Traditional forms of utilitarianism, including both the total form ("totalism") and the average form ("averagism"), have the resources to explain how an act can be wrong while making things worse for no existing or future person.
Both had charismatic leaders who created an environment of — to use Lifton's term — "ideological totalism".
It is puzzling that he doesn't acknowledge that something very much like Internet-centrism was described as "cybernetic totalism" in "You Are Not a Gadget," by the wonderfully geeky Jaron Lanier, a book that Morozov himself reviewed a few years ago.
The enemy is what he calls "totalism," by which he means systems of political or religious belief that seek to stamp out the possibility for independent thought.
Excerpt: You Are Not a Gadget (pdf) Now, in his impassioned new book "You Are Not a Gadget," Mr. Lanier expands this thesis further, looking at the implications that digital Maoism or "cybernetic totalism" have for our society at large.
His three-volume Petter Svensks historia (1923 27; "The Story of Peter Svensk") is the chief work in which he expounds his vision (which he called "totalism") of an anti-individualistic, industrial society in which group and communal values are stressed.
Candidly acknowledging China's destructive penchant for extremism, for lurching from one form of totalism to another, Mr. Wang has become one of the first indigenous voices to critique China's "economic miracle" fully and publicly and to find it a deficient remedy for the failures of socialism.
Such theories retain the aggregative element we see in (for example) totalism and hence seem able to provide a plausible response to the nonidentity problem.
Both totalism and averagism, moreover, face objections based on considerations of justice, fairness and equality.
Totalism is a paradigm instance of the internal aspects view (though not a view Temkin, given his emphasis on equality, human flourishing and so on, himself endorses).
