I’m curious why you’re emphasising ‘it needs to be obvious, after some thought, that this cause is not worth pursuing at all’ as a criteria here. To me, it doesn’t really feel like cause prioritisation to first check whether your cause is even helpful. I feel that the harder but more important insight is that ‘even if your cause is GOOD, some other causes can be better. Resources are scarce, and so you should focus on the causes that are MORE good’.
To me, one of the core ideas of EA is trying to maximise the good you do, not just settling for good enough. And that’s something I’d want to come across in an introductory work. Though it’s much harder to make this intuitive, obviously!
So I guess the reason is that the example illustrates the importance of cause prioritisation more strongly. It’s the same with PlayPumps: MacAskill could have picked a much better charitable intervention and yet still argued for effectiveness, but this wouldn’t powerfully demonstrate just how important it is to get the intervention right.
I completely agree with your overall point about maximising the good we can do, and other parts of the book will emphasise how important it is to not just settle for ‘good enough’!
This seems like an awesome project!
I’m curious why you’re emphasising ‘it needs to be obvious, after some thought, that this cause is not worth pursuing at all’ as a criteria here. To me, it doesn’t really feel like cause prioritisation to first check whether your cause is even helpful. I feel that the harder but more important insight is that ‘even if your cause is GOOD, some other causes can be better. Resources are scarce, and so you should focus on the causes that are MORE good’.
To me, one of the core ideas of EA is trying to maximise the good you do, not just settling for good enough. And that’s something I’d want to come across in an introductory work. Though it’s much harder to make this intuitive, obviously!
So I guess the reason is that the example illustrates the importance of cause prioritisation more strongly. It’s the same with PlayPumps: MacAskill could have picked a much better charitable intervention and yet still argued for effectiveness, but this wouldn’t powerfully demonstrate just how important it is to get the intervention right.
I completely agree with your overall point about maximising the good we can do, and other parts of the book will emphasise how important it is to not just settle for ‘good enough’!