Oh, I absolutely agree that we âshould want people to think and act as if having kids is a morally good thing to do.â Just as we should think of kidney donation, of adoption, of all sorts of very personal decisions that should be 100% up to individuals to decide for themselves, even though they are good things to do! The question is what further (if anything) follows that is concerning about any of this, such as to warrant the pejorative term âmoralismâ.
I donât think a historical correlation between accepting a true evaluative fact and responding badly and wrongly to it is good grounds for rejecting the true claim. (Thatâs actually precisely the pattern of practical reasoning that I take to be constitutive of âlow decouplingâ.) We should instead reject the supplemental ânaive instrumentalistâ assumptions that led people to respond badly and wrongly to the evaluative truth in question.
Again, Iâm worriedâand I think people with feminist commitments in general will be worried â about an influential view about our collective priorities which inculcates in people the belief that people can do something morally good by having kids. Thatâs a concern about the politics of longtermism, which I characterise (in passing!) in terms of moralising procreative choice. Longtermists clearly donât share this concern, nor do you.
I donât take a view on the âevaluative factâ of whether the intuition of neutrality is correct; rather, my general argument in the paper is that longtermists have been unwilling to engage with political thought and as a result arrive at political positions that are both ambiguous and unattractive. Your original post and subsequent comments seem illustrative in this regard. Attempting to construe some disagreement about longtermism in terms of a simple logical fallacy serves, in my view, to conceal lots of the detail relevant to criticisms of the view, as I have alluded to in my responses. Likewise, to disparagingly characterise positions as âlow-decouplingâ looks like asserting the abstract and impartial perspective as the authority for making claims about the social world, which is precisely what is at stake in debates between longtermism and its critics.
Probably we should leave it here, although feel free to send me your future writing on the topic, as Iâd be interested in taking a look.
Thanks for the exchange. I absolutely do endorse taking âthe abstract and impartial perspectiveâ as authoritative for assessing public policy and related social issues. (The alternative strikes me as simply indulging in uncritical vibes and bias.)
For my future reference, is there an alternative (less derogatory or stigmatizing) label youâd recommend that I use in place of âlow decouplingâ to pick out your alternative approach to normative assessment? It strikes me as an incredibly important methodological disagreement, and itâs useful to have names for different positions.
It is certainly an important disagreement. There are loads of literatures in political theory that aim to shed light on the way different political problems and practical contexts might properly shape our normative conclusions. Longtermists seem to ignore those debates, which might be fine if their view wasnât, as I try and show in the paper, deeply political.
Views that take seriously political concepts, constraints and contexts do not indulge in âuncritical vibes and biasâ. Itâs partly effective altruismâs tendency to ignore questions about politicsâfor example, about power, democracy and the processes which produce social deprivationâthat make it a fundamentally conservative movement, as many critics have pointed out.
Iâm not sure whether I fully understand what âlow decouplingâ is, as I came across the idea for the first time in your post and have looked at it only briefly. But yeah, I donât think it will be a useful concept around which to locate disagreements between longtermists and critics, although that will depend on the specifics. Iâm not sure there is a straightforward term that will carve up the field. The safest approach is to engage with the substantive details of particular argumentsâthatâs what I at least try to do in the paper!
Would you like to suggest a recommended reading that best advances your general perspective here while seriously addressing the charge of uncritical vibes and bias?
From my perspective, it seems like youâre just flatly ignoring my concerns (simply asserting that you âdo not indulge in âuncritical vibes and biasââ doesnât allay my concerns, any more than my simply asserting, without further explanation, that impartial moral theorists of my ilk do not ignore questions about power, democracy, etc., would allay yours). One reason Iâm inclined to ignore certain academic literatures is that the participants in those literatures seem to take for granted certain misguided foundational assumptions that I take to undermine their entire enterprise. Given my starting perspective, itâs not clear why I should expect to learn anything from reading people who strike me as deeply confused and donât say anything that addresses my fundamental concerns about their approach.
I would like to see more productive engagement between the two perspectives. But that requires both sides to make some effort to understand and address the otherâs concerns.
(I may write more about the substance of your paper at some point, but something that annoyed me a lot when reading it was that you largely seemed to be uncritically laundering the complaints of public critics like Emile Torres, without any apparent understanding ofâand engagement withâwhy longtermists disagree. The suggestion that our approach is âfundamentally conservativeâ strikes me as particularly groundless, and indicative of unprincipled, vibes-based criticism. But if nothing else, I guess itâs at least helpful to have the criticisms collated in one place, and maybe if I take a stab at addressing them at some point that would be a step towards more mutual engagement. You may also be interested in the final section of my paper, âWhy Not Effective Altruism?â where I respond to the âpoliticalâ critiques of Srinivasan and others.)
Oh, I absolutely agree that we âshould want people to think and act as if having kids is a morally good thing to do.â Just as we should think of kidney donation, of adoption, of all sorts of very personal decisions that should be 100% up to individuals to decide for themselves, even though they are good things to do! The question is what further (if anything) follows that is concerning about any of this, such as to warrant the pejorative term âmoralismâ.
I donât think a historical correlation between accepting a true evaluative fact and responding badly and wrongly to it is good grounds for rejecting the true claim. (Thatâs actually precisely the pattern of practical reasoning that I take to be constitutive of âlow decouplingâ.) We should instead reject the supplemental ânaive instrumentalistâ assumptions that led people to respond badly and wrongly to the evaluative truth in question.
Again, Iâm worriedâand I think people with feminist commitments in general will be worried â about an influential view about our collective priorities which inculcates in people the belief that people can do something morally good by having kids. Thatâs a concern about the politics of longtermism, which I characterise (in passing!) in terms of moralising procreative choice. Longtermists clearly donât share this concern, nor do you.
I donât take a view on the âevaluative factâ of whether the intuition of neutrality is correct; rather, my general argument in the paper is that longtermists have been unwilling to engage with political thought and as a result arrive at political positions that are both ambiguous and unattractive. Your original post and subsequent comments seem illustrative in this regard. Attempting to construe some disagreement about longtermism in terms of a simple logical fallacy serves, in my view, to conceal lots of the detail relevant to criticisms of the view, as I have alluded to in my responses. Likewise, to disparagingly characterise positions as âlow-decouplingâ looks like asserting the abstract and impartial perspective as the authority for making claims about the social world, which is precisely what is at stake in debates between longtermism and its critics.
Probably we should leave it here, although feel free to send me your future writing on the topic, as Iâd be interested in taking a look.
Thanks for the exchange. I absolutely do endorse taking âthe abstract and impartial perspectiveâ as authoritative for assessing public policy and related social issues. (The alternative strikes me as simply indulging in uncritical vibes and bias.)
For my future reference, is there an alternative (less derogatory or stigmatizing) label youâd recommend that I use in place of âlow decouplingâ to pick out your alternative approach to normative assessment? It strikes me as an incredibly important methodological disagreement, and itâs useful to have names for different positions.
It is certainly an important disagreement. There are loads of literatures in political theory that aim to shed light on the way different political problems and practical contexts might properly shape our normative conclusions. Longtermists seem to ignore those debates, which might be fine if their view wasnât, as I try and show in the paper, deeply political.
Views that take seriously political concepts, constraints and contexts do not indulge in âuncritical vibes and biasâ. Itâs partly effective altruismâs tendency to ignore questions about politicsâfor example, about power, democracy and the processes which produce social deprivationâthat make it a fundamentally conservative movement, as many critics have pointed out.
Iâm not sure whether I fully understand what âlow decouplingâ is, as I came across the idea for the first time in your post and have looked at it only briefly. But yeah, I donât think it will be a useful concept around which to locate disagreements between longtermists and critics, although that will depend on the specifics. Iâm not sure there is a straightforward term that will carve up the field. The safest approach is to engage with the substantive details of particular argumentsâthatâs what I at least try to do in the paper!
Would you like to suggest a recommended reading that best advances your general perspective here while seriously addressing the charge of uncritical vibes and bias?
From my perspective, it seems like youâre just flatly ignoring my concerns (simply asserting that you âdo not indulge in âuncritical vibes and biasââ doesnât allay my concerns, any more than my simply asserting, without further explanation, that impartial moral theorists of my ilk do not ignore questions about power, democracy, etc., would allay yours). One reason Iâm inclined to ignore certain academic literatures is that the participants in those literatures seem to take for granted certain misguided foundational assumptions that I take to undermine their entire enterprise. Given my starting perspective, itâs not clear why I should expect to learn anything from reading people who strike me as deeply confused and donât say anything that addresses my fundamental concerns about their approach.
I would like to see more productive engagement between the two perspectives. But that requires both sides to make some effort to understand and address the otherâs concerns.
(I may write more about the substance of your paper at some point, but something that annoyed me a lot when reading it was that you largely seemed to be uncritically laundering the complaints of public critics like Emile Torres, without any apparent understanding ofâand engagement withâwhy longtermists disagree. The suggestion that our approach is âfundamentally conservativeâ strikes me as particularly groundless, and indicative of unprincipled, vibes-based criticism. But if nothing else, I guess itâs at least helpful to have the criticisms collated in one place, and maybe if I take a stab at addressing them at some point that would be a step towards more mutual engagement. You may also be interested in the final section of my paper, âWhy Not Effective Altruism?â where I respond to the âpoliticalâ critiques of Srinivasan and others.)