Thanks for writing this. I think the main points Torres gets wrong are
a) his insinuation that longtermists do or would actually support serious active harms (even on a large scale) to prevent extinction, rather than just entertain the possibility theoretically, and
b) the characterization of longtermists as pro-risky tech. Longtermists would generally prefer such tech to develop more slowly to have more time to work on safety (even though they might want a given technology developed eventually, but safely).
Some comments/âfeedback on specific points:
Torres misses something here and continues to do so throughout the rest of the piece â potential is not some abstract notion, it refers to the billions of people [13] who now do not get to exist. Imagine if everyone on earth discovered they were sterile. There would obviously be suffering from the fact that many living wanted to have children and now realize they cannot have them, but there would also be some additional badness from the fact that no one would be around to experience the good things about living.
I donât agree that this loss of future people involves additional badness at all, and I would suggest rephrasing to not claim so as if itâs definitely the case, rather than just your own view. There are also longtermists with person-affecting or otherwise asymmetric views, like negative utilitarianism.
The example does not seem to represent a choice that we will ever actually face in the real world. Philosophers have debated population ethics for decades, and it is generally agreed that all views have highly counterintuitive conclusions. It is therefore flawed to say âlook, this view implies something that seems weird, therefore it must be wrong,â since this would imply that no view is correct. The total view does not seem to face more counterintuitive implications than other views.
For what itâs worth, different people find different things counterintuitive. Some people donât find the repugnant conclusion counterintuitive at all.
I think itâs the impartiality of utilitarianism, not the total view, thatâs responsible for these things. Torres is explicit in one of the articles that heâs referring to total utilitarianism. That being said, these early utilitarians were total utilitarians, AFAIK.
The total view could also imply the logic of the larder (itâs good to farm and kill animals, as long as theyâre happy) or favour restrictions on contraception and abortion, at least compared to other utilitarian or consequentialist views (variable value views, critical level utilitarianism, person-affecting views, negative utilitarianism).
Torres moves on from the total view to discussing utilitarianism more broadly (which does not have to be combined with the total view). Torres is wrong when he claims longtermism is âutilitarianism repackaged.â One does not have to be a total utilitarian, or any kind of utilitarian, to be a longtermist [21]. Torres argues that all longtermists are utilitarians, which is simply false. I am not. Nor is Bostrom [22]. Nor are many others. That being said, there are a significant number of utilitarian longtermists, and Torres does not do this ethical view justice with his description.
I think he is using âutilitarianism repackagedâ informally here, to highlight what EA (not just longtermism) and utilitarianism have in common, based on the linked article, although what they have in common doesnât imply the bad things he claims longtermism does in the article (nor does total utilitarianism necessarily, either, in practice), which I think is the best response here. He doesnât literally mean that all longtermists must be utilitarians. He wrote âthe EA movement is deeply utilitarian, at least in practiceâ. He also doesnât argue âthat all longtermists are utilitariansâ, and youâve done exactly what he anticipated, which is insist that some longtermists arenât utilitarians. This is what Torres wrote:
This leads to the third component: total utilitarianism, which I will refer to as âutilitarianismâ for short. Although some longtermists insist that they arenât utilitarians, we should right away note that this is mostly a smoke-and-mirrors act to deflect criticisms that longtermism â and, more generally, the effective altruism (EA) movement from which it emerged â is nothing more than utilitarianism repackaged. The fact is that the EA movement is deeply utilitarian, at least in practice, and indeed, before it decided upon a name, the movementâs early members, including Ord, seriously considered calling it the âeffective utilitarian communityâ.
To be clear, he is factually incorrect about that claim. I never seriously considered calling it that.
One of the major points of effective altruism in my mind was that it isnât only utilitarians who should care about doing more good rather than less, and not only consequentialists either. All theories that agree saving 10 lives is substantially more important than saving 1 life should care about effectiveness in our moral actions and could benefit from quantifying such things. I thought it was a great shame that effectiveness was usually only discussed re utilitarianism and I wanted to change that.
Thanks for writing this. I think the main points Torres gets wrong are
a) his insinuation that longtermists do or would actually support serious active harms (even on a large scale) to prevent extinction, rather than just entertain the possibility theoretically, and
b) the characterization of longtermists as pro-risky tech. Longtermists would generally prefer such tech to develop more slowly to have more time to work on safety (even though they might want a given technology developed eventually, but safely).
Some comments/âfeedback on specific points:
I donât agree that this loss of future people involves additional badness at all, and I would suggest rephrasing to not claim so as if itâs definitely the case, rather than just your own view. There are also longtermists with person-affecting or otherwise asymmetric views, like negative utilitarianism.
For what itâs worth, different people find different things counterintuitive. Some people donât find the repugnant conclusion counterintuitive at all.
I think itâs the impartiality of utilitarianism, not the total view, thatâs responsible for these things. Torres is explicit in one of the articles that heâs referring to total utilitarianism. That being said, these early utilitarians were total utilitarians, AFAIK.
The total view could also imply the logic of the larder (itâs good to farm and kill animals, as long as theyâre happy) or favour restrictions on contraception and abortion, at least compared to other utilitarian or consequentialist views (variable value views, critical level utilitarianism, person-affecting views, negative utilitarianism).
I think he is using âutilitarianism repackagedâ informally here, to highlight what EA (not just longtermism) and utilitarianism have in common, based on the linked article, although what they have in common doesnât imply the bad things he claims longtermism does in the article (nor does total utilitarianism necessarily, either, in practice), which I think is the best response here. He doesnât literally mean that all longtermists must be utilitarians. He wrote âthe EA movement is deeply utilitarian, at least in practiceâ. He also doesnât argue âthat all longtermists are utilitariansâ, and youâve done exactly what he anticipated, which is insist that some longtermists arenât utilitarians. This is what Torres wrote:
To be clear, he is factually incorrect about that claim. I never seriously considered calling it that.
One of the major points of effective altruism in my mind was that it isnât only utilitarians who should care about doing more good rather than less, and not only consequentialists either. All theories that agree saving 10 lives is substantially more important than saving 1 life should care about effectiveness in our moral actions and could benefit from quantifying such things. I thought it was a great shame that effectiveness was usually only discussed re utilitarianism and I wanted to change that.