Regardless of whether or not moral realism is true, I feel like we should act as though it is (and I would argue many Effective Altruists already do to some extent). Consider the doctor who proclaims that they just don’t value people being healthy, and doesn’t see why they should. All the other doctors would rightly call them crazy and ignore them, because the medical system assumes that we value health. In the same way, the field of ethics came about to (I would argue) try and find the most right thing to do. If an ethicist comes out and says that the most right thing to is to kill whomever you like without justification (ignoring flow on effects of course) we should be able to say they are just crazy. One, because wellbeing is what we have decided to value, and two, because wellbeing is associated with positive brain states, and why value something if it has no link to conscious experience? What would the world be like if we accepted that these people just have different values and ‘who are we to say they are wrong’?
Imagine the Worst Possible World of Sam Harris, full of near-infinite suffering for a near-infinite number of mind states. This is bad, if the word bad means anything at all. If you think this is not bad, then we probably mean different things by ‘bad’. Any step to move away from this is therefore good. There are right and wrong ways to move from the Worst Possible World to the Best Possible World, and to an extent we can determine what these are.
I haven’t fully formed this idea yet, but I’m writing a submission to Essays in Philosophy about this with Robert Farquharson. An older version of our take on this is here: http://www.michaeldello.com/?p=741
Regardless of whether or not moral realism is true, I feel like we should act as though it is (and I would argue many Effective Altruists already do to some extent). Consider the doctor who proclaims that they just don’t value people being healthy, and doesn’t see why they should. All the other doctors would rightly call them crazy and ignore them, because the medical system assumes that we value health. In the same way, the field of ethics came about to (I would argue) try and find the most right thing to do. If an ethicist comes out and says that the most right thing to is to kill whomever you like without justification (ignoring flow on effects of course) we should be able to say they are just crazy. One, because wellbeing is what we have decided to value, and two, because wellbeing is associated with positive brain states, and why value something if it has no link to conscious experience? What would the world be like if we accepted that these people just have different values and ‘who are we to say they are wrong’?
Imagine the Worst Possible World of Sam Harris, full of near-infinite suffering for a near-infinite number of mind states. This is bad, if the word bad means anything at all. If you think this is not bad, then we probably mean different things by ‘bad’. Any step to move away from this is therefore good. There are right and wrong ways to move from the Worst Possible World to the Best Possible World, and to an extent we can determine what these are.
I haven’t fully formed this idea yet, but I’m writing a submission to Essays in Philosophy about this with Robert Farquharson. An older version of our take on this is here: http://www.michaeldello.com/?p=741