On the first point, you’re right, I should have phrased this differently: it’s not that those passages imply that impartiality entails consequentialism (“an act is right iff it brings about the best consequences”). What I should have said is that they seem to imply that impartiality at a minimum entails strong forms of consequence-focused impartiality, i.e. the impartiality component of (certain forms of) consequentialism (“impartiality entails that we account for all moral patients, and all the most significant impacts”). My point was that that’s not the case; there are forms of impartiality that don’t — both weaker consequence-focused notions of impartiality as well as more rule-based notions of impartiality (etc), and these can be relevant to, and potentially help guide, ethics in general and altruism in particular.
Can you say more why you think it’s very strong?
I think it’s an extremely strong claim both because there’s a broad set of alternative views that could potentially justify varieties of impartial altruism and work on EA causes — other than very strong forms of consequence-focused impartiality that require us to account for ~all consequences till the end of time. And the claim isn’t just that all those alternative views are somewhat implausible, but that they are all wholly implausible (as seems implied by their exclusion and dismissal in passages like “impartial altruism would lose action-guiding force”).
One could perhaps make a strong case for that claim, and maybe most readers on the EA Forum endorse that strong claim. But I think it’s an extremely strong claim nevertheless.
On the first point, you’re right, I should have phrased this differently: it’s not that those passages imply that impartiality entails consequentialism (“an act is right iff it brings about the best consequences”). What I should have said is that they seem to imply that impartiality at a minimum entails strong forms of consequence-focused impartiality, i.e. the impartiality component of (certain forms of) consequentialism (“impartiality entails that we account for all moral patients, and all the most significant impacts”). My point was that that’s not the case; there are forms of impartiality that don’t — both weaker consequence-focused notions of impartiality as well as more rule-based notions of impartiality (etc), and these can be relevant to, and potentially help guide, ethics in general and altruism in particular.
I think it’s an extremely strong claim both because there’s a broad set of alternative views that could potentially justify varieties of impartial altruism and work on EA causes — other than very strong forms of consequence-focused impartiality that require us to account for ~all consequences till the end of time. And the claim isn’t just that all those alternative views are somewhat implausible, but that they are all wholly implausible (as seems implied by their exclusion and dismissal in passages like “impartial altruism would lose action-guiding force”).
One could perhaps make a strong case for that claim, and maybe most readers on the EA Forum endorse that strong claim. But I think it’s an extremely strong claim nevertheless.