I don't think you're being careful enough to separate your own ethics from your assessment of the Shiplords' ethics when you make the assertion that the Shiplords cannot possibly be actually doing moral calculus and instead must be dressing up cultural trauma as moral calculus. Or maybe instead you've forgotten about civilizations not yet confronted with the Tribute system (or are assigning them no moral weight) because the fact of the matter is that believing that ensuring life can continue to evolve and develop into (pre-spaceflight/First Secret/whatever other trigger for the Shiplords coming around) civilizations is of greater importance than the incredible degree of suffering said civilizations go through once subjected to the Tribute system is entirely plausible without assigning infinite weight to a given factor because of cultural trauma as you purport.
Suppose for brevity's sake suppose it is discovery of any Secret that brings the Shiplords down upon a species.
Suppose that the galaxy is a functionally static system (one that goes on forever, or for a length of time that may be approximated as 'forever' for calculation purposes). Suppose the Shiplord regime over the galaxy continues indefinitely. Many intelligent species will emerge. Every intelligent species will either:
1) Reach a cap of technological progress (say, because it requires some very specific biome to survive, and never reaches the critical mass of population and territorial extent for technological takeoff)
2) Exterminate itself using technologies lesser than the Secrets (e.g. climate change or global thermonuclear war)
3) Eventually discover one or more Secrets.
Any species in Group 3 will swiftly be pounced upon by the Shiplords and either exterminated or, in effect, tortured for millennia. For this viewpoint it matters not whether we view each species as a discrete greater racial whole that is being forced to collectively suffer, or as a vast number of individuals many of whom are being killed or afflicted. Every species in Group 3 is eventually tortured for millennia- or exterminated. Every future species that
will occupy Group 3
will be thus exterminated, because this is a steady-state process. The Shiplords do not plan to ever stop doing this, after all.
This is significant. It is important to note the
every future species part. If the Shiplords only intended to do this for a fixed span of time (say, ten million years) and then it would all be over, then the moral calculus would be less unfavorable to their choices. They could point out that for every species that suffers their torture, hundreds or thousands of future species will exist without the torture, and that their ability to exist will be secured
by the torture. A short spasm of pain, in exchange for a vastly longer time of peace and well-being.
But this is not, so far as we can tell, the case. Their plan shows every sign of being to go on doing exactly as they are doing until the last star burns out, so all future species will be faced with the same situation as all present species!
You cannot weigh the future existence and survival of galactic life for billions of years to come in one pan of the balance, unless you also weigh the future torture of that same life for billions of years in the other pan of the balance. Because the plan is to go on doing this
forever.
...
For the Shiplords to have 'calculated' that this is acceptable, one of the following explanations must be true:
A) The suffering of Group 3 is justified by the opportunity of Groups 1 and 2 to exist and flourish.
B) The suffering of Group 3 is justified by the opportunity of Groups 1, 2,
and 3 to exist and flourish.
(B) is greatly undermined by the fact that species part of Group 3 don't really get to "exist and flourish," and indeed many of them don't even get the "exist" part. They just get straight-up murdered by the Shiplords. We don't know the exact ratio of species killed by the Shiplords during First Contact, to those killed by the Shiplords later for violating the Directives, to those permitted to go on living in their respective boxes until they give up in dismay and become Uninvolved... But we know all three scenarios happen.
Now, maybe the Shiplords have the numbers here, but I have this vision of them saying: "Look, half the intelligent species in the galaxy are Stone Age aquatic races living indefinitely in the very specific brackish-water conditions of a major river delta until a climate shift wipes them out or something like that, and another 20% just straight-up die without our intervention anyway, and of the other 30% we only actually murder 3% of them and torture the remaining 27% for, like, a few millennia, so it's worth it for the sake of all those poor permanent Stone Age fuckers who never even find out of about us."
And you have to ask... Is it? Is it
really? I dunno. And even that was me trying to pick numbers that would be charitable to the Shiplords.
...
It seems far more likely that the Shiplords simply took "ensure that no evil overlord race devours the galaxy" and assigned the moral value of doing this to "positive infinity" or some number as close to it as makes no difference, then just back-justified everything else with reference to that: "We can never be truly in the wrong, because this is what we are fighting."
Utilitarian systems inherently break when you give a term a moral weight of "infinity" or a number so large that it might as well be infinity.
Secondly, we have no reason to believe that the Shiplords haven't asked themselves "is there a better way to solve the problem".
I didn't say the Shiplords haven't asked themselves the question. I said that the Shiplords have asked themselves the question in such a way that they were never going to find a useful answer, even if one exists.
That is, indeed, wrapped up in the nature of my accusation against them- that they permitted their biases and preconceptions to close off vast arenas of possibility, including the possibility of simply
waiting and finding some other way to process their trauma so that their immediate successors a little farther down the line could approach the problem in a healthier manner.
It's entirely possible for a person to deeply fuck up because of their own emotional damage, and spend the rest of their life wondering "how could I have fucked up so much," and still
never actually introspect deeply enough to recognize the nature of the problem or resolve it so that it doesn't happen again.
The Shiplords seem like poster children for this phenomenon.
In fact between the existence of this simulation and the Shiplord who asked Amanda to find a better way we have every reason to think that they have asked and continue to ask that question of themselves. They haven't been able to answer yes because apparently Shiplords cannot into diplomacy (or ask that question of others rather than themselves), but that blindspot isn't (or at least isn't guaranteed to be, we don't know for sure if it is) because of cultural trauma.
Shiplords certainly cannot into diplomacy
NOW... which may well be precisely the nature of the very deep pit they've short-term optimized themselves into. By modifying their culture and polices to be steadily more extreme and vicious to other races, one step at a time, they've
lost something about themselves, some potential they might have had to be more like Humanity 2.0, in terms of their outlook if not in terms of having anything like Practice.
I don't think Humanity 2.0 would have fucked this up, which is in one sense a Practiced Miracle on the part of the Elder First, but in another sense is just a sign of how badly the Shiplords reacted to the situation. Because given their clear command of the Secrets, if they wanted to be that enlightened they could probably have bootstrapped themselves to that level.
When you say the Shiplords should have calmed the fuck down and reshaped themselves into a civilization capable of being better at something they weren't equipped for immediately after the Hjivin, you're starting from the position of knowing there is a better way and that the Shiplords just couldn't see it. Without that knowledge (i.e. from the Shiplords' perspective) your request becomes "turn your civilization into one that can conceive of doing something your civilization can't conceive of in order to solve this problem", which is downright tautological. Worse yet, the bitter irony is that from all accounts the Shiplords did in fact do just that - only it turned out the thing they couldn't conceive of at the time was the infinite genocide that they ended coming up with.
The tragedy and horror of the Shiplords isn't that they failed to use logic/rational thinking, moral calculus, or rethink their actions/look at the broader picture - it's that they did do those things, and then those tools failed them because of something that was apparently outside of their context.
My own view is that the limitations of their context are themselves an artifact of something they failed to do. Maybe they should have asked other species for viewpoints different than their own? Maybe they should have just
paused and implemented no radical new changes in strategy for a few more millennia, just in case some radical thinker came up with something different?
I find it very hard to believe that they truly exhausted all possibilities, as opposed to exhausting all possibilities they were prepared to accept given the premises they refused to reconsider, premises that the Shiplords
as a whole would rather torture a galaxy forever than re-evaluate.
Because part of the package of
actually being logical and rational is, y'know, not turning into some kind of demented inflexible robot monster that twists everything around until it can ignore the most obviously bad consequences of its own actions because of some largely hypothetical threat.
But - they have the historic proof that their method works. Why reevaluate?
My point is that they should have evaluated a larger possibility space
before trying this method. Because a larger possibility space certainly existed. Either they tried a LOT of stuff we haven't heard about (possible but pure speculation), or the Tribute Cycle is very much the process of a long series of short-term optimizations by people who would rather torture a galaxy forever than revisit their basic assumptions about the proper order of that galaxy.
