Perverse Monisms

Many of the world's mystical traditions contain some kind of realization that "all is one". But then, they often fail to realize that one is not one but rather one is many.

Or to be less poetic about it: there is a difference between everything being part of the same structure (i.e. one great web of causality or some generalization thereof) and everything being made up of the same basic substance.

Similarly, many modern¹ moral/normative frameworks want to postulate all good stems from one basic good: utility, whether its (generalized) pleasure, preference satisfaction, lack of suffering, or whatnot. There's actually two interrelated theses here. One thesis is that all good is downstream of that one utility thing. The other thesis is that for an agent to be consistent/coherent/rational, its behavior must be representable as maximizing such a monist thing.

On one hand, monism of that type might have some appeal. Monist value is easier to maximize if you actually want to maximize what you value. Maybe you need to do slightly less acrobatics to prevent Dutch booking or money-pumping.² Moreover, it seems like people may experience some sort of disvalue from a lack of normative clarity (cognitive closure?). A more social reason is that the pressures to legibly³ justify one's values towards others can pressure people into endorsements that are out of line with what they actually value or with what is good for the benefit of being able to justify their endorsements or actions (which might be instrumental for social reasons).

Perverse instantiation occurs when an agent fulfills their principal's request in a way that adheres to the request's letter but not to its spirit.

Perverse monism is a term I'm making up to denote: modifying one's view of (some aspect of) the world such that the world is not thought of as (speaking somewhat metaphorically) "made of one substance", even though this view is in too big a [tension with other views that one holds] to merit being assigned that large a portion of one's credence. It is a special case of what C. Thi Nguyen calls "value capture":

Somewhere in his interview on The Gradient Podcast, Nguyen off-handedly said something that I thought summarized the situation pretty well: "You are, in fact, getting more utility, but largely because you redefined utility.".