EA-style utilitarianism is to morality as BMI is to health. Both are useful for describing a rough “healthy range,” and as metrics of health at the population level.
At the individual level, we should be more careful. For some people, they’ll serve as a helpful guide in forming moral or health habits and decisions. For others, they’ll feed into disordered thought and action, and it might be best for some people to ignore certain metrics, culture, and activities surrounding weight loss/morality.
When we manage weight, we have to take it seriously without getting obsessive. Counting calories and weighing yourself isn’t the same thing as eating less or more healthily. Participating in EA culture, having EA status, and thinking about EA ideas isn’t the same thing as being effectively altruistic.
Precisely defining endorsable guidance on exactly how each individual person should eat on a day-to-day basis is beyond the capacity of the medical system. Analogously, EA can’t tell you exactly what you should do with your time and money to make the world a better place. It can offer general guidance and create programs for you to try. At some point, though, most people will have to branch off from EA, create a set of moral behaviors that make sense for their lifestyle, and focus on maintaining those habits. Some people will remain heavily involved in EA throughout their life, some people will come back in for regular “checkups,” some people will find that they find it incredibly distasteful for some reason and stay away.
Think about the EA movement as a nascent, secular “moral system,” analogous to the “medical system” (albeit with many important differences—I’d never want to see EA adopt all the properties of any currently existing medical system).
EA-style utilitarianism is to morality as BMI is to health. Both are useful for describing a rough “healthy range,” and as metrics of health at the population level.
At the individual level, we should be more careful. For some people, they’ll serve as a helpful guide in forming moral or health habits and decisions. For others, they’ll feed into disordered thought and action, and it might be best for some people to ignore certain metrics, culture, and activities surrounding weight loss/morality.
When we manage weight, we have to take it seriously without getting obsessive. Counting calories and weighing yourself isn’t the same thing as eating less or more healthily. Participating in EA culture, having EA status, and thinking about EA ideas isn’t the same thing as being effectively altruistic.
Precisely defining endorsable guidance on exactly how each individual person should eat on a day-to-day basis is beyond the capacity of the medical system. Analogously, EA can’t tell you exactly what you should do with your time and money to make the world a better place. It can offer general guidance and create programs for you to try. At some point, though, most people will have to branch off from EA, create a set of moral behaviors that make sense for their lifestyle, and focus on maintaining those habits. Some people will remain heavily involved in EA throughout their life, some people will come back in for regular “checkups,” some people will find that they find it incredibly distasteful for some reason and stay away.
Think about the EA movement as a nascent, secular “moral system,” analogous to the “medical system” (albeit with many important differences—I’d never want to see EA adopt all the properties of any currently existing medical system).