I don’t think this is an example of “naive utilitarianism”. It’s a fairly standard EA cause prioritization analysis. Vasco is not arguing that we ought to break the law, or even that we should go against common-sense morality.
Indeed, common-sense morality finds itself in a bit of a pickle on this question: it cannot object to someone arguing that we ought not to donate to global health charities, because (as we see from the world around us) it deems it permissible to let thousands of children die every day of preventable disease. EAs (particularly the more utilitarian/consequentialist ones) are the weird ones because we reject the act/omission distinction.
(For my part, I try to donate in such a way that I’m net-positive from the perspective of both anti-speciesist animal welfare and global health advocates.)
I don’t think “common sense” morality necessarily finds itself in a pickle here.
My common sense morality veers the way of JWS and finds no pickle at all.
“The shortest answer is that I find the “Meat Eater Problem” repugnant and indicitative of defective moral reasoning that, if applied at scale, would lead to great moral harm.”
Your version of common sense morality might be different and find a pickle here, but I think it’s important to take into account that in a lot of people’s minds (I would guess 99.9 percent of humans) common sense morality would lead them to almost out of hand reject this “problem”
For the record again even though disagree with it and find it somewhat repugnant, I think it’s a reasonable argument.
Common-sense morality has nothing to say about cause prioritisation in the first place, so it rejects the problem only in the sense that it doesn’t subscribe to standard EA cause-neutrality and prioritisation frameworks. Global health EAs also violate common-sense morality when they argue that charity doesn’t begin at home (as in, within one’s own country). This is to be expected: EAs are committed to impartiality and welfarism, and the vast majority of humans are not.
I don’t think this is an example of “naive utilitarianism”. It’s a fairly standard EA cause prioritization analysis. Vasco is not arguing that we ought to break the law, or even that we should go against common-sense morality.
Indeed, common-sense morality finds itself in a bit of a pickle on this question: it cannot object to someone arguing that we ought not to donate to global health charities, because (as we see from the world around us) it deems it permissible to let thousands of children die every day of preventable disease. EAs (particularly the more utilitarian/consequentialist ones) are the weird ones because we reject the act/omission distinction.
(For my part, I try to donate in such a way that I’m net-positive from the perspective of both anti-speciesist animal welfare and global health advocates.)
I don’t think “common sense” morality necessarily finds itself in a pickle here.
My common sense morality veers the way of JWS and finds no pickle at all.
“The shortest answer is that I find the “Meat Eater Problem” repugnant and indicitative of defective moral reasoning that, if applied at scale, would lead to great moral harm.”
Your version of common sense morality might be different and find a pickle here, but I think it’s important to take into account that in a lot of people’s minds (I would guess 99.9 percent of humans) common sense morality would lead them to almost out of hand reject this “problem”
For the record again even though disagree with it and find it somewhat repugnant, I think it’s a reasonable argument.
Common-sense morality has nothing to say about cause prioritisation in the first place, so it rejects the problem only in the sense that it doesn’t subscribe to standard EA cause-neutrality and prioritisation frameworks. Global health EAs also violate common-sense morality when they argue that charity doesn’t begin at home (as in, within one’s own country). This is to be expected: EAs are committed to impartiality and welfarism, and the vast majority of humans are not.