I also can’t think of a bigger scandal in the 223-year history of utilitarianism
I feel like there’s been a lot here, though not as “one sudden shock”.
Utilitarianism being a key strain of thought in early England, which went on to colonize the world and do many questionable things. I’m not sure how close that link is, but it’s easy to imagine a lot of things (just by it being such a big deal).
Not exactly the same, but I believe that a lot of “enlightenment thinking” and similar got a ton of heat. The French Revolution, for example. Much later, arguably, a lot of WW1 and WW2 can be blamed on some of this thinking (atheism too, of course). I think the counter-enlightenment and similar jump on this.
Peter Singer got into a ton of heat for his utilitarian beliefs (though of course, the stakes were smaller)
Really, every large ideology I could think of have some pretty massive scandals associated with it. The political left, political right, lots of stuff. FTX is take compared to a lot of that. (Still really bad of course).
I think the FTX stuff a bigger deal than Peter Singer’s views on disability, and for me to be convinced about the England and enlightenment examples, you’d have to draw a clearer line between the philosophy and the wrongful actions (cf. in the FTX case, we have a self-identified utilitarian doing various wrongs for stated utilitarian reasons).
I agree that every large ideology has had massive scandals, in some cases ranging up to purges, famines, wars, etc. I think the problem for us, though, is that there aren’t very many people who take utilitarianism or beneficentrism seriously as an action-guiding principle—there are only ~10k effective altruists, basically. What happens if you scale that up to 100k and beyond? My claim would be that we need to tweak the product before we scale it, in order to make sure these catastrophes don’t scale with the size of the movement.
That’s an interesting take. I think that for me, it doesn’t feel that way, but this would be a long discussion, and my guess is that we both probably have fairly deep and different intuitions on this.
(Also, honestly, it seems like only a handful of people are really in charge of community growth decisions to me, and I don’t think I could do much to change direction there anyway, so I’m less focused on trying to change that)
I feel like there’s been a lot here, though not as “one sudden shock”.
Utilitarianism being a key strain of thought in early England, which went on to colonize the world and do many questionable things. I’m not sure how close that link is, but it’s easy to imagine a lot of things (just by it being such a big deal).
Not exactly the same, but I believe that a lot of “enlightenment thinking” and similar got a ton of heat. The French Revolution, for example. Much later, arguably, a lot of WW1 and WW2 can be blamed on some of this thinking (atheism too, of course). I think the counter-enlightenment and similar jump on this.
Peter Singer got into a ton of heat for his utilitarian beliefs (though of course, the stakes were smaller)
Really, every large ideology I could think of have some pretty massive scandals associated with it. The political left, political right, lots of stuff. FTX is take compared to a lot of that. (Still really bad of course).
I think the FTX stuff a bigger deal than Peter Singer’s views on disability, and for me to be convinced about the England and enlightenment examples, you’d have to draw a clearer line between the philosophy and the wrongful actions (cf. in the FTX case, we have a self-identified utilitarian doing various wrongs for stated utilitarian reasons).
I agree that every large ideology has had massive scandals, in some cases ranging up to purges, famines, wars, etc. I think the problem for us, though, is that there aren’t very many people who take utilitarianism or beneficentrism seriously as an action-guiding principle—there are only ~10k effective altruists, basically. What happens if you scale that up to 100k and beyond? My claim would be that we need to tweak the product before we scale it, in order to make sure these catastrophes don’t scale with the size of the movement.
That’s an interesting take. I think that for me, it doesn’t feel that way, but this would be a long discussion, and my guess is that we both probably have fairly deep and different intuitions on this.
(Also, honestly, it seems like only a handful of people are really in charge of community growth decisions to me, and I don’t think I could do much to change direction there anyway, so I’m less focused on trying to change that)