In your 80,000 Hours interview you talked about worldview diversification. You emphasized the distinction between total utilitarianism vs. person-affecting views within the EA community. What about diversification beyond utilitarianism entirely? How would you incorporate other normative ethical views into cause prioritization considerations? (I’m aware that in general this is basically just the question of moral uncertainty, but I’m curious how you and Open Phil view this issue in practice.)
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.”
In your 80,000 Hours interview you talked about worldview diversification. You emphasized the distinction between total utilitarianism vs. person-affecting views within the EA community. What about diversification beyond utilitarianism entirely? How would you incorporate other normative ethical views into cause prioritization considerations? (I’m aware that in general this is basically just the question of moral uncertainty, but I’m curious how you and Open Phil view this issue in practice.)
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.”