To be honest, I did feel like it came off this way to me as well. The majority of the piece feels like an essay on why you think utilitarianism sucks, and this post itself frames this as a criticism of EA’s “utilitarian core”. I sort of remember the point about EA just being ordinary do gooding when you strip this away as feeling like a side note, though I can reread it when I get a chance in case I missed something.
To address the point though, I’m not sure it works either, and I feel like the rest of your piece undermines it. Lots of things EA focuses on, like animal welfare and AI safety, are weird or at least weird combinations, so are plenty of its ways of thinking and approaching questions. These are consistent with utilitarianism, but they aren’t specifically tied to it, indeed you seem drawn to some of these and no one is going to accuse you of being a utilitarian after reading this, I have to imagine the idea that you do think something valuable and unique is left behind if you don’t just view EA as utilitarianism has to at least partly be behind your suggestion that we “dilute the poison” all the way out. If we already have “diluted the poison” out, I’m not sure what’s left to argue.
The point about how the founders of the movement have generally been utilitarians or utilitarian sympathetic doesn’t strike me as enough to make your point either[1]. If you mean that the movement is utilitarian at its core in the sense that utilitarianism motivated many of its founders, this is a good point. If you mean that it has a utilitarian core in the sense that it is “poisoned” by the types of implications of utilitarianism you are worried about, this doesn’t seem enough to get you there. I also think it proves far to much to mention the influence of Famine, Affluence and Morality. Non-utilitarian liberals regularly cite On Liberty, non-utilitarian vegans regularly cite Animal Liberation. Good moral philosophers generally don’t justify their points from first principles, but rather with the minimum premises necessary to agree with them on whatever specific point they’re arguing. These senses just seem crucially different to me.
I also think it’s overstated. Singer is certainly a utilitarian, but MacAskill overtly does not identify as one even though he is sympathetic to the theory and I think has plurality credence in it relative to other similarly specific theories, Ord I believe is the same, Bostrom overtly does not identify with it, Parfit moved around a bunch in his career but by the time of EA I believe he was either a prioritarian or “triple theorist” as he called it, Yudkowsky is a key example of yours but from his other writing he seems like a pluralist consequentialist at most to me. It’s true that, as your piece points out, he defends pure aggregation, but so do tons of deontologists these days, because it turns out that when you get specific about your alternative, it becomes veryhard not to be a pure aggregationist.
To be honest, I did feel like it came off this way to me as well. The majority of the piece feels like an essay on why you think utilitarianism sucks, and this post itself frames this as a criticism of EA’s “utilitarian core”. I sort of remember the point about EA just being ordinary do gooding when you strip this away as feeling like a side note, though I can reread it when I get a chance in case I missed something.
To address the point though, I’m not sure it works either, and I feel like the rest of your piece undermines it. Lots of things EA focuses on, like animal welfare and AI safety, are weird or at least weird combinations, so are plenty of its ways of thinking and approaching questions. These are consistent with utilitarianism, but they aren’t specifically tied to it, indeed you seem drawn to some of these and no one is going to accuse you of being a utilitarian after reading this, I have to imagine the idea that you do think something valuable and unique is left behind if you don’t just view EA as utilitarianism has to at least partly be behind your suggestion that we “dilute the poison” all the way out. If we already have “diluted the poison” out, I’m not sure what’s left to argue.
The point about how the founders of the movement have generally been utilitarians or utilitarian sympathetic doesn’t strike me as enough to make your point either[1]. If you mean that the movement is utilitarian at its core in the sense that utilitarianism motivated many of its founders, this is a good point. If you mean that it has a utilitarian core in the sense that it is “poisoned” by the types of implications of utilitarianism you are worried about, this doesn’t seem enough to get you there. I also think it proves far to much to mention the influence of Famine, Affluence and Morality. Non-utilitarian liberals regularly cite On Liberty, non-utilitarian vegans regularly cite Animal Liberation. Good moral philosophers generally don’t justify their points from first principles, but rather with the minimum premises necessary to agree with them on whatever specific point they’re arguing. These senses just seem crucially different to me.
I also think it’s overstated. Singer is certainly a utilitarian, but MacAskill overtly does not identify as one even though he is sympathetic to the theory and I think has plurality credence in it relative to other similarly specific theories, Ord I believe is the same, Bostrom overtly does not identify with it, Parfit moved around a bunch in his career but by the time of EA I believe he was either a prioritarian or “triple theorist” as he called it, Yudkowsky is a key example of yours but from his other writing he seems like a pluralist consequentialist at most to me. It’s true that, as your piece points out, he defends pure aggregation, but so do tons of deontologists these days, because it turns out that when you get specific about your alternative, it becomes very hard not to be a pure aggregationist.