Based on this comment, I think I understand your original point better. In most situations, a conscious chain of ethical reasoning held in the mind is not what should be motivating our actions from moment to moment. That would be crazy. I don’t need to consider the ethics of whether to take one more sip of my cup of tea.
But I think the way we resolve this is a common sense and practical form of consequentialism: a directive to apply moral thought in a manner that will have the most good consequences.
One way that might look is outsourcing our charity evaluations to specialists. I don’t have to decide if bednets or direct donations is better: GiveWell does it for me with their wonderful spreadsheets.
And I don’t have to consider every moment whether deontology or consequentialism is better: the EA movement and my identity as an EA does a lot of that work for me. It also licenses me to defer to habit almost 100% of the time, and invites applying modest limits to my obligation to give of my resources—time, money, and by extension thought.
So I think EA is already doing a pretty darn good job of limiting our need to think about ethics all the time. It’s just that when people do EA stuff, that’s what they think about. My personal EA involvement is only a tiny fraction of my waking hours, but if you thought of my EA posting as 100% of who I am, it would certainly look like I’m obsessed.
...outsourcing our charity evaluations to specialists. I don’t have to decide if bednets or direct donations is better: GiveWell does it for me with their wonderful spreadsheets.
And I don’t have to consider every moment whether deontology or consequentialism is better: the EA movement and my identity as an EA does a lot of that work for me. It also licenses me to defer to habit almost 100% of the time
These are good things, and you’re right to point them out! I certainly don’t expect to find that every EA is a walking utility calculator – I expect that to be extremely rare. I also don’t expect to find internal moral disharmony in every EA, though I expect it to be much less rare than walking utility calculators.
I just want to add one thing, just to be sure everything is clear. I’m glad you see how “a conscious chain of ethical reasoning held in the mind is not what should be motivating our actions” (i.e. we should not be walking utility calculators). But that was just my starting point. Ultimately I want to claim that, whether you’re in a “heat of the moment” situation or not, getting too used to applying a calculating maximizer’s mindset in realms typically governed by affect can result in the following:
Worst case extreme scenario: you become a walking utility calculator, and are perfectly at peace with yourself about being one. You could be accused of being cold, calculating, uncaring.
More likely scenario: you start adopting a calculating maximizer’s mindset when you shouldn’t (e.g. when trying to decide whether to go see a sick friend or not) even though you know you shouldn’t, or you didn’t mean to adopt that mindset. You could be accused of being inadvertently cold and calculating – someone who, sadly, tends to overthink things.
In such situations, because you’ve adopted that mindset, you will dampen your positive affective attachment to the decision you make (or the object at the center of that decision), even though you started with strong affect toward that decision/object. E.g. when you first heard your friend was in the hospital, you got a pit in your stomach, but it eventually wore away as you evaluated the pros and cons of going to see them or doing something else with your time (as you began comparing friends maybe, to decide who to spend time with). Whatever you do end up deciding to do, you feel ambivalent about it.
Any cognitive dissonance you might have (e.g. your internal monologue sounds like this: “Why am I thinking so hard about this? I should have just gone with my gut”), and the struggle to resolve that dissonance only worsens 2.a.
Either way: in general, considerations that once engendered an emotional response now start leaving you cold (or colder). This in turn can result in:
A more general struggle to motivate oneself to do what one believes one should do.
Seeing ethics as “just a game.”
Was that clear? Since it’s getting clearer for me, I fear it wasn’t clear in the post… It seems it needed to go through one more draft!
I understand your concern. It seems like your model is that you assume most people start with a sort of organic, healthy gut-level caring and sense of fellow-feeling, which moral calculation tends to distort.
My model is the reverse. Most people are somewhere between cold and unfeeling, and aggressively egocentric. Moral reflection builds into them some capacity for paying attention to others and cultivating empathy, which at first starts as an intellectual exercise and eventually becomes a deeply ingrained and felt habit that feels natural.
By analogy, you seem to see that moral reflection turns humans into robots. By contrast, I see moral reflection as turning animals into humans. Or think of it like acting. If you’ve ever acted, or read lines for a play in school, you might have experienced that at first, it’s hard to even understand what your character is saying or identify their objectives. After time with the script, actors understand the goal and develop an intellectual understanding of their character and the actions they use to convey emotion. The greatest actors are perhaps method actors, who spend so much time with their character that they actually feel and think naturally like their character. But this takes a lot of time and effort, and seems like it requires starting with a more intellectualized relationship with their character.
As I see it, this is pretty much how we develop our adult personalities and figure out how to fit into the social world. Maybe I’m wrong—maybe most people have a nice well-adjusted sense of fellow feeling and empathy from the jump, and I’m the weird one who’s had to work on it. If so, I think that my approach has been successful, because I think most people I know see me as an unusually empathic and emotionally aware person.
I can think of examples of people with all four combinations of moral systematization and emapthy: high/high, high/low, low/high, and low/low. I’m really not sure how the correlations run.
Overall, this seems like a question for psychology rather than a question for philosophy, and if you’re really concerned that consequentialism will turn us into calculators, I’d be most interested to see that argument referring to the psych literature rather than the philosophy literature.
It seems like your model is that you assume most people start with a sort of organic, healthy gut-level caring and sense of fellow-feeling, which moral calculation tends to distort.
Moral calculation (and faking it ’til you make it) can be helpful in becoming more virtuous, but to a limited extent – you can push it too far. And anyway, its not the only way to become a better person. I think more helpful is what I mentioned at the end of my post:
Encourage your friends to call out your vices. (In turn, steer your friends away from vice and try to be a good role model for the impressionable). Engage with good books, movies, plays etc. Virtue ethicists note that art has a great potential for exercising and training moral awareness...
If you want to see how the psych literature intersects on a related topic (romantic relationships instead of ethics in general) see Eva Illouz’s Why love hurts: A sociological explanation (2012), Chapter 3. Search for the heading “The New Architecture of Romantic Choice or the Disorganization of the Will” (p 90 in my edition) if you want to skip right to it. You might be able to read the entire section through Google books preview? I recommend the book though, if you’re interested.
I am really specifically interested in the claim you promote that moral calculation interferes on empathic development, rather than contributes to it or is neutral, on net. I don’t expect there’s much lit studying that, but that’s kind of my point. Why would we fee so confident that this or that morality has that or this psychological effect? I have a sense of how my morality has affected me, and we can speculate, but can we really claim to be going beyond that?
I claim that there is a healthy amount of moral calculation one should do, but doing too much of it has harmful side-effects. I claim, for these reasons, that Consequentialism (and the culture surrounding it) tends to result in abuse of moral calculation more so than VE. I don’t expect abuse to arise in the majority of people who engage with/follow Consequentialism or something – just more than among those who engage with/follow VE. I also claim, for reasons at the end of this section, that abuse will be more prevalent among those who engage with rationalism than those who don’t.
If I’m right about this flaw in the community culture around here, and this flaw in anyway contributed to SBF talking the way he did, shouldn’t the community consider taking some steps to curb that problematic tendency?
But also: if the EA community will only correct the flaws in itself that it can measure then… good luck. Seems short-sighted to me.
I may not have the data to back up my hypothesis, but it’s also not as if I pulled this out of thin air. And I’m not the first to find this hypothesis plausible.
Based on this comment, I think I understand your original point better. In most situations, a conscious chain of ethical reasoning held in the mind is not what should be motivating our actions from moment to moment. That would be crazy. I don’t need to consider the ethics of whether to take one more sip of my cup of tea.
But I think the way we resolve this is a common sense and practical form of consequentialism: a directive to apply moral thought in a manner that will have the most good consequences.
One way that might look is outsourcing our charity evaluations to specialists. I don’t have to decide if bednets or direct donations is better: GiveWell does it for me with their wonderful spreadsheets.
And I don’t have to consider every moment whether deontology or consequentialism is better: the EA movement and my identity as an EA does a lot of that work for me. It also licenses me to defer to habit almost 100% of the time, and invites applying modest limits to my obligation to give of my resources—time, money, and by extension thought.
So I think EA is already doing a pretty darn good job of limiting our need to think about ethics all the time. It’s just that when people do EA stuff, that’s what they think about. My personal EA involvement is only a tiny fraction of my waking hours, but if you thought of my EA posting as 100% of who I am, it would certainly look like I’m obsessed.
These are good things, and you’re right to point them out! I certainly don’t expect to find that every EA is a walking utility calculator – I expect that to be extremely rare. I also don’t expect to find internal moral disharmony in every EA, though I expect it to be much less rare than walking utility calculators.
I just want to add one thing, just to be sure everything is clear. I’m glad you see how “a conscious chain of ethical reasoning held in the mind is not what should be motivating our actions” (i.e. we should not be walking utility calculators). But that was just my starting point. Ultimately I want to claim that, whether you’re in a “heat of the moment” situation or not, getting too used to applying a calculating maximizer’s mindset in realms typically governed by affect can result in the following:
Worst case extreme scenario: you become a walking utility calculator, and are perfectly at peace with yourself about being one. You could be accused of being cold, calculating, uncaring.
More likely scenario: you start adopting a calculating maximizer’s mindset when you shouldn’t (e.g. when trying to decide whether to go see a sick friend or not) even though you know you shouldn’t, or you didn’t mean to adopt that mindset. You could be accused of being inadvertently cold and calculating – someone who, sadly, tends to overthink things.
In such situations, because you’ve adopted that mindset, you will dampen your positive affective attachment to the decision you make (or the object at the center of that decision), even though you started with strong affect toward that decision/object. E.g. when you first heard your friend was in the hospital, you got a pit in your stomach, but it eventually wore away as you evaluated the pros and cons of going to see them or doing something else with your time (as you began comparing friends maybe, to decide who to spend time with). Whatever you do end up deciding to do, you feel ambivalent about it.
Any cognitive dissonance you might have (e.g. your internal monologue sounds like this: “Why am I thinking so hard about this? I should have just gone with my gut”), and the struggle to resolve that dissonance only worsens 2.a.
Either way: in general, considerations that once engendered an emotional response now start leaving you cold (or colder). This in turn can result in:
A more general struggle to motivate oneself to do what one believes one should do.
Seeing ethics as “just a game.”
Was that clear? Since it’s getting clearer for me, I fear it wasn’t clear in the post… It seems it needed to go through one more draft!
No worries!
I understand your concern. It seems like your model is that you assume most people start with a sort of organic, healthy gut-level caring and sense of fellow-feeling, which moral calculation tends to distort.
My model is the reverse. Most people are somewhere between cold and unfeeling, and aggressively egocentric. Moral reflection builds into them some capacity for paying attention to others and cultivating empathy, which at first starts as an intellectual exercise and eventually becomes a deeply ingrained and felt habit that feels natural.
By analogy, you seem to see that moral reflection turns humans into robots. By contrast, I see moral reflection as turning animals into humans. Or think of it like acting. If you’ve ever acted, or read lines for a play in school, you might have experienced that at first, it’s hard to even understand what your character is saying or identify their objectives. After time with the script, actors understand the goal and develop an intellectual understanding of their character and the actions they use to convey emotion. The greatest actors are perhaps method actors, who spend so much time with their character that they actually feel and think naturally like their character. But this takes a lot of time and effort, and seems like it requires starting with a more intellectualized relationship with their character.
As I see it, this is pretty much how we develop our adult personalities and figure out how to fit into the social world. Maybe I’m wrong—maybe most people have a nice well-adjusted sense of fellow feeling and empathy from the jump, and I’m the weird one who’s had to work on it. If so, I think that my approach has been successful, because I think most people I know see me as an unusually empathic and emotionally aware person.
I can think of examples of people with all four combinations of moral systematization and emapthy: high/high, high/low, low/high, and low/low. I’m really not sure how the correlations run.
Overall, this seems like a question for psychology rather than a question for philosophy, and if you’re really concerned that consequentialism will turn us into calculators, I’d be most interested to see that argument referring to the psych literature rather than the philosophy literature.
Moral calculation (and faking it ’til you make it) can be helpful in becoming more virtuous, but to a limited extent – you can push it too far. And anyway, its not the only way to become a better person. I think more helpful is what I mentioned at the end of my post:
If you want to see how the psych literature intersects on a related topic (romantic relationships instead of ethics in general) see Eva Illouz’s Why love hurts: A sociological explanation (2012), Chapter 3. Search for the heading “The New Architecture of Romantic Choice or the Disorganization of the Will” (p 90 in my edition) if you want to skip right to it. You might be able to read the entire section through Google books preview? I recommend the book though, if you’re interested.
I am really specifically interested in the claim you promote that moral calculation interferes on empathic development, rather than contributes to it or is neutral, on net. I don’t expect there’s much lit studying that, but that’s kind of my point. Why would we fee so confident that this or that morality has that or this psychological effect? I have a sense of how my morality has affected me, and we can speculate, but can we really claim to be going beyond that?
I claim that there is a healthy amount of moral calculation one should do, but doing too much of it has harmful side-effects. I claim, for these reasons, that Consequentialism (and the culture surrounding it) tends to result in abuse of moral calculation more so than VE. I don’t expect abuse to arise in the majority of people who engage with/follow Consequentialism or something – just more than among those who engage with/follow VE. I also claim, for reasons at the end of this section, that abuse will be more prevalent among those who engage with rationalism than those who don’t.
If I’m right about this flaw in the community culture around here, and this flaw in anyway contributed to SBF talking the way he did, shouldn’t the community consider taking some steps to curb that problematic tendency?
What you have is a hypothesis. You could gather data to test it. But we should not take any significant action on the basis of your hypothesis.
Fair enough!
But also: if the EA community will only correct the flaws in itself that it can measure then… good luck. Seems short-sighted to me.
I may not have the data to back up my hypothesis, but it’s also not as if I pulled this out of thin air. And I’m not the first to find this hypothesis plausible.