I feel pretty disappointed by some of the comments (e.g. this one) on Vasco Grilo’s recent post arguing that some of GiveWell’s grants are net harmful because of the meat eating problem. Reflecting on that disappointment, I want to articulate a moral principle I hold, which I’ll call non-dogmatism. Non-dogmatism is essentially a weak form of scope sensitivity.[1]
Let’s say that a moral decision process is dogmatic if it’s completely insensitive to the numbers on either side of the trade-off. Non-dogmatism rejects dogmatic moral decision processes.
A central example of a dogmatic belief is: “Making a single human happy is more morally valuable than making any number of chickens happy.” The corresponding moral decision process would be, given a choice to spend money on making a human happy or making chickens happy, spending the money on the human no matter what the number of chickens made happy is. Non-dogmatism rejects this decision-making process on the basis that it is dogmatic.
(Caveat: this seems fine for entities that are totally outside one’s moral circle of concern. For instance, I’m intuitively fine with a decision-making process that spends money on making a human happy instead of spending money on making sure that a pile of rocks doesn’t get trampled on, no matter the size of the pile of rocks. So maybe non-dogmatism says that so long as two entities are in your moral circle of concern—so long as you assign nonzero weight to them—there ought to exist numbers, at least in theory, for which either side of a moral trade-off could be better.)
And so when I see comments saying things like “I would axiomatically reject any moral weight on animals that implied saving kids from dying was net negative”, I’m like… really? There’s no empirical facts that could possibly cause the trade-off to go the other way?
Rejecting dogmatic beliefs requires more work. Rather than deciding that one side of a trade-off is better than the other no matter the underlying facts, you actually have to examine the facts and do the math. But, like, the real world is messy and complicated, and sometimes you just have to do the math if you want to figure out the right answer.
Per the Wikipedia article on scope neglect, scope sensitivity would mean actually doing multiplication: making 100 people happy is 100 times better than making 1 person happy. I’m not fully sold on scope sensitivity; I feel much more strongly about non-dogmatism, which means that the numbers have to at least enter the picture, even if not multiplicatively.
Amish Shah is a Democratic politician who’s running for congress in Arizona. He appears to be a strong supporter of animal rights (see here).
He just won his primary election, and Cook Political Report rates the seat he’s running for (AZ-01) as a tossup. My subjective probability that he wins the seat is 50% (Edit: now 30%). I want him to win primarily because of his positions on animal rights, and secondarily because I want Democrats to control the House of Representatives.
The page you linked is about candidates for the Arizona State House. Amish Shah is running for the U.S. House of Representatives. There are still campaign finance limits, though ($3,300 per election per candidate, where the primary and the general election count separately; see here).
I feel pretty disappointed by some of the comments (e.g. this one) on Vasco Grilo’s recent post arguing that some of GiveWell’s grants are net harmful because of the meat eating problem. Reflecting on that disappointment, I want to articulate a moral principle I hold, which I’ll call non-dogmatism. Non-dogmatism is essentially a weak form of scope sensitivity.[1]
Let’s say that a moral decision process is dogmatic if it’s completely insensitive to the numbers on either side of the trade-off. Non-dogmatism rejects dogmatic moral decision processes.
A central example of a dogmatic belief is: “Making a single human happy is more morally valuable than making any number of chickens happy.” The corresponding moral decision process would be, given a choice to spend money on making a human happy or making chickens happy, spending the money on the human no matter what the number of chickens made happy is. Non-dogmatism rejects this decision-making process on the basis that it is dogmatic.
(Caveat: this seems fine for entities that are totally outside one’s moral circle of concern. For instance, I’m intuitively fine with a decision-making process that spends money on making a human happy instead of spending money on making sure that a pile of rocks doesn’t get trampled on, no matter the size of the pile of rocks. So maybe non-dogmatism says that so long as two entities are in your moral circle of concern—so long as you assign nonzero weight to them—there ought to exist numbers, at least in theory, for which either side of a moral trade-off could be better.)
And so when I see comments saying things like “I would axiomatically reject any moral weight on animals that implied saving kids from dying was net negative”, I’m like… really? There’s no empirical facts that could possibly cause the trade-off to go the other way?
Rejecting dogmatic beliefs requires more work. Rather than deciding that one side of a trade-off is better than the other no matter the underlying facts, you actually have to examine the facts and do the math. But, like, the real world is messy and complicated, and sometimes you just have to do the math if you want to figure out the right answer.
Per the Wikipedia article on scope neglect, scope sensitivity would mean actually doing multiplication: making 100 people happy is 100 times better than making 1 person happy. I’m not fully sold on scope sensitivity; I feel much more strongly about non-dogmatism, which means that the numbers have to at least enter the picture, even if not multiplicatively.
This page could be a useful pointer?
Amish Shah is a Democratic politician who’s running for congress in Arizona. He appears to be a strong supporter of animal rights (see here).
He just won his primary election, and Cook Political Report rates the seat he’s running for (AZ-01) as a tossup. My subjective probability that he wins the seat is 50% (Edit: now 30%). I want him to win primarily because of his positions on animal rights, and secondarily because I want Democrats to control the House of Representatives.
You can donate to him here.
Applicable campaign finance limits: According to this page, individuals can donate up to $5,400 to legislative candidates per two-year election cycle.
The page you linked is about candidates for the Arizona State House. Amish Shah is running for the U.S. House of Representatives. There are still campaign finance limits, though ($3,300 per election per candidate, where the primary and the general election count separately; see here).