The title of this post is “Does EA need an underlying philosophy? Could Sentientism be that philosophy?”
I would consider both of those points to betray a lack of basic understanding of effective altruism. There are lots of good resources elsewhere- perhaps it would be good to have a basic faq article / wiki that could be Linked in such cases?
Thanks all. I’d love to hear thoughts from anyone who has downvoted. No obligation of course.
Alasdair—I think I’m reasonably familiar with EA but I could have been clearer. I was trying to explore two points:
1) Given both sentientism and EA focus on using evidence and reason and having broad moral compassion—I thought the term and the philosophy might be of interest to EA people generally.
2) Many (all?) of the problems EA looks to address are exacerbated by the fact that billions of people believe and act without a basis in evidence, reason or broad moral compassion. I’m interested in whether people think there is value in trying to bring large numbers of people up towards a simple, common philosophical baseline like Sentientism.
The title of this post is “Does EA need an underlying philosophy? Could Sentientism be that philosophy?” I would consider both of those points to betray a lack of basic understanding of effective altruism. There are lots of good resources elsewhere- perhaps it would be good to have a basic faq article / wiki that could be Linked in such cases?
Thanks all. I’d love to hear thoughts from anyone who has downvoted. No obligation of course.
Alasdair—I think I’m reasonably familiar with EA but I could have been clearer. I was trying to explore two points:
1) Given both sentientism and EA focus on using evidence and reason and having broad moral compassion—I thought the term and the philosophy might be of interest to EA people generally.
2) Many (all?) of the problems EA looks to address are exacerbated by the fact that billions of people believe and act without a basis in evidence, reason or broad moral compassion. I’m interested in whether people think there is value in trying to bring large numbers of people up towards a simple, common philosophical baseline like Sentientism.