I like the idea, though I think its funny that we go from “It’d be helfpul to have a snappy name for this view,” to another opaque and easily confused made up philosophical term. Maybe ‘Helping other peopleism’.
I think beneficentrism is a good word and works fine. Feels well-optimized for its target audience, which I gather is philosophers and philosophy-fans who object to EA because they think EA commits you to utilitarianism.
I don’t like the name much, though I can’t think of better alternatives. I think Will MacAskill had suggested “benetarianism” for this or a similar view, many years ago. But I don’t like that name either.
(I shared the post not because I like “Beneficentrism” as a label, but because it identifies a core idea shared by all plausible moral views, and notes that this idea is probably enough to generate the most important practical implications of both utilitarianism and effective altruism. On reflection, perhaps Richard’s post should have described the idea without also proposing a label for it, since I fear people who dislike the label will take the idea less seriously than they would otherwise.)
There was a bit of discussion on Twitter about this post. Rob Bensinger had a thread that included this comment:
Someone donating 20 minutes of their time to working in a soup kitchen could say they’re “promoting the general welfare”. You need something here about maximizing.
One (maybe slight boring) option would be something like “soft welfare-maximisation”, where “soft” just means that it can be subjected to various constraints.
Well, that’s not what ‘effective altruism’ means, right? At least on some understandings of the term, EA is not even a normative view; it’s rather a project that people can engage in for a variety of reasons. E.g. “excited altruists” do not, as such, embrace “beneficentrism”. (Though I would personally agree that the latter is an excellent reason for becoming involved with EA.)
I like the idea, though I think its funny that we go from “It’d be helfpul to have a snappy name for this view,” to another opaque and easily confused made up philosophical term. Maybe ‘Helping other peopleism’.
I think beneficentrism is a good word and works fine. Feels well-optimized for its target audience, which I gather is philosophers and philosophy-fans who object to EA because they think EA commits you to utilitarianism.
I don’t like the name much, though I can’t think of better alternatives. I think Will MacAskill had suggested “benetarianism” for this or a similar view, many years ago. But I don’t like that name either.
(I shared the post not because I like “Beneficentrism” as a label, but because it identifies a core idea shared by all plausible moral views, and notes that this idea is probably enough to generate the most important practical implications of both utilitarianism and effective altruism. On reflection, perhaps Richard’s post should have described the idea without also proposing a label for it, since I fear people who dislike the label will take the idea less seriously than they would otherwise.)
There was a bit of discussion on Twitter about this post. Rob Bensinger had a thread that included this comment:
One (maybe slight boring) option would be something like “soft welfare-maximisation”, where “soft” just means that it can be subjected to various constraints.
Another term for a related concept is Richard Ngo’s “scope-sensitive ethics” (or “scale sensitive” as Ben Todd suggests), which he takes to “the core intuition motivating utilitarianism”. However, that doesn’t include any explicit reference to welfare or maximisation.
Is there anything wrong just with ‘effective altruism’ as the name?
Well, that’s not what ‘effective altruism’ means, right? At least on some understandings of the term, EA is not even a normative view; it’s rather a project that people can engage in for a variety of reasons. E.g. “excited altruists” do not, as such, embrace “beneficentrism”. (Though I would personally agree that the latter is an excellent reason for becoming involved with EA.)
welfarism would be a natural one but that is already taken.