Forgive me playing to type and offering a minor-key variation on the OP’s theme. Any EA predisposition for vainglorious grasping after heroism is not only an unedifying shape to draw one’s life, but also implies attitudes that are themselves morally ugly.
There are some (mercifully few) healthcare professionals who are in prison: so addicted to the thrill of ‘saving lives’ they deliberately inflicted medical emergencies on their patients so they had the opportunity to ‘rescue’ them.
The error in ‘EA-land’ is of a similar kind (but a much lower degree): it is much better from the point of view of the universe that no one needs your help. To wish instead they are arranged in jeopardy as some potemkin vale of soul-making to demonstrate one’s virtue (rightly, ego) upon is perverse.
(I dislike ‘opportunity’ accounts of EA for similar reasons: that (for example) millions of children are likely to die before their fifth birthday is a grotesque outrage to the human condition. Excitement that this also means one has the opportunity make this number smaller is inapt.)
Likewise, ‘total lifetime impact (in expectation)’ is the wrong unit of account to judge oneself. Not only because moral luck intervenes in who you happen to be (more intelligent counterparts of mine could ‘do more good’ than I—but this can’t be helped), but also in what world one happens to inhabit.
I think most people I met in medical school (among other comparison classes) are better people than I am: across the set of relevant possible circumstances we could find ourselves, I’d typically ‘do less good’ than the cohort average. If it transpires I end up doing much more good than them, it will be due to the accident where particular features of mine—mainly those I cannot take moral credit for, and some of which are blameworthy—happen to match usefully to particular features of the world which themselves should only be the subject of deep regret. Said accident is scant cause for celebration.
(my thoughts on this are conflicted, and I’m not sure I will endorse this after significant reflection) I think whether opportunity style accounts of EA are grotesque or natural are somewhat domain-specific.
I agree that it’s somewhat grotesque to think of kids dying of diarrhea or chickens being tortured in factory farms as an exciting opportunity. But when I think of opportunity accounts, I think of something like Parfit (who himself probably had an obligation framing, not sure) talking about the future we can work towards:
Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea.
If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would give us all, including some of those who have suffered, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.
Bravo.
Forgive me playing to type and offering a minor-key variation on the OP’s theme. Any EA predisposition for vainglorious grasping after heroism is not only an unedifying shape to draw one’s life, but also implies attitudes that are themselves morally ugly.
There are some (mercifully few) healthcare professionals who are in prison: so addicted to the thrill of ‘saving lives’ they deliberately inflicted medical emergencies on their patients so they had the opportunity to ‘rescue’ them.
The error in ‘EA-land’ is of a similar kind (but a much lower degree): it is much better from the point of view of the universe that no one needs your help. To wish instead they are arranged in jeopardy as some potemkin vale of soul-making to demonstrate one’s virtue (rightly, ego) upon is perverse.
(I dislike ‘opportunity’ accounts of EA for similar reasons: that (for example) millions of children are likely to die before their fifth birthday is a grotesque outrage to the human condition. Excitement that this also means one has the opportunity make this number smaller is inapt.)
Likewise, ‘total lifetime impact (in expectation)’ is the wrong unit of account to judge oneself. Not only because moral luck intervenes in who you happen to be (more intelligent counterparts of mine could ‘do more good’ than I—but this can’t be helped), but also in what world one happens to inhabit.
I think most people I met in medical school (among other comparison classes) are better people than I am: across the set of relevant possible circumstances we could find ourselves, I’d typically ‘do less good’ than the cohort average. If it transpires I end up doing much more good than them, it will be due to the accident where particular features of mine—mainly those I cannot take moral credit for, and some of which are blameworthy—happen to match usefully to particular features of the world which themselves should only be the subject of deep regret. Said accident is scant cause for celebration.
(my thoughts on this are conflicted, and I’m not sure I will endorse this after significant reflection) I think whether opportunity style accounts of EA are grotesque or natural are somewhat domain-specific.
I agree that it’s somewhat grotesque to think of kids dying of diarrhea or chickens being tortured in factory farms as an exciting opportunity. But when I think of opportunity accounts, I think of something like Parfit (who himself probably had an obligation framing, not sure) talking about the future we can work towards: