Agreed, and that’s a very good response to a position that one of the sides I critiqued has presented. But despite this and other reasons to reject their positions, I don’t think the reverse theoretical claim that we should focus resources exclusively on longtermism is a reasonable one to hold, even while accepting the deontological taboo and dismissing those overwrought supposed fears.
There is nothing special about longtermism compared to any other big desideratum in this regard.
I’m not sure this is the case. E.g. Steven Pinker in Better Angels makes the case that utopian movements systematically tend to commit atrocities because this all-important end goal justifies anyting in the medium term. I haven’t rigorously examined this argument and think it would be valuable for someone to do so, but much of longtermism in the EA community, especially of the strong variety, is based on something like utopia.
One reason why you might intuitively think there would be a relationship is that shorter-term impacts are typically somewhat more bounded; e.g. if thousands of American schoolchildren are getting suboptimal lunches, this obviously doesn’t justify torturing hundreds of thousands of people. With the strong longtermist claims it’s much less clear that there’s any sort of upper bound, so to draw a firm line against atrocities you end up looking to somewhat more convoluted reasoning (e.g. some notion of deontological restraint that isn’t completely absolute but yet can withstand astronomical consequences, or a sketchy and loose notion that atrocities have an instrumental downside).
There’s nothing convoluted about it! We just observe that historical experience shows that the supposed benefits never actually appear, leaving just the atrocity! That’s it! That’s the actual reason you know the real result would be net bad and therefore you need to find a reason to argue against it! If historically it worked great and exactly as promised every time, you would have different heuristics about it now!
Agreed, and that’s a very good response to a position that one of the sides I critiqued has presented. But despite this and other reasons to reject their positions, I don’t think the reverse theoretical claim that we should focus resources exclusively on longtermism is a reasonable one to hold, even while accepting the deontological taboo and dismissing those overwrought supposed fears.
I’m not sure this is the case. E.g. Steven Pinker in Better Angels makes the case that utopian movements systematically tend to commit atrocities because this all-important end goal justifies anyting in the medium term. I haven’t rigorously examined this argument and think it would be valuable for someone to do so, but much of longtermism in the EA community, especially of the strong variety, is based on something like utopia.
One reason why you might intuitively think there would be a relationship is that shorter-term impacts are typically somewhat more bounded; e.g. if thousands of American schoolchildren are getting suboptimal lunches, this obviously doesn’t justify torturing hundreds of thousands of people. With the strong longtermist claims it’s much less clear that there’s any sort of upper bound, so to draw a firm line against atrocities you end up looking to somewhat more convoluted reasoning (e.g. some notion of deontological restraint that isn’t completely absolute but yet can withstand astronomical consequences, or a sketchy and loose notion that atrocities have an instrumental downside).
There’s nothing convoluted about it! We just observe that historical experience shows that the supposed benefits never actually appear, leaving just the atrocity! That’s it! That’s the actual reason you know the real result would be net bad and therefore you need to find a reason to argue against it! If historically it worked great and exactly as promised every time, you would have different heuristics about it now!