Executive summary: The collapse of objective morality challenges traditional ethical frameworks, raising deep uncertainties about long-term consequences, infinite ethics, and morality’s evolutionary origins, but Effective Altruism can adapt by embracing epistemic humility, pragmatic heuristics, and a science-based approach to moral progress.
Key points:
Epistemic cluelessness: Our inability to predict long-term consequences undermines consequentialist decision-making, necessitating heuristics and robustly positive interventions rather than strict expected value calculations.
Infinite ethics problem: If the universe is infinite, standard moral reasoning breaks down, leading to paradoxes where all actions might seem equally (in)significant, requiring new decision rules to navigate ethical paralysis.
Morality as an evolutionary strategy: Ethical intuitions evolved to promote cooperation rather than track objective truth, implying that moral norms are contingent, adaptable, and influenced by cultural evolution.
Prospects for moral enhancement: Advances in AI, neuroscience, and biotechnology could allow deliberate shaping of moral dispositions, but raise ethical concerns about autonomy and unintended consequences.
The collapse of moral bindingness: Without moral realism, ethical claims lack intrinsic authority, but EA can remain action-guiding by focusing on widely shared values like reducing suffering and increasing flourishing.
Implications for EA: The movement should prioritise epistemic humility, avoid fanaticism in decision-making, embrace an empirical approach to moral progress, and reframe its mission in pragmatic rather than absolutist terms.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: The collapse of objective morality challenges traditional ethical frameworks, raising deep uncertainties about long-term consequences, infinite ethics, and morality’s evolutionary origins, but Effective Altruism can adapt by embracing epistemic humility, pragmatic heuristics, and a science-based approach to moral progress.
Key points:
Epistemic cluelessness: Our inability to predict long-term consequences undermines consequentialist decision-making, necessitating heuristics and robustly positive interventions rather than strict expected value calculations.
Infinite ethics problem: If the universe is infinite, standard moral reasoning breaks down, leading to paradoxes where all actions might seem equally (in)significant, requiring new decision rules to navigate ethical paralysis.
Morality as an evolutionary strategy: Ethical intuitions evolved to promote cooperation rather than track objective truth, implying that moral norms are contingent, adaptable, and influenced by cultural evolution.
Prospects for moral enhancement: Advances in AI, neuroscience, and biotechnology could allow deliberate shaping of moral dispositions, but raise ethical concerns about autonomy and unintended consequences.
The collapse of moral bindingness: Without moral realism, ethical claims lack intrinsic authority, but EA can remain action-guiding by focusing on widely shared values like reducing suffering and increasing flourishing.
Implications for EA: The movement should prioritise epistemic humility, avoid fanaticism in decision-making, embrace an empirical approach to moral progress, and reframe its mission in pragmatic rather than absolutist terms.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.