It also seems strange to defend longtermists as only being harmful in theory, since the vast majority of longtermism is theory, and relatively few actions have been taken. That is, almost all longtermist ideas so far have implications which are currently only hypothetical.
But there is at least one concrete thing that has happened—many people in effective altruism who previously worked on and donated to near-term causes in global health and third world poverty have shifted focus away from those issues. And I don’t disagree with that choice, but if that isn’t an impact of longtermism which counterfactually harms the global poor, what do you think would qualify?
I just want to highlight your second point― resource allocation within the movement away from the global poor and towards longtermsism― seems to be a big part of what is concretely criticized in the Current Affairs piece. Quoting:
This means that if you want to do the most good, you should focus on these far-future people rather than on helping those in extreme poverty today. As [Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill] write, “for the purposes of evaluating actions, we can in the first instance often simply ignore all the effects contained in the first 100 (or even 1,000) years, focusing primarily on the further-future effects. Short-run effects act as little more than tie-breakers.”
...
Since our resources for reducing existential risk are finite, Bostrom argues that we must not “fritter [them] away” on what he describes as “feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy.” Such projects would include, on this account, not just saving people in the Global South—those most vulnerable, especially women—from the calamities of climate change, but all other non-existential philanthropic causes, too.
This doesn’t seem to me like a purely hypothetical harm. If you value existing people much more than potential future people (not an uncommon moral intuition) then this is concretely bad, especially since the EA community is able to move around a lot of philanthropic capital.
Yes but the counter-argument is that longtermists don’t accept the antecedent—they don’t value current people more than future people. And if you don’t accept the antecedent then it could equally be said that near-termist people are inflicting harm on non-white people. So, the argument doesn’t take us anywhere
Fair enough; it’s unsurprising that a major critique of longtermism is “actually, present people matter more than future people”. To me, a more productive framing of this criticism than racist/non-racist is about longtermist indifference to redistribution. I’ve seen various recent critiques quoting the following paragraph of Nick Beckstead’s thesis:
Saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards—at least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards—saving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.
The standard neartermist response is “all other things are definitely not equal, it’s much easier to save a life in a poor country than a rich country”, while the standard longtermist response is (I think) “this is the wrong comparison to pay attention to, we should focus on protecting humanity’s potential”. Given this difference, I disagree a little with this bit of the OP:
the motivations for the part of the community which embraces longtermism still includes Peter Singer’s embrace of practical ethics and effective altruist ideas like the Giving Pledge
in that some of the foundational values embedded in Peter Singer’s writings (e.g. The Life You Can Save) strike me as redistributive commitments. This is very much reflected in the quote from Sanjay included in the OP. As far as I can tell (reading the EA Forum, The Precipice, and various Bostrom papers) longtermist philosophy typically does not emphasize redistribution or fairness as core values, but instead focuses on the overwhelming value of the far future.
(That said, I have seen some fairness-based arguments that future people are a constituency whose interests are underweighted politically, for example in response to the proposed UN Special Envoy for Future Generations.)
in that some of the foundational values embedded in Peter Singer’s writings (e.g. The Life You Can Save) strike me as redistributive commitments.
One thing to note is that redistributive commitments flow from impartial utilitarianism as well as the weaker normative commitments that Singer espouses as a largely empirical claim about a) human psychology and b) the world we live in.
Singer’s strong principle: “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”
Singer’s weak principle: “If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.”
I understood the outer framing of the drowning child etc as making not only normative claims about what’s right to do in the abstract but also empirical claims about the best way to apply those normative principles in the world we live in. I think the idea that existential risk is very bad and that we are morally compelled to stop it if we aren’t sacrificing things of comparable moral significance[1] is fully consistent with Singerian notions.
[1] or that both existential risk and present suffering is morally significant, so choosing one over the other is superergoatory under Singer’s principles, but not necessarily under classical utilitarianism.
I would note that Toby and others in the long-termist camp do, in fact, very clearly embrace “the foundational values embedded in Peter Singer’s writings.” I agree that some people who embrace long-termism could decide to do so on other bases than impartial utilitarianism or similar arguments which agree with both redistribution and some importance of the long term, but I don’t hear them involved in the discussions, and so I don’t think it works as a criticism when the actual people do also advocate for near-term redistributive causes.
I don’t think I quite understand this reply. Are you saying that (check all that apply):
In your experience, the people involved in discussions do embrace redistribution and fairness as core values, they are just placing more value on future people.
Actual longtermists also advocate for near-term redistributive causes, so criticism about resource allocation within the movement away from the global poor and towards longtermism doesn’t make sense (i.e. it’s not zero-sum).
Redistributive commitments are only one part of the “foundational values”, and Toby and others in the longtermist camp are still motivated by the same underlying impartial utilitarianism, so pointing at less emphasis on redistribution is an unfair nitpick.
On the first para, that doesn’t seem to me to be true of work on AI safety or biorisk, as I understand it.
On the second para, the first thing to say is that longtermists shouldn’t be the target of particular criticism on this score—almost no-one is wholly focused on improving the welfare of the global poor. If this decision by longtermists is racist then so is almost everyone else in the world.
Secondly, no I don’t think it counterfactually harms the global poor. That only works if you take a person-affecting view of people’s interests. If you count future people, then the shift is counterfactually very beneficial for the global poor and for both white and non-white people.
I don’t think it’s necessarily very good for the global poor as a changing group defined by their poverty, depending on how quickly global poverty declines. There’s also a big drop in the strength of evidence in this shift, so it depends on how skeptical you are.
Plus, person-affecting views (including asymmetric ones) or at least somewhat asymmetric views (e.g. prioritarianism) are not uncommon, and I would guess especially among those concerned with the global poor and inequality. Part of the complaint made by some is about ethical views that say extinction would be an astronomical loss and deserves overwhelming priority as a result, over all targeted anti-poverty work. This is a major part of the disagreement, not something to be quickly dismissed.
I disagree about at least some Biorisk, as the allocation of scarce resources in public health has distributive effects, and some work on pandemic preparedness has reduced focus for near-term campaigns on vaccinations. I suspect the same is true, to a lesser extent, in pushing people who might otherwise work on near-term ML bias to work on longer term concerns. But as this relates to your second point, and the point itself, I agree completely, and don’t think it’s reasonable to say it’s blameworthy or morally unacceptable, though as I argued, I think we should worry about the impacts.
But the last point confuses me. Even ignoring person-affecting or not, shifting efforts to help John can (by omission, at the very least,) injure Sam. “The global poor” isn’t a uniform pool, and helping those who are part of “the global poor” in a century by, say, taxing someone now is a counterfactual harm for the person now. If you aggregate the way you prefer, this problem goes away, but there are certainly ethical views, even within utilitarianism, where this isn’t acceptable—for example, if the future benefit is discounted so heavily that it’s outweighed by the present harm.
On your first para, I was responding to this claim: “It also seems strange to defend longtermists as only being harmful in theory, since the vast majority of longtermism is theory, and relatively few actions have been taken. That is, almost all longtermist ideas so far have implications which are currently only hypothetical.” I said that most work on bio and AI was not just theory but was applied. I don’t think the things you say in the first para present any evidence against that claim, but rather they seem to grant my initial point.
I agree that there are some things in Bio and AI that are applied—though the vast majority of the work in both areas is still fairly far from application. But my point which granted your initial point was responding to “I don’t think it counterfactually harms the global poor.”
person-affecting view of ethics, which longtermists reject
I’m a longtermist and I don’t reject (asymmetric) person(-moment-)affecting views, at least not those that think necessary ≠ only present people. I would be very hard-pressed to give a clean formalization of necessary people though. I think it’s bad if effective altruists think longtermism can only be justified with astronomical waste-style arguments and not at all if someone has person-affecting intuitions. (Staying in a broadly utilitarian framework. There are, of course, also obligation-to-ancestor-type justifications for longtermism or similar.) The person-affecting part of me just pushes me in the direction of caring more about trajectory change than extinction risk.
Since I could only ever give very handwavey defenses of person-affecting views and even handwaveier explanations of my overall moral views: Here’s a paper by someone that AFAICT is at least sympathetic to longtermism and discusses asymmetric person-affecting views. (I have to admit I never got around to read the paper.) (Writing a paper on how an asymmetric person-affecting view obviously also doesn’t necessarily mean that the author doesn’t actually reject person-affecting views)
Many current individuals will be worse off when resources don’t go to them, for instance, because they are saving future lives, versus when they do, for instance, funds focused on near-term utilitarian goals like poverty reduction. And if, as most of us expect, the world’s wealth will continue to grow, effectively all future people who are helped by existential risk reduction are not what we’d now consider poor. You can defend this via the utilitarian calculus across all people, but that doesn’t change the distributive impact between groups.
Equally, many future people will be worse-off than they would have been if we don’t reduce extinction risks. The claim is about the net total impact on non-white people
Your definition of problematic injustice seems far too narrow, and I explicitly didn’t refer to race in the previous post. The example I gave was that the most disadvantaged people are in the present, and are further injured—not that non-white people (which under current definitions will describe approximately all of humanity in another half dozen generations) will be worse off.
On the second point, yes I agree that there are some popular views on which we would discount or ignore future people. I just don’t think that they are plausible. If someone held a view which said that they only count the interests of white future people, I think it would be quite clear that this was bad for the interests of non-white people in a very important way. Therefore, if I ignore all future people, then I ignore all future non-white people, which is bad for their interests in a very important way
As I said above in a different comment thread, it seems clear we’re talking past one another.
Yes, being racist would be racist, and no, that’s not the criticism. You said that “there are some popular views on which we would discount or ignore future people. I just don’t think that they are plausible.” And I think part of the issue is exactly this dismissiveness. As a close analogy, imagine someone said “there are some popular views where AI could be a risk to humans. I just don’t think that these are plausible,” and went on to spend money building ASI instead of engaging with the potential that they are wrong, or taking any action to investigate or hedge that possibility.
I don’t really understand your response. Most of the people who argue for a longtermist ethical standpoint have spent many many years thinking about the possibility that they are wrong and arguing against person-affecting views, during their philosophy degrees. I could talk to you for several weeks about the merits and demerits of such views and the published literature on them.
“Yes, being racist would be racist, and no, that’s not the criticism.” I don’t really understand your point here.
My point is that many people who disagree with the longtermist ethical viewpoint also spent years thinking about the issues, and dismissing the majority of philosophers, and the vast, vast majority of people’s views as not plausible, is itself one of the problems I tried to highlight on the original post when I said that a small group talking about how to fix everything should raise flags.
And my point about racism is that criticism of choices and priorities which have a potential to perpetuate existing structural disadvantages and inequity is not the same as calling someone racist.
The standards in the first para appear to be something like ‘you can never say that something is implausible if some philosophers believe it’. That seems like a pretty weird standard. Another way of making saying it is implausible is just saying that “I think it is probably false”.
Near-termists are also a small group talking about how to fix everything.
this is perhaps too meta, but on the second para, if that is what you meant, I don’t understand how it is a response to the comment your response was to.
I’m pointing out that you’re privileging your views over those of others—not “some philosophers,” but “most people.”
And unless you’re assuming a fairly strong version of moral realism, this isn’t a factual question, it’s a values question—so it’s strange to me to think that we should get to assume we’re correct despite being a small minority, without at least a far stronger argument that most people would agree with longermism if properly presented—and I think Stefan Schubert’s recent work implies that is not at all clear.
Any time you take a stance on anything you are privileging your view over some other people. Your argument also applies to people working on animal welfare and on global poverty. In surveys, most people don’t even seem to care about saving more lives than less.
If we are going to go down the route of saying that what EAs do should be decided by the majority opinion of the current global population, then that would be the end of EA of any kind. As I understand it, your claim is that the total view is false (or we don’t have reason to act on it) because the vast majority of the world population do not believe in the total view. Is that right?
It is difficult not to come up with examples. In 1500, most people would have believed that violence against women and slavery were permissible. Would that have made you stop campaigning to bring an end to that? These are also values, after all
Also, the demographic criticism also applies to EAs who are working on global development: people in that area also skew white and highly educated.
People who work on farm animal welfare are not focused on the global poor either, but this seems to me an extremely flimsy basis on which to call them racist.
Note: I did not call anyone racist, other than to note that there are groups which embrace some views which themselves embrace that label—but on review, you keep saying that this is about calling someone racist, whereas I’m talking about unequal impacts and systemic impacts of choices—and I think this is a serious confusion which is hampering our conversation.
Perhaps I have misunderstood, but I interpreted your post as saying we should take the two critiques of longtermism seriously. I think the quality of the critiques is extremely poor, and am trying to explain why.
I might have been unclear. As I said initially, I claim it’s good to publicly address concerns about “the (indisputable) fact that avoiding X-risks can be tied to racist or eugenic historical precedents”, and this is what the LARB piece actually discussed. And I think that slightly more investigation into the issue should have convinced the author that any concerns about continued embrace of the eugenic ideas, or ignorance of the issues, were misplaced. I initially pointed out that specific claims about longtermism being similar to eugenics are “farcical.” More generally, I tried to point out in this post that many the attacks are unserious or uniformed- as Scott pointed out in his essay, which this one quoted and applied to this situation, the criticisms aren’t new.
More serious attempts at dialog, like some of the criticisms in the LARB piece are not bad-faith or unreasonable claims, even if they fail to be original. And I agree that “we cannot claim to take existential risk seriously — and meaningfully confront the grave threats to the future of human and nonhuman life on this planet — if we do not also confront the fact that our ideas about human extinction, including how human extinction might be prevented, have a dark history.” But I also think it’s obvious that others working on longtermism agree, so the criticism seems to be at best a weak man argument. Unfortunately, I think we’ll need to wait another year or so for Will’s new book, which I understand has a far more complete discussion of this, much of which was written before either of these pieces were published.
It also seems strange to defend longtermists as only being harmful in theory, since the vast majority of longtermism is theory, and relatively few actions have been taken. That is, almost all longtermist ideas so far have implications which are currently only hypothetical.
But there is at least one concrete thing that has happened—many people in effective altruism who previously worked on and donated to near-term causes in global health and third world poverty have shifted focus away from those issues. And I don’t disagree with that choice, but if that isn’t an impact of longtermism which counterfactually harms the global poor, what do you think would qualify?
I just want to highlight your second point― resource allocation within the movement away from the global poor and towards longtermsism― seems to be a big part of what is concretely criticized in the Current Affairs piece. Quoting:
This doesn’t seem to me like a purely hypothetical harm. If you value existing people much more than potential future people (not an uncommon moral intuition) then this is concretely bad, especially since the EA community is able to move around a lot of philanthropic capital.
Yes but the counter-argument is that longtermists don’t accept the antecedent—they don’t value current people more than future people. And if you don’t accept the antecedent then it could equally be said that near-termist people are inflicting harm on non-white people. So, the argument doesn’t take us anywhere
Fair enough; it’s unsurprising that a major critique of longtermism is “actually, present people matter more than future people”. To me, a more productive framing of this criticism than racist/non-racist is about longtermist indifference to redistribution. I’ve seen various recent critiques quoting the following paragraph of Nick Beckstead’s thesis:
The standard neartermist response is “all other things are definitely not equal, it’s much easier to save a life in a poor country than a rich country”, while the standard longtermist response is (I think) “this is the wrong comparison to pay attention to, we should focus on protecting humanity’s potential”. Given this difference, I disagree a little with this bit of the OP:
in that some of the foundational values embedded in Peter Singer’s writings (e.g. The Life You Can Save) strike me as redistributive commitments. This is very much reflected in the quote from Sanjay included in the OP. As far as I can tell (reading the EA Forum, The Precipice, and various Bostrom papers) longtermist philosophy typically does not emphasize redistribution or fairness as core values, but instead focuses on the overwhelming value of the far future.
(That said, I have seen some fairness-based arguments that future people are a constituency whose interests are underweighted politically, for example in response to the proposed UN Special Envoy for Future Generations.)
One thing to note is that redistributive commitments flow from impartial utilitarianism as well as the weaker normative commitments that Singer espouses as a largely empirical claim about a) human psychology and b) the world we live in.
I understood the outer framing of the drowning child etc as making not only normative claims about what’s right to do in the abstract but also empirical claims about the best way to apply those normative principles in the world we live in. I think the idea that existential risk is very bad and that we are morally compelled to stop it if we aren’t sacrificing things of comparable moral significance[1] is fully consistent with Singerian notions.
[1] or that both existential risk and present suffering is morally significant, so choosing one over the other is superergoatory under Singer’s principles, but not necessarily under classical utilitarianism.
I would note that Toby and others in the long-termist camp do, in fact, very clearly embrace “the foundational values embedded in Peter Singer’s writings.” I agree that some people who embrace long-termism could decide to do so on other bases than impartial utilitarianism or similar arguments which agree with both redistribution and some importance of the long term, but I don’t hear them involved in the discussions, and so I don’t think it works as a criticism when the actual people do also advocate for near-term redistributive causes.
I don’t think I quite understand this reply. Are you saying that (check all that apply):
In your experience, the people involved in discussions do embrace redistribution and fairness as core values, they are just placing more value on future people.
Actual longtermists also advocate for near-term redistributive causes, so criticism about resource allocation within the movement away from the global poor and towards longtermism doesn’t make sense (i.e. it’s not zero-sum).
Redistributive commitments are only one part of the “foundational values”, and Toby and others in the longtermist camp are still motivated by the same underlying impartial utilitarianism, so pointing at less emphasis on redistribution is an unfair nitpick.
I think all of these are true, but I was pointing to #2 specifically.
On the first para, that doesn’t seem to me to be true of work on AI safety or biorisk, as I understand it.
On the second para, the first thing to say is that longtermists shouldn’t be the target of particular criticism on this score—almost no-one is wholly focused on improving the welfare of the global poor. If this decision by longtermists is racist then so is almost everyone else in the world.
Secondly, no I don’t think it counterfactually harms the global poor. That only works if you take a person-affecting view of people’s interests. If you count future people, then the shift is counterfactually very beneficial for the global poor and for both white and non-white people.
I don’t think it’s necessarily very good for the global poor as a changing group defined by their poverty, depending on how quickly global poverty declines. There’s also a big drop in the strength of evidence in this shift, so it depends on how skeptical you are.
Plus, person-affecting views (including asymmetric ones) or at least somewhat asymmetric views (e.g. prioritarianism) are not uncommon, and I would guess especially among those concerned with the global poor and inequality. Part of the complaint made by some is about ethical views that say extinction would be an astronomical loss and deserves overwhelming priority as a result, over all targeted anti-poverty work. This is a major part of the disagreement, not something to be quickly dismissed.
I disagree about at least some Biorisk, as the allocation of scarce resources in public health has distributive effects, and some work on pandemic preparedness has reduced focus for near-term campaigns on vaccinations. I suspect the same is true, to a lesser extent, in pushing people who might otherwise work on near-term ML bias to work on longer term concerns. But as this relates to your second point, and the point itself, I agree completely, and don’t think it’s reasonable to say it’s blameworthy or morally unacceptable, though as I argued, I think we should worry about the impacts.
But the last point confuses me. Even ignoring person-affecting or not, shifting efforts to help John can (by omission, at the very least,) injure Sam. “The global poor” isn’t a uniform pool, and helping those who are part of “the global poor” in a century by, say, taxing someone now is a counterfactual harm for the person now. If you aggregate the way you prefer, this problem goes away, but there are certainly ethical views, even within utilitarianism, where this isn’t acceptable—for example, if the future benefit is discounted so heavily that it’s outweighed by the present harm.
On your first para, I was responding to this claim: “It also seems strange to defend longtermists as only being harmful in theory, since the vast majority of longtermism is theory, and relatively few actions have been taken. That is, almost all longtermist ideas so far have implications which are currently only hypothetical.” I said that most work on bio and AI was not just theory but was applied. I don’t think the things you say in the first para present any evidence against that claim, but rather they seem to grant my initial point.
I agree that there are some things in Bio and AI that are applied—though the vast majority of the work in both areas is still fairly far from application. But my point which granted your initial point was responding to “I don’t think it counterfactually harms the global poor.”
This is question begging: it only counterfactually harms the poor on a person-affecting view of ethics, which longtermists reject
I’m a longtermist and I don’t reject (asymmetric) person(-moment-)affecting views, at least not those that think necessary ≠ only present people. I would be very hard-pressed to give a clean formalization of necessary people though. I think it’s bad if effective altruists think longtermism can only be justified with astronomical waste-style arguments and not at all if someone has person-affecting intuitions. (Staying in a broadly utilitarian framework. There are, of course, also obligation-to-ancestor-type justifications for longtermism or similar.) The person-affecting part of me just pushes me in the direction of caring more about trajectory change than extinction risk.
Since I could only ever give very handwavey defenses of person-affecting views and even handwaveier explanations of my overall moral views: Here’s a paper by someone that AFAICT is at least sympathetic to longtermism and discusses asymmetric person-affecting views. (I have to admit I never got around to read the paper.) (Writing a paper on how an asymmetric person-affecting view obviously also doesn’t necessarily mean that the author doesn’t actually reject person-affecting views)
Is that true?
Many current individuals will be worse off when resources don’t go to them, for instance, because they are saving future lives, versus when they do, for instance, funds focused on near-term utilitarian goals like poverty reduction. And if, as most of us expect, the world’s wealth will continue to grow, effectively all future people who are helped by existential risk reduction are not what we’d now consider poor. You can defend this via the utilitarian calculus across all people, but that doesn’t change the distributive impact between groups.
Equally, many future people will be worse-off than they would have been if we don’t reduce extinction risks. The claim is about the net total impact on non-white people
Your definition of problematic injustice seems far too narrow, and I explicitly didn’t refer to race in the previous post. The example I gave was that the most disadvantaged people are in the present, and are further injured—not that non-white people (which under current definitions will describe approximately all of humanity in another half dozen generations) will be worse off.
On the second point, yes I agree that there are some popular views on which we would discount or ignore future people. I just don’t think that they are plausible. If someone held a view which said that they only count the interests of white future people, I think it would be quite clear that this was bad for the interests of non-white people in a very important way. Therefore, if I ignore all future people, then I ignore all future non-white people, which is bad for their interests in a very important way
As I said above in a different comment thread, it seems clear we’re talking past one another.
Yes, being racist would be racist, and no, that’s not the criticism. You said that “there are some popular views on which we would discount or ignore future people. I just don’t think that they are plausible.” And I think part of the issue is exactly this dismissiveness. As a close analogy, imagine someone said “there are some popular views where AI could be a risk to humans. I just don’t think that these are plausible,” and went on to spend money building ASI instead of engaging with the potential that they are wrong, or taking any action to investigate or hedge that possibility.
I don’t really understand your response. Most of the people who argue for a longtermist ethical standpoint have spent many many years thinking about the possibility that they are wrong and arguing against person-affecting views, during their philosophy degrees. I could talk to you for several weeks about the merits and demerits of such views and the published literature on them.
“Yes, being racist would be racist, and no, that’s not the criticism.” I don’t really understand your point here.
My point is that many people who disagree with the longtermist ethical viewpoint also spent years thinking about the issues, and dismissing the majority of philosophers, and the vast, vast majority of people’s views as not plausible, is itself one of the problems I tried to highlight on the original post when I said that a small group talking about how to fix everything should raise flags.
And my point about racism is that criticism of choices and priorities which have a potential to perpetuate existing structural disadvantages and inequity is not the same as calling someone racist.
The standards in the first para appear to be something like ‘you can never say that something is implausible if some philosophers believe it’. That seems like a pretty weird standard. Another way of making saying it is implausible is just saying that “I think it is probably false”.
Near-termists are also a small group talking about how to fix everything.
this is perhaps too meta, but on the second para, if that is what you meant, I don’t understand how it is a response to the comment your response was to.
I’m pointing out that you’re privileging your views over those of others—not “some philosophers,” but “most people.”
And unless you’re assuming a fairly strong version of moral realism, this isn’t a factual question, it’s a values question—so it’s strange to me to think that we should get to assume we’re correct despite being a small minority, without at least a far stronger argument that most people would agree with longermism if properly presented—and I think Stefan Schubert’s recent work implies that is not at all clear.
Any time you take a stance on anything you are privileging your view over some other people. Your argument also applies to people working on animal welfare and on global poverty. In surveys, most people don’t even seem to care about saving more lives than less.
If we are going to go down the route of saying that what EAs do should be decided by the majority opinion of the current global population, then that would be the end of EA of any kind. As I understand it, your claim is that the total view is false (or we don’t have reason to act on it) because the vast majority of the world population do not believe in the total view. Is that right?
It is difficult not to come up with examples. In 1500, most people would have believed that violence against women and slavery were permissible. Would that have made you stop campaigning to bring an end to that? These are also values, after all
Also, the demographic criticism also applies to EAs who are working on global development: people in that area also skew white and highly educated.
People who work on farm animal welfare are not focused on the global poor either, but this seems to me an extremely flimsy basis on which to call them racist.
Note: I did not call anyone racist, other than to note that there are groups which embrace some views which themselves embrace that label—but on review, you keep saying that this is about calling someone racist, whereas I’m talking about unequal impacts and systemic impacts of choices—and I think this is a serious confusion which is hampering our conversation.
Perhaps I have misunderstood, but I interpreted your post as saying we should take the two critiques of longtermism seriously. I think the quality of the critiques is extremely poor, and am trying to explain why.
I might have been unclear. As I said initially, I claim it’s good to publicly address concerns about “the (indisputable) fact that avoiding X-risks can be tied to racist or eugenic historical precedents”, and this is what the LARB piece actually discussed. And I think that slightly more investigation into the issue should have convinced the author that any concerns about continued embrace of the eugenic ideas, or ignorance of the issues, were misplaced. I initially pointed out that specific claims about longtermism being similar to eugenics are “farcical.” More generally, I tried to point out in this post that many the attacks are unserious or uniformed- as Scott pointed out in his essay, which this one quoted and applied to this situation, the criticisms aren’t new.
More serious attempts at dialog, like some of the criticisms in the LARB piece are not bad-faith or unreasonable claims, even if they fail to be original. And I agree that “we cannot claim to take existential risk seriously — and meaningfully confront the grave threats to the future of human and nonhuman life on this planet — if we do not also confront the fact that our ideas about human extinction, including how human extinction might be prevented, have a dark history.” But I also think it’s obvious that others working on longtermism agree, so the criticism seems to be at best a weak man argument. Unfortunately, I think we’ll need to wait another year or so for Will’s new book, which I understand has a far more complete discussion of this, much of which was written before either of these pieces were published.
Sorry to jump in the conversation, but Toby Ord has another book? Maybe you’re talking about Will MacAskill’s upcoming book on longtermism?
Right—fixed. Whoops!