Is it morally permissible for Effective Altruists to travel (far) for pleasure?
Little can be found on the ethical dilemmas we face when choosing to travel for pleasure (or doing similar leisure activities).
Travelling (far) has:
- An environmental cost, most notably greenhouse gas emissions from flights
- Opportunity costs, both time and money. Travelling is pretty expensive while many human and non-human beings/organizations/ are dying to get money. Time off is also limited when you’re employed. Wouldn’t it be better spent improving your skills, doing projects, learning, … ?
Travelling probably also has some benefits.
Curious to hear what EAs here think about the subject.
I don’t like this post. It feels like a step down a purity spiral. An Effective Altruist is anyone who wants to increase net utility, not one who has no other goals.
This is an interesting question. I think a similar question asked by Richard Ngo, and my reply post, might be relevant to this.
Rather critical in questions like this is how you integrate your own potential for burnout or responses to rewards. If indulging in such excesses helps you more sustainably and effectively avoid burnout or otherwise be more effective at doing good, it could make sense. Even among EAs, most people have an aspect of themselves that isn’t totally concerned with utility maximization that they need to feed.
The problem is that this rationalization can be used to justify increasingly wasteful or harmful behavior where one says that an indulgence renders them more effective-thus increasing total utility, but it’s actually a result of one’s privileging one’s interests.
It is like traveling, and I don’t see anything that should stop me from that. Effective altruism does not mean you are not allowed to do things that please you. Also, you can do much good to people while traveling and build many new effective relationships.
I am a newbie here, and I still don’t know a lot, but I think that effective altruism is more like a philosophical movement that sets your minds in a certain condition when you start to think more about others and not teaching that prohibits you from having pleasure like puritanism. I like to travel with my ESA registered through https://www.esaregistration.org/esa-letter/, and I see no bad thing here. OFC has an environmental track, but if you live your regular life, there is also a huge track.