Thanks! Your summaries are very helpful. Yes, I agree with the first two as a summary of my beliefs. However, for (3) I mostly agree with the first sentence, but disagree with the second.
This is because in-principle objections to utilitarianism do have the potential to affect the altruistic work that EA does. Indeed, there’s a sense in which in-principle concerns impact all the in-practice ones. E.g., let’s say there there are indeed qualitative moral differences, as (2) might imply. If so, then donating enough money to charity to save, in expectation, a life, could very well not be qualitatively equivalent to jumping in to save a child from drowning in a pond. It might be merely quantitatively equivalent. That is, the former might be a morally heroic act that it’s any adult’s duty to do, the other, still admirable, but one has far less of a duty to do it. And if it’s true there’s a qualitative difference between saving a child from drowning and donating enough to charity to save a life in expectation, this calls into question whether the entire motto of EA, of maximizing the good, is accomplished by the sort of secular tithing that make up the core of its in-practice operations. This is what’s behind my suggestion (I probably should have made it explicit) to continue to shift EA away from purely utilitarian causes and to much broader ones, like promoting “longtermism” or even just cool projects that no one else is doing that have little to zero utilitarian value. I very much agree that this piece lacks any specifics of how to do that (I think I glibly suggest mining an astroid) and could see a lack of specificity as a valid criticism of it, although I also think that the level of specificity of “move X dollars here” might be a somewhat high bar.
Thanks! Your summaries are very helpful. Yes, I agree with the first two as a summary of my beliefs. However, for (3) I mostly agree with the first sentence, but disagree with the second.
This is because in-principle objections to utilitarianism do have the potential to affect the altruistic work that EA does. Indeed, there’s a sense in which in-principle concerns impact all the in-practice ones. E.g., let’s say there there are indeed qualitative moral differences, as (2) might imply. If so, then donating enough money to charity to save, in expectation, a life, could very well not be qualitatively equivalent to jumping in to save a child from drowning in a pond. It might be merely quantitatively equivalent. That is, the former might be a morally heroic act that it’s any adult’s duty to do, the other, still admirable, but one has far less of a duty to do it. And if it’s true there’s a qualitative difference between saving a child from drowning and donating enough to charity to save a life in expectation, this calls into question whether the entire motto of EA, of maximizing the good, is accomplished by the sort of secular tithing that make up the core of its in-practice operations. This is what’s behind my suggestion (I probably should have made it explicit) to continue to shift EA away from purely utilitarian causes and to much broader ones, like promoting “longtermism” or even just cool projects that no one else is doing that have little to zero utilitarian value. I very much agree that this piece lacks any specifics of how to do that (I think I glibly suggest mining an astroid) and could see a lack of specificity as a valid criticism of it, although I also think that the level of specificity of “move X dollars here” might be a somewhat high bar.