I agree with you on your central premise that philosophical triviality is okay if the idea is still valuable and important. But I think EA happens to be less trivial than even Rob says. It looks to me (from a cursory reading of Iason’s paper) like the ‘thick version’ in Iason Gabriel’s post is quite a bit thinner than the ‘associated ideas’ in Rob’s post. The thick version involves assumptions that I think are pretty central to EA—the broadly consequentialist framework (which includes the erasure of the action/omission distinction common to many moral theories and a morally egalitarian ethos with regard to categories like nationality and species) and confidence in scientific methodology. The associated ideas go further than that—the idea that earning to give is highly effective or that RCTs are highly valuable same more specific than even the thick version. I think Jason’s thick version is a better description of EA than the thin version (which is closer to what Rob uses in his post), and though it’s more trivial than a version incorporating all of those incorporated ideas would be, it’s significantly less trivial than the thin one.
I agree with you on your central premise that philosophical triviality is okay if the idea is still valuable and important. But I think EA happens to be less trivial than even Rob says. It looks to me (from a cursory reading of Iason’s paper) like the ‘thick version’ in Iason Gabriel’s post is quite a bit thinner than the ‘associated ideas’ in Rob’s post. The thick version involves assumptions that I think are pretty central to EA—the broadly consequentialist framework (which includes the erasure of the action/omission distinction common to many moral theories and a morally egalitarian ethos with regard to categories like nationality and species) and confidence in scientific methodology. The associated ideas go further than that—the idea that earning to give is highly effective or that RCTs are highly valuable same more specific than even the thick version. I think Jason’s thick version is a better description of EA than the thin version (which is closer to what Rob uses in his post), and though it’s more trivial than a version incorporating all of those incorporated ideas would be, it’s significantly less trivial than the thin one.