EA: We should never trust ourselves to do act utilitarianism, we must strictly abide by a set of virtuous principles so we don’t go astray.
Also EA: It’s ok to eat animals as long as you do other world-saving work. The effort and sacrifice it would take to relearn my eating patterns just isn’t worth it on consequentialist grounds.
Sorry for the strawmanish meme format. I realise people have complex reasons for needing to navigate their lives the way they do, and I don’t advocate aggressively trying to make other people stop eating animals. The point is just that I feel like the seemingly universal disavowment of utilitarian reasoning has been insufficiently vetted for consistency. If we claim that utilitarian reasoning can be blamed for the FTX catastrophe, then we should ask ourselves what else we should apply that lesson to; or we should recognise that FTX isn’t a strong counterexample to utilitarianism, and we can still use it to make important decisions.
EA: We should never trust ourselves to do act utilitarianism, we must strictly abide by a set of virtuous principles so we don’t go astray.
Also EA: It’s ok to eat animals as long as you do other world-saving work. The effort and sacrifice it would take to relearn my eating patterns just isn’t worth it on consequentialist grounds.
Sorry for the strawmanish meme format. I realise people have complex reasons for needing to navigate their lives the way they do, and I don’t advocate aggressively trying to make other people stop eating animals. The point is just that I feel like the seemingly universal disavowment of utilitarian reasoning has been insufficiently vetted for consistency. If we claim that utilitarian reasoning can be blamed for the FTX catastrophe, then we should ask ourselves what else we should apply that lesson to; or we should recognise that FTX isn’t a strong counterexample to utilitarianism, and we can still use it to make important decisions.