Great! I broadly endorse the above virtues and can’t say much on the object level. On meta-level, I am curious about how do you think about the impact of this paper. I have certain guesses:
The paper’s conclusion says: “We hope that it should inspire a debate among philosophers and psychologists about what virtues utilitarians should prioritize the most.” Is that it?
Or maybe you want to re-associate utilitarianism with nice/warm virtues because it appears cold to some (like Bleeding Heart Libertarians was reframing libertarianism)?
Thanks for your comment. The comparison to Bleeding Heart Libertarians is good and instructive; thanks for that. Yes, one goal of our paper is to show that utilitarianism as practiced in the real world isn’t about breaking rules and similar. Instead, when you actually apply utilitarianism, you need virtues that most people would feel positively about—like truth-seeking and collaboration. And yes, we do hope that that gives a different and more positive image of utilitarianism.
We also want to give recommendations to people who already believe in utilitarianism inside and outside the EA community, yes.
We are also at the early stages of an empirical project focused on getting a better psychological understanding of these virtues.
Great! I broadly endorse the above virtues and can’t say much on the object level. On meta-level, I am curious about how do you think about the impact of this paper. I have certain guesses:
The paper’s conclusion says: “We hope that it should inspire a debate among philosophers and psychologists about what virtues utilitarians should prioritize the most.” Is that it?
Or are you aiming at figuring out recommendations for EAs to follow (akin to CEA’s Guiding principles and Lucius Caviola’s talk Against naive effective altruism)?
Or maybe you want to re-associate utilitarianism with nice/warm virtues because it appears cold to some (like Bleeding Heart Libertarians was reframing libertarianism)?
Thanks for your comment. The comparison to Bleeding Heart Libertarians is good and instructive; thanks for that. Yes, one goal of our paper is to show that utilitarianism as practiced in the real world isn’t about breaking rules and similar. Instead, when you actually apply utilitarianism, you need virtues that most people would feel positively about—like truth-seeking and collaboration. And yes, we do hope that that gives a different and more positive image of utilitarianism.
We also want to give recommendations to people who already believe in utilitarianism inside and outside the EA community, yes.
We are also at the early stages of an empirical project focused on getting a better psychological understanding of these virtues.