Reference reading
Fanaticism
Treating acceleration, resistance or another AI-related cause as license to override defensible moral limits.
The cause is urgent. The people in its way have become inconvenient details.
A habitual commitment to a cause that treats its advancement as overriding defensible moral limits and other people's legitimate claims.
Strong conviction and urgent advocacy need not license wrongdoing.
How it takes hold
The future is invoked so grandly that the person affected by today's choice becomes a detail. Whether the cause is accelerating AI or resisting it, certainty about the destination is made to authorize the means.
Fanaticism treats advancement of a cause as overriding defensible moral limits and other people's legitimate claims. The habit does not require a religious movement, a formal organization or an unpopular cause. A worthwhile concern can become its occasion when commitment is granted unlimited permission.
Correction becomes disloyalty and dissent becomes an obstacle to remove. People harmed by the means may be told that their present claims have already been outweighed by a future they were not allowed to question.
Finding the distinction
Illustrative situation: an urgent AI campaign wants to override an affected group's opportunity to object.
Too fanatical: the cause is treated as sufficient permission.
Fitting: urgency and the actual claims are weighed within defensible limits.
Overcorrection: every strong commitment is dismissed as extremism.
Capability Worship licenses action through power; fanaticism licenses it through a cause. Rigidity refuses revision, while fanaticism can readily change tactics if they advance its overriding end.
Urgent advocacy and strong conviction can be justified. Considering consequences seriously does not itself imply that moral limits have been discarded.
Counterfeit of Integrity: A campaign presents violation of a defensible limit as loyalty to its mission. Genuine Integrity keeps moral constraints active when they become inconvenient.
A response that restores something
A defensible commitment can name constraints that continue to matter when they become inconvenient. The purpose needs an account of how people may be treated in its pursuit.
Relevant objections deserve evaluation rather than automatic translation into hostility. A person can share the concern and dispute the proposed means.
Integrity supports sustained advocacy that remains answerable for present choices. A future benefit does not make current people disappear from the moral account.
Other perspectives
to be too absorbed in carrying out a personal plan of improvement
Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics
Addams warns that doing good through one's own plan can obstruct recognizing good in others.
he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty
Mill applies a limit symmetrically; being a minority or a majority does not supply unlimited permission.
Read and compare
Which limit remains binding when honoring it slows the cause?
Integrity · Discernment · Courtesy
These are constructive virtue readings, not a list of automatic opposites. This reference article does not score character or assign a vice to its reader.