You could be lying to us right now to rehabilitate EA’s image.
I referenced work to this effect from my decade-old PhD dissertation, along with published articles and books from prior utilitarians, none of which could possibly have been written with “rehabilitating EA’s image” in mind.
Randomly accusing people of lying is incredibly jerkish behaviour. I’ve been arguing for almost two decades now that utilitarianism calls for honest and straightforward behaviour. (And anyone who knows me IRL can vouch for my personal integrity.) You have zero basis for making these insulting accusations. Please desist.
What are you using to justify these conclusions? EV? Is it an empirical claim?
My post on naive utilitarianism, like other academic literature on the topic (including, e.g., more drastic claims from Bernard Williams et al. that utilitarianism is outright self-effacing, or arguments by rule consequentialists like Brad Hooker), invokes common-sense empirical knowledge, drawing attention to the immense potential downside from reputational risks alongside other grounds for distrusting direct calculations as unreliable when they violate well-established moral rules.
Again, there’s a huge academic literature on this. You don’t have to trust me personally, I’m just trying to summarize some basic points.
Maybe stop misrepresenting...
What are you talking about? Publius referenced the idea that this may be “too complex for a not insignificant proportion of the public and therefore utilitarianism should not be promoted at all for a larger audience”. This could be interpreted in different (stronger or weaker) ways, depending on what one has in mind by “larger audiences”. My reply argued against a strong interpretation, and then indicated that I agreed with a weaker interpretation.
So let’s restrict our scope to SBF’s decision-making within the past few years. It is an open question: were SBF’s decisions consistent with utilitarian-minded EV reasoning?
And we can start to answer this question. We can quantify the money he was dealing with, and his potential earnings. We can quantify the range of risk he was likely dealing with. We can provide a reasonable range as to the negative consequences of him getting caught. We can plug all these numbers into our EV calculus. It is the results of these equations that we are currently discussing.
So some vague and artificial thought experiments written a decade ago is not especially relevant. Not unless you happened to run these specific EV calculations into your PhD dissertation. But given the fact that you are a mere mortal and so cannot predict the future, I doubt that you did.
My post on naive utilitarianism, like other academic literature on the topic (including, e.g., more drastic claims from Bernard Williams et al. that utilitarianism is outright self-effacing, or arguments by rule consequentialists like Brad Hooker), invokes common-sense empirical knowledge, drawing attention to the immense potential downside from reputational risks alongside other grounds for distrusting direct calculations as unreliable when they violate well-established moral rules.
Your post is hardly “academic literature” (was it peer reviewed? Or just upvoted by many philosophically naive EAs?).
And it is common-sense empirical knowledge that SBF did what he did due to his utilitarianism + EV reasoning. It is currently only on this forum where this incredibly obvious fact is being seriously questioned.
And, besides, when has a utilitarian ever cared about common sense?
What are you talking about?
Do you think you represented your opponent’s view in the most charitable way possible? Do you think a superbowl commercial is a charitable example to be giving? Do you think that captures the essence of the critique? Or is it merely a cartoonish example, strategically chosen to make the critique look silly?
You don’t have to trust me personally
It’s not you personally. It’s utilitarians in general. Like I said in my original comment: it is wholly unsurprising that public facing EAs are currently denying that ends justify means. Because they are in damage control mode. They are tying to tame the onslaught of negative PR that EA is now getting. So even if they thought that the ends did justify the means, they would probably lie about it. Because the ends (better PR) would justify the means (lying). So we cannot simply take these people at their word. Because whatever they truly believe, we should expect their answers to be the same.
So why should we have any reason to trust any utilitarian right now? And again, I am referring to this particular situation—pointing to defences of utilitarianism written in the 1970s is not especially relevant, since they did not account for SBFs particular situation, which is what we are currently discussing.
As I’m sure you’ll find, it’s pretty difficult to provide any reason why we should trust a utilitarian’s views on the SBF debacle. Perhaps that’s a problem for utilitarianism. We can add it to the collection.
I referenced work to this effect from my decade-old PhD dissertation, along with published articles and books from prior utilitarians, none of which could possibly have been written with “rehabilitating EA’s image” in mind.
Randomly accusing people of lying is incredibly jerkish behaviour. I’ve been arguing for almost two decades now that utilitarianism calls for honest and straightforward behaviour. (And anyone who knows me IRL can vouch for my personal integrity.) You have zero basis for making these insulting accusations. Please desist.
My post on naive utilitarianism, like other academic literature on the topic (including, e.g., more drastic claims from Bernard Williams et al. that utilitarianism is outright self-effacing, or arguments by rule consequentialists like Brad Hooker), invokes common-sense empirical knowledge, drawing attention to the immense potential downside from reputational risks alongside other grounds for distrusting direct calculations as unreliable when they violate well-established moral rules.
Again, there’s a huge academic literature on this. You don’t have to trust me personally, I’m just trying to summarize some basic points.
What are you talking about? Publius referenced the idea that this may be “too complex for a not insignificant proportion of the public and therefore utilitarianism should not be promoted at all for a larger audience”. This could be interpreted in different (stronger or weaker) ways, depending on what one has in mind by “larger audiences”. My reply argued against a strong interpretation, and then indicated that I agreed with a weaker interpretation.
I’m not talking about your PhD dissertation.
So let’s restrict our scope to SBF’s decision-making within the past few years. It is an open question: were SBF’s decisions consistent with utilitarian-minded EV reasoning?
And we can start to answer this question. We can quantify the money he was dealing with, and his potential earnings. We can quantify the range of risk he was likely dealing with. We can provide a reasonable range as to the negative consequences of him getting caught. We can plug all these numbers into our EV calculus. It is the results of these equations that we are currently discussing.
So some vague and artificial thought experiments written a decade ago is not especially relevant. Not unless you happened to run these specific EV calculations into your PhD dissertation. But given the fact that you are a mere mortal and so cannot predict the future, I doubt that you did.
Your post is hardly “academic literature” (was it peer reviewed? Or just upvoted by many philosophically naive EAs?).
And it is common-sense empirical knowledge that SBF did what he did due to his utilitarianism + EV reasoning. It is currently only on this forum where this incredibly obvious fact is being seriously questioned.
And, besides, when has a utilitarian ever cared about common sense?
Do you think you represented your opponent’s view in the most charitable way possible? Do you think a superbowl commercial is a charitable example to be giving? Do you think that captures the essence of the critique? Or is it merely a cartoonish example, strategically chosen to make the critique look silly?
It’s not you personally. It’s utilitarians in general. Like I said in my original comment: it is wholly unsurprising that public facing EAs are currently denying that ends justify means. Because they are in damage control mode. They are tying to tame the onslaught of negative PR that EA is now getting. So even if they thought that the ends did justify the means, they would probably lie about it. Because the ends (better PR) would justify the means (lying). So we cannot simply take these people at their word. Because whatever they truly believe, we should expect their answers to be the same.
So why should we have any reason to trust any utilitarian right now? And again, I am referring to this particular situation—pointing to defences of utilitarianism written in the 1970s is not especially relevant, since they did not account for SBFs particular situation, which is what we are currently discussing.
As I’m sure you’ll find, it’s pretty difficult to provide any reason why we should trust a utilitarian’s views on the SBF debacle. Perhaps that’s a problem for utilitarianism. We can add it to the collection.