Thanks for this very accessible breakdown of the key differences between EA and utilitarianism. I’m somewhat of an EA newbie and have been quietly grappling with how to distinguish the two. I see EA as requiring a high-utility mindset, but certainly not utilitarianism at all costs (i.e. compromising other values).
One quick flag: did you rather mean “reducing gender inequality” in the third to last para?
Thank you! Yeah, exactly, EAs think about trying to do good in a cost-effective way, but they don’t do so at all costs. Before it was called EA, Toby Ord was envisioning something he called “positive ethics,” where the idea was that we should try to make use of the positive things from utilitarianism (that it takes seriously the suffering of people far away and how we go about reducing it) but not having to include the negative things (like a narrow set of values and extreme demandingness.)
Thanks for this very accessible breakdown of the key differences between EA and utilitarianism. I’m somewhat of an EA newbie and have been quietly grappling with how to distinguish the two. I see EA as requiring a high-utility mindset, but certainly not utilitarianism at all costs (i.e. compromising other values).
One quick flag: did you rather mean “reducing gender inequality” in the third to last para?
Thank you! Yeah, exactly, EAs think about trying to do good in a cost-effective way, but they don’t do so at all costs. Before it was called EA, Toby Ord was envisioning something he called “positive ethics,” where the idea was that we should try to make use of the positive things from utilitarianism (that it takes seriously the suffering of people far away and how we go about reducing it) but not having to include the negative things (like a narrow set of values and extreme demandingness.)