McLaughlin highlights a problem for people who want to say that scale matters, and also avoid the train to crazy town.
It’s not clear how anyone actually gets off the train to crazy town. Once you allow even a little bit of utilitarianism in, the unpalatable consequences follow immediately. The train might be an express service: once the doors close behind you, you can’t get off until the end of the line.
As Richard Y. Chappell has put it, EAs want ‘utilitarianism minus the controversial bits’. Yet it’s not immediately clear how the models and decision-procedures used by Effective Altruists can consistently avoid any of the problems for utilitarianism: as examples above illustrate, it’s entirely possible that even the simplest utilitarian premises can lead to seriously difficult conclusions.
For any moral theory with universal domain where utility matters at all, either the marginal value of utility diminishes rapidly (asymptotically) towards zero, or considerations of utility come to swamp all other values.
Title:
Getting on a different train: can Effective Altruism avoid collapsing into absurdity?
Author:
Peter McLaughlin
URL:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8wWYmHsnqPvQEnapu/getting-on-a-different-train-can-effective-altruism-avoid
Why it’s good:
McLaughlin highlights a problem for people who want to say that scale matters, and also avoid the train to crazy town.
Tyler Cowen wrote a paper on this problem in 1996, called ’What Do We Learn from the Repugnant Conclusion?’. McLaughlin’s post opens with an excellent summary.
The upshot:
Uh oh!
My take: perhaps the more principled among us should make room for more messy fudges in our thought. Cluster thinking, bounded commensurability and two-thirds utilitarianism for the win.