Alternatives to your five attributes in your analogy? I don’t think there’s any that longtermists have identified that is immune to the motivations for cluelessness. The best contender in people’s minds might be “making sure the ship doesn’t get destroyed,” but I haven’t encountered any convincing case for why we shouldn’t be clueless about whether that’s good (or bad) in the long run.[1]
Then, it’s tempting to say “let’s try to do research and be less clueless” (predictive power) but even predictive power might turn out bad for all we know (in a complex-cluelessness way, not mere uncertainty).
Some may even argue that we are clueless about _how_ to save the ship in the long run. See, e.g., DiGiovanni (2025), Schwitzgebel (2024), and Friederich (2025, §5).
I aim to contribute to efforts to 1. find alternative action-guidance when standard consequentialism is silent on what we ought to do. In particular, I’m interested in finding something different from (or more specific than) Clifton’s “Option 3”, DiGiovanni’s non-consequentialist altruism proposal, or Vinding’s twoproposals. 2. reduce short-term animal suffering or finding out how to do so in robust ways, since I suspect most plausible solutions to 1 say it’s quite a good thing to do, although maybe not the best (and we might need to do 1 to do 2 better. Sometimes, cluelessness bites even if we ignore long-term consequences—e.g., the impact of fishing).
what alternative(s) do you prefer?
Alternatives to your five attributes in your analogy? I don’t think there’s any that longtermists have identified that is immune to the motivations for cluelessness. The best contender in people’s minds might be “making sure the ship doesn’t get destroyed,” but I haven’t encountered any convincing case for why we shouldn’t be clueless about whether that’s good (or bad) in the long run.[1]
Then, it’s tempting to say “let’s try to do research and be less clueless” (predictive power) but even predictive power might turn out bad for all we know (in a complex-cluelessness way, not mere uncertainty).
Some may even argue that we are clueless about _how_ to save the ship in the long run. See, e.g., DiGiovanni (2025), Schwitzgebel (2024), and Friederich (2025, §5).
given this, i’m curious how you yourself are making decisions about how to allocate your energy/effort.
I aim to contribute to efforts to
1. find alternative action-guidance when standard consequentialism is silent on what we ought to do. In particular, I’m interested in finding something different from (or more specific than) Clifton’s “Option 3”, DiGiovanni’s non-consequentialist altruism proposal, or Vinding’s two proposals.
2. reduce short-term animal suffering or finding out how to do so in robust ways, since I suspect most plausible solutions to 1 say it’s quite a good thing to do, although maybe not the best (and we might need to do 1 to do 2 better. Sometimes, cluelessness bites even if we ignore long-term consequences—e.g., the impact of fishing).