Equim is a world in which everyone is completely impartial. In Equim, everyone treats everyone else with equal concern. Therefore, if a parent had the choice of saving their child or another child from drowning, they would make an impartial decision, possibly flipping a coin or simply choosing the child that is closest. For the purpose of this thought experiment, let us say that the world of Equim is happier than our society, both on a societal level and an individual level. If you could give the people of Equim a pill to make them more like the people of Earth, would or should you? Contrarily, would or should you give a pill to make the people of Earth more like the people of Equim?

Let us pause and think about the implications of each decision and the factors one must take into account to arrive at it. The core of the argument is the difference between pragmatic, hedonistic utilitarians and eloquent, higher moralists who advocate that we should not confuse mere contentment with eudaimonia, also known as human flourishing.

Let us explore both points of view. For the pro-Equim side, considering the core premise that empirically the happiness of both the individual and society as a whole is greater, and assuming your goal is to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering, the argument for Equim is ironclad. From this perspective, any argument that injects partiality or any sort of human bias is simply moral negligence on our end.

The implication of this perspective is that the loss of personalization in human connection is just a value we subtract from the utilitarian algebra to make the right call. The pro-Equim side argues that this subtraction is for our own good. They point out that human bias and favoritism form the cornerstone of the relentless catalog of war, nepotism, racism, and systemic poverty that we seek to fight against. Each of these evils shares a common root in partiality, human bias, and segregation. Removing that seems like the obvious thing to do. It will fix all the problems, right?

Consider a specific edge case. Suppose the love of your life and a stranger are both on the tracks of a trolley problem, and you are standing next to the lever. If you pull the lever, you save your love but kill a stranger. If you do nothing, your love dies, but the stranger lives. According to the pure and unbiased utilitarian view, both choices yield the same outcome since you possess no bias after taking the Equim pill. Considering the utilitarian algebra, there is no moral implication in pushing the lever. It is just an act and nothing more. What happened here is that the problem itself ceases to exist, and your choice does not burden you anymore. You are freer. Is the idea of outsourcing morality to equations liberating, and does it truly seem to increase the net pleasure for an individual?

Critics of Equim argue that if you care for everyone equally, your depth of love has plummeted. However, the premise stated clearly that individual happiness is also increased, rendering that argument invalid. This means that the citizens of Equim do not care less. Instead, they care more. They have successfully expanded their circle of empathy from selected groups to the entire human race. Imagine a world where a child can look at any adult with the same confidence and sense of security as they would their own parents. You decide whether that is better or worse.

Now let us examine the anti-Equim perspective, which is the one I resonate with. The core argument here is not about pleasure and harm. It is about the agency of the self. If the decision for an action is not yours and is instead outsourced to an equation, there was never truly a choice. Morality cannot exist without choice.

You have unknowingly lost a part of yourself. You are no longer a moral agent, but a mere cog in the system that just functions rather than one who decides. Equim is not a society of good people. It is a society of functioning machines wearing a fancy cloak of equity.

You, my friend, are defined by your commitments, the people you cherish, the priorities you have, and the biases you live with. Surrender these, and you surrender yourself. The loss of self is what concerns me most. If you strip away all my biases, you strip me from myself. I lose what I call my identity and get molded into a generic, interchangeable cog in a deterministic global machine governed by equations.

Human love is by definition an act of favoritism. It is a discrimination against the rest of the world because a specific person holds more value to you than the masses. You cannot love everyone equally. If you do, it is not love, but simply your baseline behavior. If you strip away bias and partiality from the human mind, you remove the specialness of human connection. You might generate utility, but you lose the depth of the experience.

The very nature of the true human experience exists in the deep cracks and hills of the way we interpret and act. Strip that away, and you are left with a flat and barren land. You cannot have depth without a height to compare it against.

Agency over the self means being presented with a choice and still choosing the stranger over your lover. This is what makes you a hero or a failed lover. You cannot have both. The cost of being human is choosing the regrets you live with.

Bias has definitely caused great evil, but it has also given us the agency we possess. Perhaps it is better to be yourself and capable of evil than to be a mere cog in a machine.

So, which pill are you going to choose now that you have heard both sides? Remember to account for my bias toward the anti-Equim perspective, which may have influenced this writing. Ultimately, which pill are you personally taking?