Commonsense Good, Creative Good
Letâs say youâre vegan and you go to a vegan restaurant. The food is quite bad, and youâd normally leave a bad review, but now youâre worried: what if your bad review leads people to go to non-vegan restaurants instead? Should you refrain from leaving a review? Or leave a false review, for the animals?
On the other hand, there are a lot of potential consequences of leaving a review beyond âit makes people less likely to eat at this particular restaurant, and they might eat at a non-vegan restaurant insteadâ. For example, three plausible effects of artificially inflated reviews could be:
Non-vegans looking for high-quality food go to the restaurant, get vegan food, think âeven highly rated vegan food is terribleâ, donât become vegan.
Actually good vegan restaurants have trouble distinguishing themselves, because âhelpfulâ vegans rate everywhere five stars regardless of quality, and so the normal forces that push up the quality of food donât work as well. Now the food tastes bad and fewer people are willing to sustain the sacrifice of being vegan.
People notice this and think âif vegans are lying to us about how good the food is, are they also lying to us about the health impacts?â Overall trust in vegans (and utilitarians) decreases.
Despite thinking that it is the outcomes of actions that determine whether they are a good idea, I donât think this kind of reasoning about everyday things is actually helpful. Itâs too easy to tie yourself in logical knots, making a decision that seems counterintuitive-but-correct, except if you spent longer thinking about it, or discussed it with others, you would have decided the other way.
We are human beings making hundreds of decisions a day, with limited ability to know the impacts of our actions, and a worryingly strong capacity for self-serving reasoning. A full unbiased weighing of the possibilities is, sure, the correct choice if you relax these constraints, but in our daily lives thatâs not an option we have.
Luckily, humans have lived for centuries under these constraints, and weâve developed ideas of what is âgoodâ that turn out to be a solid guide to typical situations. Moral systems around the world donât agree on everything, but on questions of how to live your daily life theyâre surprisingly close: patience, respect, humility, moderation, kindness, honesty. Iâm thankful we have all this learning on makes for harmonious societies distilled into our cultures to support us in our interactions.
On the other hand, I do think there is a very important place for this kind of reasoning: sometimes our normal ideas of âgoodâ are seriously lacking. For example, they donât give us much guidance once scale is involved: a donation that helps a hundred people and one that equivalently helps a thousand people are both âgoodâ from a commonsense perspective, even though I think itâs pretty clearly ten times better to go with the second. Similarly, if youâre trying to decide between working as a teacher in a poor school, therapist in a jail, a manager at a food pantry, or a firefighter in a disadvantaged community, common sense just says theyâre all âgoodâ and leaves you there.
How do we reconcile this conflict, where carefully getting into the consequences of decisions can take a lot of time and risk strange errors, while never evaluating the outcomes of decisions risks having a much smaller positive effect on the world? Iâd propose normally going for âcommonsense goodâ and then in the most important cases going for âcreative goodâ.
The idea is, normally just do straightforwardly good things. Be cooperative, friendly, and considerate. Embrace the standard virtues. Donât stress about the global impacts or second-order altruistic effects of minor decisions. But also identify the very small fraction of your decisions which are likely to have the largest effects and put a lot of creative energy into doing the best you can. Questions like, what cause areas are most important, or what should I do with my time and/âor money? On those decisions, make a serious effort to figure out what will have the best effects: read what other people have to say, talk to people whoâve made similar decisions, form your own views, consider writing up your conclusions, and stay open to evidence that you could be doing better.
For example, perhaps after a lot of thinking you decide that animals matter a lot more than most people seem to think they do, especially less-fuzzy ones like shrimp, and that improving their situation is one of the most urgent ways to make the world better. You might decide to start donating to support animal organizations, or even switch careers to work on it full time. You might decide to stop eating animal products as a way to show how important this is and build the world you want to see. But in your day-to-day life Iâd recommend doing normal good things: maintain a good work-life balance even though your work matters a lot; give your friends honest health advice, not what will get them to minimize animal consumption; review restaurants as a consumer, not an animal advocate.
Reposting my LW comment here:
Just want to plug Josh Greeneâs great book Moral Tribes here (disclosure: heâs my former boss). Moral Tribes basically makes the same argument in different/âmore words: we evolved moral instincts that usually serve us pretty well, and the tricky part is realizing when weâre in a situation that requires us to pull out the heavy-duty philosophical machinery.
I wanted to highlight Annaâs comment in the LW version:
Didnât catch this until just now, but happy to see the idea expanded a bit more! Iâll have to sit down and think on it longer, but I did have some immediate thoughts.
I guess at its core Iâm unsure what exactly a proper balance of thinking about folk ethics[1] (or commonsense good) and reasoned ethics[2] (or creative good) is, when exactly you should engage in each. You highlight the content, that reasoned ethics should be brought in for the big decisions, those with longevity generally. And Ana starts to map this out a bit further, saying reasoned ethics involves an analysis of âthe small set of decisions that are worth intensive thought/âeffort/âresearchâ But even if the decision set is small, if itâs just these really big topics, the time spent implementing major decisions like these is likely long and full of many day to day tradeoffs and choices. Sure, eating vegan is now a system one task for me, but part of what solidified veganism for me was bringing in my discomfort from reasoned ethics into my day to day for awhile, for months even. The folk ethics there (for me) was entirely in the opposite direction, and I honestly donât think I would have made the switch if I didnât bring reasoned ethics into my everyday decisions.
I guess for that reason Iâm kind of on guard, looking for other ways my commonsense intuitions about what I should do might be flawed. And sure, when you set it up like âfolk ethics is just sticking to basic principles of benevolence, of patience, honesty and kindnessâ few will argue adherence to this is flawed. But itâs rarely these principles and instead the application of them where the disagreement comes in. My family and I donât disagree that kindness is an important value, we disagree on what practicing kindness in the world looks like.
In light of this, I think Iâd propose the converse of Annaâs comments: stick to folk ethics for most of the day to day stuff, but with some frequency[3] bring the reasoned ethics into your life, into the day to day, to see if how you are living is in accord with your philosophical commitments. This could look like literally going through a day wearing the reasoned ethics hat, or it could even look like taking stock of what what has happened over a period of time and reflecting on whether those daily decisions are in accord. Maybe this community is different, but I agree with Eccentricity that I generally see way to little of this in the world, and really wish people engaged in it more.
Iâll use folk ethics in place of commonsense good hereafter because I find the term compelling
Iâll use reasoned ethics in place of creative good because I think this set (folk ethics and reasoned ethics) feels more intuitive. Sorry for changing the language, it just made it easier for me to articulate myself here.
Really unsure whatâs best here so Iâm leaving it intentionally vague. If I had to suggest something, at least an annual review and time of reflection is warranted (I like to do this at the end of the calendar year but I think you could do it w/âe) and at most I think checking in each week (running through a day at the end of the week really thinking if the decisions and actions you are taking make sense) might be good.
Nice post! Somewhat relatedly, people may like to check Paul Christianoâs Integrity for consequentialists.