>Isn't much of the middle ground between the status quo and "supervillain territory" fairly close to outright racism and genocidal propaganda? In effect, yes.

>Isn't much of the middle ground between the status quo and "supervillain territory" fairly close to outright racism and genocidal propaganda? In effect, yes. A true "negative utilitarian" fully accepts even the "pinprick argument" whereby a paradise would not be worth creating even if it only required one person suffering a single pinprick. But value systems, in theory, could exist somewhere in the middle. The only difference between this and historical genocides it that, because of its motivation, it would be attempted as painlessly as possible. I once heard an interesting utilitarian argument that genocide is not worse than a random mass murder of an equivalent body count. Random mass murder may actually be worse because it leaves a lot more grieving survivors, whereas genocide kills much of the people who would be grieving. Utilitarianism does bump up strongly against human moral intuitions, but we already know this from lots of thought experiments: utility monsters, the repugnant conclusion, trolley problems, the pinprick argument, etc.