So I’ve not written extensively on this (and in some cases not at all), but I’m a virtue ethicist and I care about animal welfare and x-risks (or just future-folks more generally) as an expression of compassion. That is, satisfying the virtue of compassion that I aspire to (now drawn from Buddhist notions of compassion, but originally from a more folky notion of it that I learned to adopt as a virtue from my upbringing in secular Protestant America) encourages me to give consideration to the welfare of animals and future folks, and this results in my choice to eat almost-only plants and to work on addressing AI-related x-risks.
This is not exactly something you can cite nor a full-fledge argument, but figured you might find it worthwhile to hear more from someone in EA who has one of these non-consequentialist moral views. I expect there are a number of crypto-Kantians around (crypto only in the sense though that they just don’t bring it up much because it’s not part of normal EA conversation to reason via deontology) and a decent number of contractualist given that position’s affinity with libertarian ethics and the number of libertarian EAs drawn from the rationalist community.
So I’ve not written extensively on this (and in some cases not at all), but I’m a virtue ethicist and I care about animal welfare and x-risks (or just future-folks more generally) as an expression of compassion. That is, satisfying the virtue of compassion that I aspire to (now drawn from Buddhist notions of compassion, but originally from a more folky notion of it that I learned to adopt as a virtue from my upbringing in secular Protestant America) encourages me to give consideration to the welfare of animals and future folks, and this results in my choice to eat almost-only plants and to work on addressing AI-related x-risks.
This is not exactly something you can cite nor a full-fledge argument, but figured you might find it worthwhile to hear more from someone in EA who has one of these non-consequentialist moral views. I expect there are a number of crypto-Kantians around (crypto only in the sense though that they just don’t bring it up much because it’s not part of normal EA conversation to reason via deontology) and a decent number of contractualist given that position’s affinity with libertarian ethics and the number of libertarian EAs drawn from the rationalist community.