Thanks for the kind words and feedback! Some responses:
I wonder if there are examples?
The sort of examples which come to mind are things like new religions, or startup, or cults—all of which make heavy demands on early participants, and thereby foster a strong group bond and sense of shared identity which allows them greater long-term success.
since the antecedent “if you want to contribute to the common good” is so minimal, ben’s def feels kind of near-normative to me
Consider someone who only cares about the lives of people in their own town. Do they want to contribute to the common good? In one sense yes, because the good of the town is a part of the common good. But in another sense no; they care about something different from the common good, which just happens to partially overlap with it.
Using the first definition, “if you want to contribute to the common good” is too minimal to imply that not pursuing effective altruism is a mistake.
Using the second definition, “if you want to contribute to the common good” is too demanding—because many people care about individual components of the common good (e.g. human flourishing) without being totally on board with “welfare from an impartial perspective”.
I think I disagree about the maximising point. Basically I read your proposed definition as near-maximising, becuase when you iterate on ‘contributing much more’ over and over again you get a maximum or a near-maximum.
Yeah, I agree that it’s tricky to dodge maximalism. I give some more intuitions for what I’m trying to do in this post. On the 2nd worry: I think we’re much more radically uncertain about the (ex ante) best option available to us out of the space of all possible actions, than we are radically uncertain about a direct comparison between current options vs a new proposed option which might do “much more” good. On the 3rd worry: we should still encourage people not to let their personal preferences stand in the way of doing much more good. But this is consistent with (for example) people spending 20% of their charity budget in less effective ways. (I’m implicitly thinking of “much more” in relative terms, not absolute—so a 25% increase is not “much more” good.)
Thanks for the kind words and feedback! Some responses:
The sort of examples which come to mind are things like new religions, or startup, or cults—all of which make heavy demands on early participants, and thereby foster a strong group bond and sense of shared identity which allows them greater long-term success.
Consider someone who only cares about the lives of people in their own town. Do they want to contribute to the common good? In one sense yes, because the good of the town is a part of the common good. But in another sense no; they care about something different from the common good, which just happens to partially overlap with it.
Using the first definition, “if you want to contribute to the common good” is too minimal to imply that not pursuing effective altruism is a mistake.
Using the second definition, “if you want to contribute to the common good” is too demanding—because many people care about individual components of the common good (e.g. human flourishing) without being totally on board with “welfare from an impartial perspective”.
Yeah, I agree that it’s tricky to dodge maximalism. I give some more intuitions for what I’m trying to do in this post. On the 2nd worry: I think we’re much more radically uncertain about the (ex ante) best option available to us out of the space of all possible actions, than we are radically uncertain about a direct comparison between current options vs a new proposed option which might do “much more” good. On the 3rd worry: we should still encourage people not to let their personal preferences stand in the way of doing much more good. But this is consistent with (for example) people spending 20% of their charity budget in less effective ways. (I’m implicitly thinking of “much more” in relative terms, not absolute—so a 25% increase is not “much more” good.)