Would you similarly doubt that, on expectation, someone murdering someone else had bad consequences overall? Someone slapping you very hard in the face?
This kind of reasoning seems to bring about a universal scepticism about whether we’re doing Good. Even if you think you can pin down the long term effects, you have no idea about the very long term effects (and everything else is negligible compared to very long term effects).
For what it’s worth, I definitely don’t think we should throw our hands up and say that everything is too uncertain, so we should do nothing. Instead we have to accept that we’re going to have high levels of uncertainty, and make decisions based on that. I’m not sure it’s reasonable to say that GiveWell top charities are a “safe bet”, which means they don’t have a clear advantage over far future interventions. You could argue that we should favor GW top charities because they have better feedback loops—I discuss this here.
Murdering also decreases world population and consumption, which decreases problems like global warming, overfishing, etc. and probably reduces some existential risks.
Would you similarly doubt that, on expectation, someone murdering someone else had bad consequences overall? Someone slapping you very hard in the face?
This kind of reasoning seems to bring about a universal scepticism about whether we’re doing Good. Even if you think you can pin down the long term effects, you have no idea about the very long term effects (and everything else is negligible compared to very long term effects).
For what it’s worth, I definitely don’t think we should throw our hands up and say that everything is too uncertain, so we should do nothing. Instead we have to accept that we’re going to have high levels of uncertainty, and make decisions based on that. I’m not sure it’s reasonable to say that GiveWell top charities are a “safe bet”, which means they don’t have a clear advantage over far future interventions. You could argue that we should favor GW top charities because they have better feedback loops—I discuss this here.
I think the effect of murdering someone are more robustly bad than reducing poverty (which are also probably positive, but less obviously so).
Why? What are the very long term effects of a murder?
Murdering also decreases world population and consumption, which decreases problems like global warming, overfishing, etc. and probably reduces some existential risks.
Increasing violence and expectation of violence seems to lead to worse values and a more cruel/selfish world.
Of course it’s also among the worst thing you can do under all non-consequentialist ethics.