If you’re looking for a reason to leave effective altruism, I give the Scourge five out of five revealed preferences
Why would a paper with no reference to EA that one major author who identifies with EA wrote 14 years ago be a conclusive reason to leave EA?
Even if abortion was something EAs usually defend, you could just see EA as “a tower of assumptions” (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of)
I genuinely think he wrote what turned out to be a decent anti-EA article.
If most people follow their moral principles, they run into really challenging situations- like confronting millions of spontaneous abortions per year. One response is to bite the bullet (rare), one is to not think about the implications of your moral commitments (common), and another is to argue that the fact that nobody follows a principle fully, you can discard it (I dislike this approach), but it’s a possible conclusion.
Instead, I think people should bite the bullet on moral reasoning, and not use arguments like “that’s weird” or “that’s too hard” and not conclude that if other people aren’t living out their claimed values, their values are wrong.
Edited to add this: If you think people not following through on the implications of moral claim X, lets you reject X, you can easily reject EA. Almost nobody outside of EA follows through on a lot of central EA claims about the future, global poor, or wild animals. Few EAs fully follow through- but I don’t think that justifies indifference to those claims.
I was gonna add that maybe what you meant is that Ord’s argument would justify a subjectivist moral theory. But I don’t see anything implying it in the text, though. His point is more like some sort of reflexive equilibrium, when one has to see which of the inconsistent moral intuitions must remain. that’s how moral reasoning usually works. Your way of solving this is by biting the bullet that embryos might be the moral tragedy of our time. Others will solve the inconsistency in some other way. But one’s modus ponens is someone else’s modus tollens (https://www.gwern.net/Modus)… if someone replied that selfish behavior is inconsistent with altruistic principles, I’d have to agree—at least since Thrasymacus people have used this when arguing for some sort of moral skepticism. The reasonig is logically valid; that’s precisely why this position is kind of hard to retort. You can’t just reply that this is wrong; you must show how it conflicts with other beliefs the person is supposed to have.
Edit: on the fun side: on of the moral pros of assisted reproduction is that it helps save us from the non-identity problem, as it mitigates the contingencies of human reproduction.
I’m not making any claim about the moral value of embryos.
I just think Ord’s claim that embryo valuers don’t care about embryos (in the right way, in all circumstances) says that their general view can be discarded is not convincing. I know tons of people who claim X, but don’t act on X. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong about X- they might be weak or hypocritical or bad at reasoning!
I shouldn’t have implied you made any claim about the moral value of embryos. I should have said, instead, that someone who thinks they are morally valuable would bite the bullet... And Ord thinks that’s a very problematic position—it apparently implies that we should try to prevent the loss embryos even if it happens right after conception. So it is not absurd to see his point as akin to a reductio.
On the other hand
That doesn’t mean they’re wrong about X- they might be weak or hypocritical or bad at reasoning
If they are “weak or hypocritical or bad at reasoning” then their failing to act on X conflicts with other beliefs—like their belief in X. They can solve the conflict by either dropping X, or changing their behavior. We usaully don’t convince people to donate to GD by first convincing them that suffering matters; we assume they agree that suffering matters and show them that their belief that suffering matters imply they should donate... If someone says “Oh, but now I don’t think suffering matters anymore” you need to use different arguments—you have to show that this new position conflicts with other premises they defend
The fact that the founder of EA wrote the article is largely irrelevant to ColdButtonIssues’s argument; he just thinks an equivalent argument could be used against EA.
I recognized it on my second reply and addressed this. I still think it misses the point. I don’t think it provides a point against EAs—which usually start from ideas people already agree with (and are not willing to give up on—that’s the whole point of thereversal test advocated by Toby Ord to precisely eliminate status quo bias) and then draw the corresponding conclusions.
Why would a paper with no reference to EA that one major author who identifies with EA wrote 14 years ago be a conclusive reason to leave EA? Even if abortion was something EAs usually defend, you could just see EA as “a tower of assumptions” (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of)
I genuinely think he wrote what turned out to be a decent anti-EA article.
If most people follow their moral principles, they run into really challenging situations- like confronting millions of spontaneous abortions per year. One response is to bite the bullet (rare), one is to not think about the implications of your moral commitments (common), and another is to argue that the fact that nobody follows a principle fully, you can discard it (I dislike this approach), but it’s a possible conclusion.
Instead, I think people should bite the bullet on moral reasoning, and not use arguments like “that’s weird” or “that’s too hard” and not conclude that if other people aren’t living out their claimed values, their values are wrong.
Edited to add this: If you think people not following through on the implications of moral claim X, lets you reject X, you can easily reject EA. Almost nobody outside of EA follows through on a lot of central EA claims about the future, global poor, or wild animals. Few EAs fully follow through- but I don’t think that justifies indifference to those claims.
I was gonna add that maybe what you meant is that Ord’s argument would justify a subjectivist moral theory. But I don’t see anything implying it in the text, though. His point is more like some sort of reflexive equilibrium, when one has to see which of the inconsistent moral intuitions must remain. that’s how moral reasoning usually works. Your way of solving this is by biting the bullet that embryos might be the moral tragedy of our time. Others will solve the inconsistency in some other way. But one’s modus ponens is someone else’s modus tollens (https://www.gwern.net/Modus)… if someone replied that selfish behavior is inconsistent with altruistic principles, I’d have to agree—at least since Thrasymacus people have used this when arguing for some sort of moral skepticism. The reasonig is logically valid; that’s precisely why this position is kind of hard to retort. You can’t just reply that this is wrong; you must show how it conflicts with other beliefs the person is supposed to have.
Edit: on the fun side: on of the moral pros of assisted reproduction is that it helps save us from the non-identity problem, as it mitigates the contingencies of human reproduction.
I’m not making any claim about the moral value of embryos.
I just think Ord’s claim that embryo valuers don’t care about embryos (in the right way, in all circumstances) says that their general view can be discarded is not convincing. I know tons of people who claim X, but don’t act on X. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong about X- they might be weak or hypocritical or bad at reasoning!
I shouldn’t have implied you made any claim about the moral value of embryos. I should have said, instead, that someone who thinks they are morally valuable would bite the bullet...
And Ord thinks that’s a very problematic position—it apparently implies that we should try to prevent the loss embryos even if it happens right after conception. So it is not absurd to see his point as akin to a reductio.
On the other hand
If they are “weak or hypocritical or bad at reasoning” then their failing to act on X conflicts with other beliefs—like their belief in X. They can solve the conflict by either dropping X, or changing their behavior. We usaully don’t convince people to donate to GD by first convincing them that suffering matters; we assume they agree that suffering matters and show them that their belief that suffering matters imply they should donate...
If someone says “Oh, but now I don’t think suffering matters anymore” you need to use different arguments—you have to show that this new position conflicts with other premises they defend
The fact that the founder of EA wrote the article is largely irrelevant to ColdButtonIssues’s argument; he just thinks an equivalent argument could be used against EA.
I recognized it on my second reply and addressed this. I still think it misses the point.
I don’t think it provides a point against EAs—which usually start from ideas people already agree with (and are not willing to give up on—that’s the whole point of the reversal test advocated by Toby Ord to precisely eliminate status quo bias) and then draw the corresponding conclusions.