abortion is morally wrong is a direct logical extension of a longtermist view that highly values maximizing the number of people on assumption that the average existing persons life will have positive value
Regardless of whether we’re for or against abortion, I think it’s meaningful that there was no attempt to debate this assertion in the comments. Here it is stated precisely in a single sentence:
If we have (1a) total/low critical level and (1b) non-person-affecting views in population ethics, and (2) believe that a child today will live a life above the critical level (in expectation), then (3) ignoring replaceability, preventing an abortion seems to be as good as saving a life today.
If you find this disturbing, there are a few philosophical outs:
Reject (1b): Richard Chappell does this, embracing a hybrid person-affecting and non-person-affecting view.
Reject (2): Some suffering-focused utilitarians / anti-natalists would be sympathetic to this.
Accept (3), but argue that saving lives today is bad. For example, you could use the meat-eater problem, or argue that adding a person today makes us more susceptible to the unilateralist’s curse, which could expose us to greater x-risks or s-risks.
Although it seems that this will fall upon deaf ears, if you really find this argument compelling and think you have to choose between (a) abortion is morally wrong and (b) distancing yourself from EA, why are you choosing (b)?
Even if abortion is morally wrong, it seems that virtually every EA cause is more important than abortion. People in extreme poverty don’t stop mattering. Neither do animals in factory farms, or people/animals/sentient AIs who may exist in the far future. Compared to the scale of these issues, abortion is comparatively small.
Partisanship and tribalism likely explain a majority of why it consumes so much of the public attention, including why you and I care about it so much. Instead of distancing yourself from EA, what’s preventing you from advocating for more “explicit countervailing frameworks prioritizing the rights and needs of already existing people?” It seems that many EAs already agree with you.
Partisanship and tribalism likely explain a majority of why it consumes so much of the public attention
My guess is that women who wish to have the option of having an abortion and not live with the stresses of feeling like they have no choice but to have a child they don’t want will probably disagree that they feel strongly about it because of “tribalism”.
Instead of distancing yourself from EA, what’s preventing you from advocating for more “explicit countervailing frameworks prioritizing the rights and needs of already existing people?”
One plausible reason is that this is not something they actually want to spend their time on.
Lets say you want to spend your time in the EA community discussing whether or not abortion is morally acceptable on longtermist grounds. But in the EA community, you frequently hear discussions around whether or not [insert your ethnicity here] can actually be capable of high quality intellectual contributions, or potentially whether people like you even deserve basic human rights!
You think this is clearly wrong by any moral framework you deem acceptable, and don’t particularly enjoy discussing this (because you want to focus on the more important discussion of whether abortion is morally acceptable or not), and find it surprising that so many people in this otherwise like-minded community have somehow come to a conclusion that you feel is so unintuitive and morally unacceptable, and have done so under what you believe to be the views of the community (or at least parts of it). You think to yourself, “Maybe these people aren’t as like-minded as I thought they were, maybe we don’t quite share the same values.” And when you express your dissatisfaction and desire to distance yourself, one of the people who were vocally against [your people]’s rights say, “Well, why don’t you stay in the community so you can make a case for your position and argue for it?”
I’m not claiming at all that this is the reason for lastmistborn’s distancing from the EA community, but just illustrating one plausible reason, mainly to indicate that they should have no obligation or expectation placed on them to stay, nor to argue against views they find disturbing before they choose to distance themselves (I recognise you’re not explicitly doing this!). But basically the costs of engagement here are asymmetrical because it’s much less (e.g. emotionally) costly for people to come up with a discussion point that is perceived to be against someone else’s rights than for those who perceive to have their rights challenged to engage and justify why they think they deserve this right.
Yes, this seems accurate. I’ve spent some time in liberal/left spaces talking about EA with folks who highly prioritize pro-choice policy in their politics (say that 5 times fast!). If they viewed OP’s arguments as being roughly synonymous with EA as a whole (it’s not, but that doesn’t mean the impression couldn’t exist) it would be totally understandable, I think, for them to dismiss the rest of EA. “This community doesn’t share my values,” they might say, as bruce alludes to.
Personally, I think EA is very, very compatible with mainstream left-of-center liberalism/leftism, and, in my view, a pro-choice ethic is probably a very significant part of that. Not to say that OP’s view is indefensible; it’s just that I think there is a tension between their stated arguments and the broader values and politics that are the foundation of most EA’s actually-existing political views.
Tentatively, I’m imagining there are a number of EAs who identify as longtermist first, and, to them, OP’s argument would have some purchase. Then there’s a second group who may find longtermism interesting, but they still have other commitments that they’re prioritizing (liberalism, rights, leftism, social justice, global health, and so on), and they’re unlikely to forsake those views in favor of a longtermist proposal that is, in a sense, pretty radical. I suspect the second group is larger than the first, but the impression that the former group is central to EA could lead to people viewing EA as not worth the time.
the impression that the former group is central to EA could lead to people viewing EA as not worth the time.
You’re completely right that EA should strive to be a big tent and alienate as few people as possible. Do you think it’s possible that the impression that EA is “very, very compatible with mainstream left-of-center liberalism/leftism” could contribute to less than 1% of EAs identifying as politically “right”?
Given this information, how do you think we should prioritize between appeals to one political group which could alienate a different political group?
(Note that I’m not arguing here that this particular post helps avoid alienating potential EAs on net—just that there are other groups we should consider too when thinking about what EA can do to help more people feel we’re compatible with their values.)
If you find this disturbing, there are a few philosophical outs:
I would like to object to framing these as “outs”: I disagree with several assumptions that aren’t stated here (that possibly existing people or fetuses have equivalent moral value to currently existing people, that we have equal moral duties to safeguard the well being of both groups, that allowing a life to come into existence is equally as good as saving a life), but it isn’t because I’m looking for an out from an inconvenient conclusion. I believe we have a duty to try and make the world a better place for future generations, and that we must avoid making it a worse one, but I don’t consider myself a longtermist and I strongly disagree that maximising the total number of people who are happier than the critical level is a worthwhile goal, as opposed to trying to maximise the median or average happiness of a smaller number of people. These are normative disagreements, and they are why I don’t find this argument compelling. Your case isn’t falling on deaf ears, I understand it and I simply disagree.
Partisanship and tribalism likely explain a majority of why it consumes so much of the public attention, including why you and I care about it so much.
I also strongly disagree with this. I did not grow up somewhere where abortion was a hot-button or partisan issue the way it is in the US, and I don’t believe that it’s a partisan or tribal issue. This may be the case for you, but I care about this issue because a) as bruce points out below, the right to have abortions is an issue that deeply affects an enormous number of people and I would very much like them, and myself, to have option to exercise my free will and bodily autonomy on issues that have huge impacts on my life, and b) I highly value rights, particularly social and positive rights, as a moral good, and this is one among many that are vitally important.
Instead of distancing yourself from EA, what’s preventing you from advocating for more “explicit countervailing frameworks prioritizing the rights and needs of already existing people?”
Again, bruce’s comment articulates my feelings on this very well. This is not the only problem I have with EA as it currently operates, but this is a major ideological one. I want to make it clear that the problem for me isn’t only “longtermist EA might be anti-abortion”, it’s how longtermist EA can be extended to reach this conclusion and the further implications of that. Overlooking or writing off the needs and rights of currently existing people in service of creating more future people is, overall, a stance that I find morally unacceptable and actively harmful. While I know that there are longtermist EAs who feel and think similarly, longtermist EA in general seems likely to tend towards (or in fact may actively be tending towards) this direction unless this is addressed in some way. That this issue exists in the first place is, to me, either indicative of willful oversight and disregard (which is possible and also obviously perfectly fine, if that is what longtermist EAs believe, but in my opinion morally bad), or a serious blindspot that is so enormous in size and implications that it lowers my regard of the intellectual rigor of longtermist EA. I’d also like to add that, in addition to asymmetrical costs and time issues, one reason why I’m not writing advocating for “maybe we should care about the human rights of currently existing people, and maybe we should care about it more than creating more people in the future” is that having to argue for caring about human rights in a social movement that is about doing the most good possible is, to me, a clear indicator that that movement is not the right place for me.
Thank you for explaining how you feel. For what it’s worth, is there anything I or others who believe this is an implication of longtermism can do which would help you or others who share your perspective or feelings about EA to feel more welcome?
(No need to answer if you feel like it would take asymmetric effort, or wouldn’t be worth it, or for any other reason.)
Thank you as well, it definitely is worth something. I’ve been thinking about this for the past couple of days and I can’t come up with a very satisfying answer, and this will likely be a bit of a digression so I apologize for that.
I think the short answer is perhaps not very much. (There may be others who are more imaginative than I who can come up with actual actionable things here.) The EA Forum in particular tends to value evidence based, well sourced and impartially argued posts. This is a good thing in many cases, but it does create trades offs in terms of being “welcoming”[1], and I think this is one of them: I recognize and respect that many people who oppose abortion do it from a place of believing that a fetus is a person and caring very deeply about the lives of unborn children, but the corollary to that is a reduction to the rights of bodily autonomy and self-determination of a huge number of people. It’s very challenging for me personally to find the desire and follow through to sit down and spend hours putting together a post that argues for respect for my rights because, to put it simply, the idea that I need to argue that my rights and the rights of roughly half the worlds population should be valued and respected in this type of format (or at all, even) in the context of a movement that values doing good is extremely disheartening and demotivating, particularly when those rights are already being eroded across the world. I imagine that there are people who are invested enough in EA and/or longtermism that the emotional and time costs of doing that will be worth it, but I don’t think I am.
Also, this is a relatively minor point and I only mention because you do seem to care about this and I in no way mean to come off as accusatory as I sincerely believe it was without malice or bad intent, but writing off people’s sincerely held beliefs and priorities as a result of partisanship or tribalism or assuming that a question will fall on deaf ears does have a chilling effect, at least for me. I have done my best to engage with this post respectfully and in good faith, even when I strongly disagree with many parts of it, and these comments make me feel like my disagreements are being treated as incorrect received knowledge rather than considered and examined beliefs that are treated with respect.
I put this in quotes because it doesn’t quite sit well with me, but I’m not sure what would work better—it’s not that I feel that a post that is of “lower quality” by these standard wouldn’t be welcome, necessarily, but that it would probably be met with a lot of questions and demands to have it conform more to those standards—which is, to some extent, fair enough, as every space is obviously allowed to have its own discursive norms, but it does come with costs in some cases.
Thanks for your reply. No worries if you feel like you weren’t able to come up with a satisfying answer—given that you’re engaging in a dialogue where you reasonably perceive your counterpart to be going after your rights, your reaction has been very understandable.
I’d like to apologize for the characterization of your sincerely held views as tribalism. It wasn’t empathetic or helpful to our dialogue.
Regardless of whether we’re for or against abortion, I think it’s meaningful that there was no attempt to debate this assertion in the comments. Here it is stated precisely in a single sentence:
If you find this disturbing, there are a few philosophical outs:
Reject (1a).
Reject (1b): Richard Chappell does this, embracing a hybrid person-affecting and non-person-affecting view.
Reject (2): Some suffering-focused utilitarians / anti-natalists would be sympathetic to this.
Accept (3), but argue that saving lives today is bad. For example, you could use the meat-eater problem, or argue that adding a person today makes us more susceptible to the unilateralist’s curse, which could expose us to greater x-risks or s-risks.
Although it seems that this will fall upon deaf ears, if you really find this argument compelling and think you have to choose between (a) abortion is morally wrong and (b) distancing yourself from EA, why are you choosing (b)?
Even if abortion is morally wrong, it seems that virtually every EA cause is more important than abortion. People in extreme poverty don’t stop mattering. Neither do animals in factory farms, or people/animals/sentient AIs who may exist in the far future. Compared to the scale of these issues, abortion is comparatively small.
Partisanship and tribalism likely explain a majority of why it consumes so much of the public attention, including why you and I care about it so much. Instead of distancing yourself from EA, what’s preventing you from advocating for more “explicit countervailing frameworks prioritizing the rights and needs of already existing people?” It seems that many EAs already agree with you.
My guess is that women who wish to have the option of having an abortion and not live with the stresses of feeling like they have no choice but to have a child they don’t want will probably disagree that they feel strongly about it because of “tribalism”.
One plausible reason is that this is not something they actually want to spend their time on.
Lets say you want to spend your time in the EA community discussing whether or not abortion is morally acceptable on longtermist grounds. But in the EA community, you frequently hear discussions around whether or not [insert your ethnicity here] can actually be capable of high quality intellectual contributions, or potentially whether people like you even deserve basic human rights!
You think this is clearly wrong by any moral framework you deem acceptable, and don’t particularly enjoy discussing this (because you want to focus on the more important discussion of whether abortion is morally acceptable or not), and find it surprising that so many people in this otherwise like-minded community have somehow come to a conclusion that you feel is so unintuitive and morally unacceptable, and have done so under what you believe to be the views of the community (or at least parts of it). You think to yourself, “Maybe these people aren’t as like-minded as I thought they were, maybe we don’t quite share the same values.” And when you express your dissatisfaction and desire to distance yourself, one of the people who were vocally against [your people]’s rights say, “Well, why don’t you stay in the community so you can make a case for your position and argue for it?”
I’m not claiming at all that this is the reason for lastmistborn’s distancing from the EA community, but just illustrating one plausible reason, mainly to indicate that they should have no obligation or expectation placed on them to stay, nor to argue against views they find disturbing before they choose to distance themselves (I recognise you’re not explicitly doing this!). But basically the costs of engagement here are asymmetrical because it’s much less (e.g. emotionally) costly for people to come up with a discussion point that is perceived to be against someone else’s rights than for those who perceive to have their rights challenged to engage and justify why they think they deserve this right.
Yes, this seems accurate. I’ve spent some time in liberal/left spaces talking about EA with folks who highly prioritize pro-choice policy in their politics (say that 5 times fast!). If they viewed OP’s arguments as being roughly synonymous with EA as a whole (it’s not, but that doesn’t mean the impression couldn’t exist) it would be totally understandable, I think, for them to dismiss the rest of EA. “This community doesn’t share my values,” they might say, as bruce alludes to.
Personally, I think EA is very, very compatible with mainstream left-of-center liberalism/leftism, and, in my view, a pro-choice ethic is probably a very significant part of that. Not to say that OP’s view is indefensible; it’s just that I think there is a tension between their stated arguments and the broader values and politics that are the foundation of most EA’s actually-existing political views.
Tentatively, I’m imagining there are a number of EAs who identify as longtermist first, and, to them, OP’s argument would have some purchase. Then there’s a second group who may find longtermism interesting, but they still have other commitments that they’re prioritizing (liberalism, rights, leftism, social justice, global health, and so on), and they’re unlikely to forsake those views in favor of a longtermist proposal that is, in a sense, pretty radical. I suspect the second group is larger than the first, but the impression that the former group is central to EA could lead to people viewing EA as not worth the time.
You’re completely right that EA should strive to be a big tent and alienate as few people as possible. Do you think it’s possible that the impression that EA is “very, very compatible with mainstream left-of-center liberalism/leftism” could contribute to less than 1% of EAs identifying as politically “right”?
(source)
Given this information, how do you think we should prioritize between appeals to one political group which could alienate a different political group?
(Note that I’m not arguing here that this particular post helps avoid alienating potential EAs on net—just that there are other groups we should consider too when thinking about what EA can do to help more people feel we’re compatible with their values.)
This pretty much hits the nail on the head, thank you for articulating it so well.
I would like to object to framing these as “outs”: I disagree with several assumptions that aren’t stated here (that possibly existing people or fetuses have equivalent moral value to currently existing people, that we have equal moral duties to safeguard the well being of both groups, that allowing a life to come into existence is equally as good as saving a life), but it isn’t because I’m looking for an out from an inconvenient conclusion. I believe we have a duty to try and make the world a better place for future generations, and that we must avoid making it a worse one, but I don’t consider myself a longtermist and I strongly disagree that maximising the total number of people who are happier than the critical level is a worthwhile goal, as opposed to trying to maximise the median or average happiness of a smaller number of people. These are normative disagreements, and they are why I don’t find this argument compelling. Your case isn’t falling on deaf ears, I understand it and I simply disagree.
I also strongly disagree with this. I did not grow up somewhere where abortion was a hot-button or partisan issue the way it is in the US, and I don’t believe that it’s a partisan or tribal issue. This may be the case for you, but I care about this issue because a) as bruce points out below, the right to have abortions is an issue that deeply affects an enormous number of people and I would very much like them, and myself, to have option to exercise my free will and bodily autonomy on issues that have huge impacts on my life, and b) I highly value rights, particularly social and positive rights, as a moral good, and this is one among many that are vitally important.
Again, bruce’s comment articulates my feelings on this very well. This is not the only problem I have with EA as it currently operates, but this is a major ideological one. I want to make it clear that the problem for me isn’t only “longtermist EA might be anti-abortion”, it’s how longtermist EA can be extended to reach this conclusion and the further implications of that. Overlooking or writing off the needs and rights of currently existing people in service of creating more future people is, overall, a stance that I find morally unacceptable and actively harmful. While I know that there are longtermist EAs who feel and think similarly, longtermist EA in general seems likely to tend towards (or in fact may actively be tending towards) this direction unless this is addressed in some way. That this issue exists in the first place is, to me, either indicative of willful oversight and disregard (which is possible and also obviously perfectly fine, if that is what longtermist EAs believe, but in my opinion morally bad), or a serious blindspot that is so enormous in size and implications that it lowers my regard of the intellectual rigor of longtermist EA. I’d also like to add that, in addition to asymmetrical costs and time issues, one reason why I’m not writing advocating for “maybe we should care about the human rights of currently existing people, and maybe we should care about it more than creating more people in the future” is that having to argue for caring about human rights in a social movement that is about doing the most good possible is, to me, a clear indicator that that movement is not the right place for me.
Thank you for explaining how you feel. For what it’s worth, is there anything I or others who believe this is an implication of longtermism can do which would help you or others who share your perspective or feelings about EA to feel more welcome?
(No need to answer if you feel like it would take asymmetric effort, or wouldn’t be worth it, or for any other reason.)
Thank you as well, it definitely is worth something. I’ve been thinking about this for the past couple of days and I can’t come up with a very satisfying answer, and this will likely be a bit of a digression so I apologize for that.
I think the short answer is perhaps not very much. (There may be others who are more imaginative than I who can come up with actual actionable things here.) The EA Forum in particular tends to value evidence based, well sourced and impartially argued posts. This is a good thing in many cases, but it does create trades offs in terms of being “welcoming”[1], and I think this is one of them: I recognize and respect that many people who oppose abortion do it from a place of believing that a fetus is a person and caring very deeply about the lives of unborn children, but the corollary to that is a reduction to the rights of bodily autonomy and self-determination of a huge number of people. It’s very challenging for me personally to find the desire and follow through to sit down and spend hours putting together a post that argues for respect for my rights because, to put it simply, the idea that I need to argue that my rights and the rights of roughly half the worlds population should be valued and respected in this type of format (or at all, even) in the context of a movement that values doing good is extremely disheartening and demotivating, particularly when those rights are already being eroded across the world. I imagine that there are people who are invested enough in EA and/or longtermism that the emotional and time costs of doing that will be worth it, but I don’t think I am.
Also, this is a relatively minor point and I only mention because you do seem to care about this and I in no way mean to come off as accusatory as I sincerely believe it was without malice or bad intent, but writing off people’s sincerely held beliefs and priorities as a result of partisanship or tribalism or assuming that a question will fall on deaf ears does have a chilling effect, at least for me. I have done my best to engage with this post respectfully and in good faith, even when I strongly disagree with many parts of it, and these comments make me feel like my disagreements are being treated as incorrect received knowledge rather than considered and examined beliefs that are treated with respect.
I put this in quotes because it doesn’t quite sit well with me, but I’m not sure what would work better—it’s not that I feel that a post that is of “lower quality” by these standard wouldn’t be welcome, necessarily, but that it would probably be met with a lot of questions and demands to have it conform more to those standards—which is, to some extent, fair enough, as every space is obviously allowed to have its own discursive norms, but it does come with costs in some cases.
Thanks for your reply. No worries if you feel like you weren’t able to come up with a satisfying answer—given that you’re engaging in a dialogue where you reasonably perceive your counterpart to be going after your rights, your reaction has been very understandable.
I’d like to apologize for the characterization of your sincerely held views as tribalism. It wasn’t empathetic or helpful to our dialogue.