Are you saying that people were worried about abolition slowing down economic growth and lowering standards of living? I haven’t heard this as a significant concern—free labor was perfectly capable of producing cotton at a small premium, and there were significant British boycotts of slave-produced products like cotton and sugar.
Absolutely slaveholders and those dependent on them were worried about their own standard of living (and more importantly, specifically not interested in significantly improving the standard of living of plantation slaves, and not because they’d never heard anyone put forward the idea that all people were equal. I mean, some of them were on first name terms with Thomas Paine and signed the Declaration of Independence and still didn’t release their slaves!). I’m sure most people who were sympathetic to EA ideas would have strongly disagreed with this prioritisation decision, just like the Quakers or Jeremy Bentham. I just don’t think they’d have been more influential than the Quakers or Jeremy Bentham, or indeed the deeply religious abolitionists lead by William Wilberforce.
I agree the number of philosophers in EA is quite low, but I’m assuming the influence centre would be similar, possibly even more Oxford-centric, in a pre-internet, status-obsessed social environment where discourse is more centred on physical places and elite institutions[1]. For related reasons I think they’d be influential in the sort of place where abolitionist arguments were already getting a fair hearing, and of little consequence in slaveowning towns in the Deep South. In the UK, I think the political process was held up by the amount of vested interests in keeping it going in Parliament and beliefs that slavery was “the natural order” rather than any lack of zeal or arguments or resources on the abolitionist side (though I’m sure they’d have been grateful for press baron Moskovitz’s donations!). I think you could make the argument that slave trade abolition in the UK was actually pretty early considering the revenues it generated, who benefited, and the generally deeply inegalitarian social values and assumption of racial superiority of British society at the time.
As for utilitarian arguments, that’s not the main way I imagine EAs would help. EA pragmatists would prioritize the cause for utilitarian reasons and do whatever is best to achieve their policy goals, much as we are already doing for animal welfare. The success of EAs in animal welfare, or indeed anywhere other than x-risk, is in implementation of things like corporate campaigns rather than mass spreading of arguments.
I agree this is probably the main way that EAs would try to help, I just don’t think abolitionism is an area where this would have much impact (both due to it being a centralised political problem, and due to existing abolitionists already being quite sophisticated when it came to boycotts and literature distribution and freedom suits). I can totally imagine historic EAs trying to find more efficient means to distribute poor relief and shaming bad farmers (and doing some stuff that seemed like a it might be effective at the time like abstinence campaigns to ward off Mathusian catastrophes), I just don’t think it would change much on the politics of slavery which wars were to be fought over. I guess it also depends on how much knowledge they get to take back with them. Introducing RCTs to medicine in the 1770s would have been revolutionary![2]
I agree a more general “what would EA be like in different eras and what would their priorities have been” would be an interesting thread.
Feels more in keeping with the thought experiment and the actual responsibilities of the modern movement to have EAs include people who are super impressed by papers they read by Jon Snow and Florence Nightingale and want to put that sort of analysis into practice in more places. Which still could have speeded up evidence based medicine a lot, but over half a century later...
Absolutely slaveholders and those dependent on them were worried about their own standard of living (and more importantly, specifically not interested in significantly improving the standard of living of plantation slaves, and not because they’d never heard anyone put forward the idea that all people were equal. I mean, some of them were on first name terms with Thomas Paine and signed the Declaration of Independence and still didn’t release their slaves!). I’m sure most people who were sympathetic to EA ideas would have strongly disagreed with this prioritisation decision, just like the Quakers or Jeremy Bentham. I just don’t think they’d have been more influential than the Quakers or Jeremy Bentham, or indeed the deeply religious abolitionists lead by William Wilberforce.
I agree the number of philosophers in EA is quite low, but I’m assuming the influence centre would be similar, possibly even more Oxford-centric, in a pre-internet, status-obsessed social environment where discourse is more centred on physical places and elite institutions[1]. For related reasons I think they’d be influential in the sort of place where abolitionist arguments were already getting a fair hearing, and of little consequence in slaveowning towns in the Deep South. In the UK, I think the political process was held up by the amount of vested interests in keeping it going in Parliament and beliefs that slavery was “the natural order” rather than any lack of zeal or arguments or resources on the abolitionist side (though I’m sure they’d have been grateful for press baron Moskovitz’s donations!). I think you could make the argument that slave trade abolition in the UK was actually pretty early considering the revenues it generated, who benefited, and the generally deeply inegalitarian social values and assumption of racial superiority of British society at the time.
I agree this is probably the main way that EAs would try to help, I just don’t think abolitionism is an area where this would have much impact (both due to it being a centralised political problem, and due to existing abolitionists already being quite sophisticated when it came to boycotts and literature distribution and freedom suits). I can totally imagine historic EAs trying to find more efficient means to distribute poor relief and shaming bad farmers (and doing some stuff that seemed like a it might be effective at the time like abstinence campaigns to ward off Mathusian catastrophes), I just don’t think it would change much on the politics of slavery which wars were to be fought over. I guess it also depends on how much knowledge they get to take back with them. Introducing RCTs to medicine in the 1770s would have been revolutionary![2]
I agree a more general “what would EA be like in different eras and what would their priorities have been” would be an interesting thread.
I’m also not sure what all the AI researchers would do, but I guess it would involve reading and writing papers
Feels more in keeping with the thought experiment and the actual responsibilities of the modern movement to have EAs include people who are super impressed by papers they read by Jon Snow and Florence Nightingale and want to put that sort of analysis into practice in more places. Which still could have speeded up evidence based medicine a lot, but over half a century later...