I really like the idea of “a beneficentric virtue ethicist who takes scope-sensitive impartial benevolence to be the central virtue”, and feel that something approximating this would be a plausible recommendation of utilitarianism for the heuristics people should actually use to act. (For this purpose, it obviously wouldn’t work to include the parenthetical “(or even only)”.)
However, I’m confused by your confusion at people being appalled by utilitarianism. It seems to me that the heart of it is that utilitarianism, combined with poor choices in instrumental rationality, can lead to people doing really appalling things. Philosophically, you may reasonably object that this is a failure of instrumental rationality, not of utilitarianism. But humans are notoriously bad at instrumental rationality! From a consequentialist perspective it’s a pretty big negative to recommend something which, when combined with normal human levels of failure at instrumental rationality, can lead to catastrophic failures. It could be that it’s still, overall, a good thing to recommend, but I’d certainly feel happier if people doing so (unless they’re explicitly engaged just in a philosophical truth-seeking exercise, and not concerned with consequences) would recognise and address this issue.
Are you disagreeing with my constraint on warranted hostility? As I say in the linked post on that, I think it’s warranted to be hostile towards naive instrumentalism, since it’s actually unreasonable for limited human agents to use that as their decision procedure. But that’s no part of utilitarianism per se.
You say: it could turn out badly to recommend X, if too many people would irrationally combine it with Y, and X+Y has bad effects. I agree. That’s a good reason for being cautious about communicating X without simultaneously communicating not-Y. But that doesn’t warrant hostility towards X, e.g. philosophical judgments that X is “deeply appalling” (something many philosophers claim about utilitarianism, which I think is plainly unwarranted).
There’s a difference between thinking “there are risks to communicating X to people with severe misunderstandings” and “X is inherently appalling”. What baffles me is philosophers who claim the latter, when X = utilitarianism (and even more strongly, for X = EA).
Mmm, while I can understand “appalling” or “deeply appalling”, I don’t think “inherently appalling” makes sense to me (at least coming from philosophers, who should be careful about their language use). I guess you didn’t use that phrase in the original post and now I’m wondering if it’s a precise quote.
(I’d also missed the fact that these were philosophical judgements, which makes me think it’s reasonable to hold them to higher standards than otherwise.)
I don’t think there’s any such thing as non-inherent appallingness. To judge X as warranting moral disgust, revulsion, etc. seems a form of intrinsic evaluation (attributing a form of extreme vice rather than mere instrumental badness).
Hence the paradigmatic examples being things like racist attitudes, not things like… optimism about the prospects were one to implement communism.
I can see where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure I agree. People would be appalled by restaurant staff not washing their hands after going to the toilet, and I think this is because it’s instrumentally bad (in an uncooperative way + may make people ill) rather than because it’s extreme vice.
But negligence / lack of concern for obvious risks to others is a classic form of vice? (In this case, the connection to toilet waste may amplify disgust reactions, for obvious evolutionary reasons.)
If you specify that the staff are from a distant tribe that never learned about basic hygiene facts, I think people would cease to be “appalled” in the same way, and instead just feel that the situation was very lamentable. (Maybe they’d instead blame the restaurant owner for not taking care to educate their staff, depending on whether the owner plausibly “should have known better”.)
Thanks, that helped me sharpen my intuitions about what triggers the “appalled” reaction.
I think I’m still left with: People may very reasonably say that fraud in the service of effective altruism is appalling. Then it’s pretty normal and understandable (even if by my lights unreasonable) to label as “appalling” things which you think will predictably lead others to appalling action.
I really like the idea of “a beneficentric virtue ethicist who takes scope-sensitive impartial benevolence to be the central virtue”, and feel that something approximating this would be a plausible recommendation of utilitarianism for the heuristics people should actually use to act. (For this purpose, it obviously wouldn’t work to include the parenthetical “(or even only)”.)
However, I’m confused by your confusion at people being appalled by utilitarianism. It seems to me that the heart of it is that utilitarianism, combined with poor choices in instrumental rationality, can lead to people doing really appalling things. Philosophically, you may reasonably object that this is a failure of instrumental rationality, not of utilitarianism. But humans are notoriously bad at instrumental rationality! From a consequentialist perspective it’s a pretty big negative to recommend something which, when combined with normal human levels of failure at instrumental rationality, can lead to catastrophic failures. It could be that it’s still, overall, a good thing to recommend, but I’d certainly feel happier if people doing so (unless they’re explicitly engaged just in a philosophical truth-seeking exercise, and not concerned with consequences) would recognise and address this issue.
Are you disagreeing with my constraint on warranted hostility? As I say in the linked post on that, I think it’s warranted to be hostile towards naive instrumentalism, since it’s actually unreasonable for limited human agents to use that as their decision procedure. But that’s no part of utilitarianism per se.
You say: it could turn out badly to recommend X, if too many people would irrationally combine it with Y, and X+Y has bad effects. I agree. That’s a good reason for being cautious about communicating X without simultaneously communicating not-Y. But that doesn’t warrant hostility towards X, e.g. philosophical judgments that X is “deeply appalling” (something many philosophers claim about utilitarianism, which I think is plainly unwarranted).
There’s a difference between thinking “there are risks to communicating X to people with severe misunderstandings” and “X is inherently appalling”. What baffles me is philosophers who claim the latter, when X = utilitarianism (and even more strongly, for X = EA).
Mmm, while I can understand “appalling” or “deeply appalling”, I don’t think “inherently appalling” makes sense to me (at least coming from philosophers, who should be careful about their language use). I guess you didn’t use that phrase in the original post and now I’m wondering if it’s a precise quote.
(I’d also missed the fact that these were philosophical judgements, which makes me think it’s reasonable to hold them to higher standards than otherwise.)
I don’t think there’s any such thing as non-inherent appallingness. To judge X as warranting moral disgust, revulsion, etc. seems a form of intrinsic evaluation (attributing a form of extreme vice rather than mere instrumental badness).
Hence the paradigmatic examples being things like racist attitudes, not things like… optimism about the prospects were one to implement communism.
I can see where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure I agree. People would be appalled by restaurant staff not washing their hands after going to the toilet, and I think this is because it’s instrumentally bad (in an uncooperative way + may make people ill) rather than because it’s extreme vice.
But negligence / lack of concern for obvious risks to others is a classic form of vice? (In this case, the connection to toilet waste may amplify disgust reactions, for obvious evolutionary reasons.)
If you specify that the staff are from a distant tribe that never learned about basic hygiene facts, I think people would cease to be “appalled” in the same way, and instead just feel that the situation was very lamentable. (Maybe they’d instead blame the restaurant owner for not taking care to educate their staff, depending on whether the owner plausibly “should have known better”.)
Thanks, that helped me sharpen my intuitions about what triggers the “appalled” reaction.
I think I’m still left with: People may very reasonably say that fraud in the service of effective altruism is appalling. Then it’s pretty normal and understandable (even if by my lights unreasonable) to label as “appalling” things which you think will predictably lead others to appalling action.
I mean, lots of fallacious reasoning is “normal and understandable”, but I’m still confused when philosophers do it—I expect better from them!