Re your second point, a counter would be that the implementation of recommendations arising from ERS will often have impacts on the population around at the time of implementation, and the larger those impacts are the less possible specialization seems. E.g. if total utilitarians/longtermists were considering seriously pursuing the implementation of global governance/ubiquitous surveillance, this might risk such a significant loss of value to non-utilitarian non-longtermists that it’s not clear total utilitarians/longtermists should be left to dominate the debate.
I mostly agree. I’m not sure I see how that’s a counter to my second point though. My second point was just that (contrary to what the paper seems to assume) some amount of ethical non-representativeness is not in itself bad:
There’s room to debate just how much these ethical views should concentrate their investments, but if the answer is not zero, then it’s not the case that e.g. the field having “non-representative moral visions of the future” is a “daunting problem” for anyone.
Also, if we’re worried about implementation of large policy shifts (at least, if we’re worried about this under “business as usual” politics), I think utilitarians/longtermists can’t and won’t actually dominate the debate, because policymaking processes in modern democracies by default engage a large and diverse set of stakeholders. (In other words, dominance in the internal debates of a niche research field won’t translate into dominance of policymaking debates—especially when the policy in question would significantly affect many people.)
Re your second point, a counter would be that the implementation of recommendations arising from ERS will often have impacts on the population around at the time of implementation, and the larger those impacts are the less possible specialization seems. E.g. if total utilitarians/longtermists were considering seriously pursuing the implementation of global governance/ubiquitous surveillance, this might risk such a significant loss of value to non-utilitarian non-longtermists that it’s not clear total utilitarians/longtermists should be left to dominate the debate.
I mostly agree. I’m not sure I see how that’s a counter to my second point though. My second point was just that (contrary to what the paper seems to assume) some amount of ethical non-representativeness is not in itself bad:
Also, if we’re worried about implementation of large policy shifts (at least, if we’re worried about this under “business as usual” politics), I think utilitarians/longtermists can’t and won’t actually dominate the debate, because policymaking processes in modern democracies by default engage a large and diverse set of stakeholders. (In other words, dominance in the internal debates of a niche research field won’t translate into dominance of policymaking debates—especially when the policy in question would significantly affect many people.)