“To redeem their version of morality from the demangingness objection, the tweeters assert that some good deeds are supererogatory, which is philosophy for “nice to do, but not obligatory.” The problem is that they do not present a reason why doing more good would ever be supererogatory, other than the implicit convenience of ducking the demandingness objection.”
What would it mean for a thing which nobody does (donate literally all their money beyond minimum required to live) to be obligatory? I think of “obligatory” as meaning that if someone doesn’t do a thing, then we all agree to consider them a bad person. But we can’t make that agreement regarding donating 100% of income beyond survival level, because we’d never stick to it—I think of the EAs who donate 50% of their income as extremely good people, I can’t self-modify to not do that even if I wanted to, and I don’t want to.
Without something like that, how do you distinguish “obligatory” from simply “a good thing to do” (which I and IIUC everyone in the discussion agrees that donating more is).
For what it’s worth I didn’t have your tweets in mind when I wrote this, but it’s possible I saw them a couple weeks ago when the Discourse was happening.
Thanks for linking to the post! It satisfies most of my complaint about people not providing reasoning.
I still have some objections to it, but now I’m arguing for “there are no good reasons for certain actions to be supererogatory,” which is a layer down from “I wish people would try to give reasons.”
The post mostly gives a description of people’s attitudes toward different actions, but not so much a justification for those attitudes. (Reminds me of this paper on moral attitudes toward tradeoffs.) I agree that no one thinks it’s blameworthy to stop short of donating your last dollar.
To the extent the post make a normative case, I also agree that morality has to account for the pragmatic considerations you name (uncertainty, coordination, cognitive limitations, etc), rather than naively trying to fashion the world after your favored axiology. But I think the post makes the right response: you can just factor in those considerations, and the resulting morality might still allow offsets / be demanding. “People are only going to do a certain amount and then get tired” but maybe we’re obligated to be tired a lot, etc.
Side note: I think it’s interesting that your argument against demandingness came out of an argument against offsets because another argument against offsets is related to demandingness: whenever you’re considering an offset, one option in your choice set is to buy the offset but not do the bad thing, so you should always do that.
On obligatory: maybe using this word was a mistake, I used it because it’s what everyone uses. If it means “blameworthy not to do,” then I don’t have a position. Finding the optimal schedule of blame and praise for acts of varying levels of demandingess is an empirical problem.
I meant obligatory in the sense that moral reasoning typically obligates you to take actions. When you do a bit of moral reasoning that leads you to believe that some action would be good to take, you should feel equally bound by the moral force of that reasoning, whether it implies you should donate your first dollar or your last.
Do you agree with something like “trying to apply your axiology in the real world is probably demanding”?
“To redeem their version of morality from the demangingness objection, the tweeters assert that some good deeds are supererogatory, which is philosophy for “nice to do, but not obligatory.” The problem is that they do not present a reason why doing more good would ever be supererogatory, other than the implicit convenience of ducking the demandingness objection.”
I think this might be addressed to me. My reasoning is at https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/ . Other than that, I’m not sure how you get a coherent theory of obligatory vs. supererogatory.
What would it mean for a thing which nobody does (donate literally all their money beyond minimum required to live) to be obligatory? I think of “obligatory” as meaning that if someone doesn’t do a thing, then we all agree to consider them a bad person. But we can’t make that agreement regarding donating 100% of income beyond survival level, because we’d never stick to it—I think of the EAs who donate 50% of their income as extremely good people, I can’t self-modify to not do that even if I wanted to, and I don’t want to.
Without something like that, how do you distinguish “obligatory” from simply “a good thing to do” (which I and IIUC everyone in the discussion agrees that donating more is).
For what it’s worth I didn’t have your tweets in mind when I wrote this, but it’s possible I saw them a couple weeks ago when the Discourse was happening.
Thanks for linking to the post! It satisfies most of my complaint about people not providing reasoning.
I still have some objections to it, but now I’m arguing for “there are no good reasons for certain actions to be supererogatory,” which is a layer down from “I wish people would try to give reasons.”
The post mostly gives a description of people’s attitudes toward different actions, but not so much a justification for those attitudes. (Reminds me of this paper on moral attitudes toward tradeoffs.) I agree that no one thinks it’s blameworthy to stop short of donating your last dollar.
To the extent the post make a normative case, I also agree that morality has to account for the pragmatic considerations you name (uncertainty, coordination, cognitive limitations, etc), rather than naively trying to fashion the world after your favored axiology. But I think the post makes the right response: you can just factor in those considerations, and the resulting morality might still allow offsets / be demanding. “People are only going to do a certain amount and then get tired” but maybe we’re obligated to be tired a lot, etc.
Side note: I think it’s interesting that your argument against demandingness came out of an argument against offsets because another argument against offsets is related to demandingness: whenever you’re considering an offset, one option in your choice set is to buy the offset but not do the bad thing, so you should always do that.
On obligatory: maybe using this word was a mistake, I used it because it’s what everyone uses. If it means “blameworthy not to do,” then I don’t have a position. Finding the optimal schedule of blame and praise for acts of varying levels of demandingess is an empirical problem.
I meant obligatory in the sense that moral reasoning typically obligates you to take actions. When you do a bit of moral reasoning that leads you to believe that some action would be good to take, you should feel equally bound by the moral force of that reasoning, whether it implies you should donate your first dollar or your last.
Do you agree with something like “trying to apply your axiology in the real world is probably demanding”?