirkegaard, and the Biorealist Rebuttal
Why “manual-override” utilitarianism still self-destructs.
Greene’s utilitarian manifesto, quoted at length in Kirkegaard’s “Effective Africanism,” treats human moral intuitions as evolutionary junk to be overridden by a universal pleasure calculus. Kirkegaard applauds this move and then tries to graft a race-based population-optimization scheme onto it. Both moves are incoherent once you recognize three elementary facts:
Moral emotions are evolved design features, not cognitive bugs.
Group extinction is the ultimate negative utility.
Any moral framework that reliably drives its adherents toward demographic or cultural self-liquidation is self-refuting.
Below is a brief clarification of what Greene actually believes, followed by a concise, point-by-point refutation of his premises, and an explanation of why Kirkegaard’s appropriation collapses under its own weight while making an otherwise valid point about pathological altruism.
Greene in Context: a “qualified” utilitarian
Greene is not a starry-eyed Benthamite. In Moral Tribes he openly concedes that organ-harvesting thought-experiments, experience machines, and the like make classical utilitarianism look grotesque. Yet he still argues that, once you accept moral anti-realism and the evolutionary origins of intuition, utilitarianism remains “the best manual override we’ve got” for large-scale, cross-tribal conflicts.
Small-scale morality is handled by tribal instincts (“Me vs. Us”).
Global morality requires a conscious calculus of welfare (“Us vs. Them”).
That is Greene’s own framing, and it is precisely where the wheels come off.
Meta-Ethical Sleight of Hand
Greene’s move
“Our intuitions were shaped by evolution; therefore deontology is silly and utilitarianism is what’s left.”
Why it’s absurd
If moral realism is false, i.e., if no moral claim is objectively true, then nothing is “what’s left.” Utilitarianism has no privileged status; it is just one more evolved preference bundle. Greene smuggles an unearned prescriptive conclusion out of a descriptive premise, a textbook is/ought violation.
Evolutionary Heuristics Are Fitness Algorithms
Love, kin loyalty, disgust toward freeloaders, resentment of cheaters, these are low-level decision rules that promoted inclusive fitness in ancestral groups. Ignoring or suppressing them is not “rational”; it is biologically self-defeating. A moral system that asks humans to treat their own children and distant strangers as morally interchangeable units is demanding the functional equivalent of programmed infertility.
Utility Is Not a Fungible Global Commodity
Greene models happiness as a scalar you can sum across eight billion interchangeable egos. In reality:
Reproductive value differs. Ten additional children in a lineage that sustains high-trust, high-innovation social capital have far greater civilizational impact than ten additional children in a lineage chronically trapped at subsistence IQ and social organization.
Network effects matter. A society that preserves cognitive capital and technological momentum multiplies utility for future generations; a society that trades that away for short-term hedonic equalization destroys option value on a planetary scale.
Utility is path-dependent and lumpy; treating it as uniform violates the basic economics of compounding returns.
The “Monster List” of Utilitarian Horrors Is Self-Inflicted
Greene readily admits that utilitarianism seems to demand:
Killing infants to reallocate resources
Forced organ harvesting
Mandatory poverty for productive citizens
Wiring everyone into an experience-machine hive
Those conclusions follow only if you first erase kin bonds, long-horizon group fitness, and civilizational externalities from the model. Re-insert those variables and the horrors evaporate:
Infanticide destroys future reproductive capacity—long-term negative.
Organ harvesting undermines social trust necessary for high-productivity cooperation—negative.
Experience machines produce evolutionary dead ends—negative.
Absolute altruism invites exploitation by free-riding populations—negative.
The absurdities are artifacts of absurd premises, not of “hard-headed rationality.”
Kirkegaard’s Racial-Utilitarian Pivot Is a Category Error
Kirkegaard accepts Greene’s anti-realist demolition of moral intuition, then abruptly re-introduces a different intuition—technological maximization by high-IQ lineages—without justification. If all intuitions are arbitrary, why privilege that one? Conversely, if there is an objective good (civilizational flourishing), then the original anti-realist move was illegitimate. He can’t have it both ways.
The Only Non-Suicidal First Principle: “Avoid Extinction”
Adopt one axiomatic constraint:
“The continued existence and flourishing of my lineage is preferable to its extinction.”
From that, a robust moral structure falls out:
Prioritize kin and ethnic continuity (inclusive fitness).
Cultivate cooperative norms locally, reciprocity globally (game-theoretic stability).
Invest in cognitive and cultural capital (long-horizon utility multipliers).
Limit altruism where it predictably erodes 1–3 (anti-pathological-altruism safeguard).
Call it fitness-aligned ethics: it tracks biological reality, preserves civilization, and blocks the runaway-altruist paradox that dooms universalist utilitarianism.
Why “Effective Africanism” Is Still Correct, For the Wrong Reason
Here Kirkegaard lands a blow that utilitarians refuse to see: funneling resources into perpetually high-fertility, low-productivity populations is not altruism; it is civilizational self-harm. Western technological infrastructure, institutional trust, and scientific discovery come overwhelmingly from lineages whose traits are poorly replicated in those target populations. Amplifying the latter at the expense of the former degrades the very substrate upon which all large-scale human welfare depends.
Kirkegaard is right about the symptom, but he misdiagnoses the cause. The problem is not insufficient utilitarian rigor; it is utilitarianism’s own requirement to treat all happiness as metaphysically interchangeable. Add differential group fitness back into the model and “Effective Africanism” is revealed as an evolutionary dead-end, not a moral triumph.
Greene’s utilitarianism is not the inevitable destination of rational reflection; it is a degenerate spreadsheet fantasy that deletes the very heuristics which made human cooperation, and hence morality, possible. Kirkegaard’s attempt to bolt racial eugenics onto that chassis only highlights the contradiction: you cannot reject evolved moral intuitions as meaningless and then cherry-pick the ones you like.
A moral framework that ignores evolutionary design constraints is, quite literally, selection against itself. Any group that consistently applies it without boundary conditions will be out-reproduced, out-competed, and eventually replaced by groups that don’t.
In the long run, nature is the final moral arbiter, and she shows no mercy to systems that reward sterility and self-erasure.
excellent essay.
insofar as this is a criticism of universalist utilitarianism, it succeeds by pointing out an important and specific flaw. but as an unum necessarium upon which to build a moral system, i think it fails, as does all utilitarianism and all attempts to isolate a value or virtue and elevate it above all others. no longer governed by the balance of other virtues, it quickly becomes a parody of itself. it absolutizes a partial truth. no single virtue is sufficient to guide moral reasoning in every situation. kindness or tolerance without justice leads to all kinds of evil. justice without mercy leads to cruelty. likewise "fitness aligned ethics" logical conclusion would seem to be racial totalitarianism at which point there is nothing stopping the most "fit" defining good and evil as they please.
that said, i am largely in agreement that it is pure insanity to ignore either "fitness" or the natural preference one has for their own kin. i think it is foundational, but i dont think one can use it as THE foundation of an ethical system. to say nothing of the problem with defining "fitness" beyond mere survival. it is easy enough to imagine a very "fit" but morally grotesque society.