Most people at Open Phil aren’t 100% bought into to utilitarianism, but utilitarian thinking has an outsized impact on cause selection and prioritization because under a lot of other ethical perspectives, philanthropy is supererogatory, so those other ethical perspectives are not as “opinionated” about how best to do philanthropy. It seems that the non-utilitarian perspectives we take most seriously usually don’t provide explicit cause prioritization input such as “Fund biosecurity rather than farm animal welfare”, but rather provide input about what rules or constraints we should be operating under, such as “Don’t misrepresent what you believe even if it would increase expected impact in utilitarian terms.”
Most people at Open Phil aren’t 100% bought into to utilitarianism, but utilitarian thinking has an outsized impact on cause selection and prioritization because under a lot of other ethical perspectives, philanthropy is supererogatory, so those other ethical perspectives are not as “opinionated” about how best to do philanthropy. It seems that the non-utilitarian perspectives we take most seriously usually don’t provide explicit cause prioritization input such as “Fund biosecurity rather than farm animal welfare”, but rather provide input about what rules or constraints we should be operating under, such as “Don’t misrepresent what you believe even if it would increase expected impact in utilitarian terms.”