I agree with this comment—thanks! A follow up: can you say why political theorists accept high stakes instrumentalism (as opposed to stating that they do)? It sounds like this is effectively a re-run of familiar debates between consequentialists and non-consequentialists (e.g. “can you kill one to save five? what about killing one to save a million?”), just wrapped in different language, so I’m wondering if something else is going on. I suppose I’m a bit surprised the view has no detractors—I imagine there are some (Kant?) who would hold the seemingly equivalent view you can never kill one to save any number of others.
Hi Michael, I was also surprised! I think the basic intuition is that people want to avoid sanctioning the tyranny of the majority. Philosophers think it would be unjust for the majority to violate the basic rights of minorities. As I argue in the paper, democracies do this all the time. Lots of philosophers who are at pains to emphasise their democrat credentials are also in favour of the US Supreme Court for this reason—it doesn’t get much more undemocratic than that.
The two main arguments for intrinsic proceduralism are from autonomy and from equal respect/basic equality. It is usually held that people’s rights to act autonomously stop at the rights of others. No-one holds that people have a right grounded in autonomy to pursue the project of killing minorities. On equal respect/basic equality, I have a hard time understanding how it is an argument rather than merely a restatement of the claim that intrinsic proceduralism is true: in spite of basic equality, there are lots of rights and powers we distribute unequally, such as the right to practice medicine or drive.
That said, I’m confused on why you believe this post is an example of “academic research we might be unaware of is important to an issue we care about.” If it were the case that the majority of political philosophers oppose High Stakes Instrumentalism, I think I would waiver little in my belief that EA billionaire philanthropy is justified and even laudable. For example, I would not suddenly believe that Gateses are wrong to prevent low-income children from dying instead of gifting it to the US federal government for reallocation, nor that Tuna and Moskovitz are wrong to want to reduce the risk of future pandemics and AGI catastrophes.
(This, to me, is akin to why I do not update strongly on there being slightly more deontologists in expert surveys of philosophers than consequentialists)
Given this, it directly follows that expert consensus should not be a strong update in favor of my preferred hypothesis, if my preferred hypothesis was not strongly motivated by expert deference to begin with.
It’s possible that I just have a lot less epistemic humility/expert deference in this domain than you do? But from reading your public writings and our occasional conversations, I do not believe that this is true in other domains, so I’d be interested in knowing what is different here.
Thanks for writing this. I like articles that showcase examples were academic research we might be unaware of is important to an issue we care about.
I agree with this comment—thanks! A follow up: can you say why political theorists accept high stakes instrumentalism (as opposed to stating that they do)? It sounds like this is effectively a re-run of familiar debates between consequentialists and non-consequentialists (e.g. “can you kill one to save five? what about killing one to save a million?”), just wrapped in different language, so I’m wondering if something else is going on. I suppose I’m a bit surprised the view has no detractors—I imagine there are some (Kant?) who would hold the seemingly equivalent view you can never kill one to save any number of others.
Hi Michael, I was also surprised! I think the basic intuition is that people want to avoid sanctioning the tyranny of the majority. Philosophers think it would be unjust for the majority to violate the basic rights of minorities. As I argue in the paper, democracies do this all the time. Lots of philosophers who are at pains to emphasise their democrat credentials are also in favour of the US Supreme Court for this reason—it doesn’t get much more undemocratic than that.
The two main arguments for intrinsic proceduralism are from autonomy and from equal respect/basic equality. It is usually held that people’s rights to act autonomously stop at the rights of others. No-one holds that people have a right grounded in autonomy to pursue the project of killing minorities. On equal respect/basic equality, I have a hard time understanding how it is an argument rather than merely a restatement of the claim that intrinsic proceduralism is true: in spite of basic equality, there are lots of rights and powers we distribute unequally, such as the right to practice medicine or drive.
I really appreciate this post too!
That said, I’m confused on why you believe this post is an example of “academic research we might be unaware of is important to an issue we care about.” If it were the case that the majority of political philosophers oppose High Stakes Instrumentalism, I think I would waiver little in my belief that EA billionaire philanthropy is justified and even laudable. For example, I would not suddenly believe that Gateses are wrong to prevent low-income children from dying instead of gifting it to the US federal government for reallocation, nor that Tuna and Moskovitz are wrong to want to reduce the risk of future pandemics and AGI catastrophes.
(This, to me, is akin to why I do not update strongly on there being slightly more deontologists in expert surveys of philosophers than consequentialists)
Given this, it directly follows that expert consensus should not be a strong update in favor of my preferred hypothesis, if my preferred hypothesis was not strongly motivated by expert deference to begin with.
It’s possible that I just have a lot less epistemic humility/expert deference in this domain than you do? But from reading your public writings and our occasional conversations, I do not believe that this is true in other domains, so I’d be interested in knowing what is different here.