The above comment is probably hard to understand. Here’s a better explanation of what I wanted to say:
Lack of morally urgent causes: In the blogpost On Caring, Nate Soares writes: “It’s not enough to think you should change the world — you also need the sort of desperation that comes from realizing that you would dedicate your entire life to solving the world’s 100th biggest problem if you could, but you can’t, because there are 99 bigger problems you have to address first.”
In that passage, Soares points out that desperation can be a strong motivating factor to why some people develop an identity around effective altruism. Interestingly enough, in some moral reflection procedures , the outside world is on pause. Reflection procedures are thinking-and-acting sequences we’d undergo if we had ample time and resources (no opportunity costs from urgent moral issues!).
When you’re in the reflection procedure, there’s no reason to experience the phenomenology of “desperation” that Soares describes. If you’ve suffered from poverty, illnesses or abuse, these hardships are no longer an issue. Also, there are no people to lift out of poverty and no factory farms to shut down. You’re no longer in a race against time to prevent bad things from happening, seeking friends and allies while trying to defend your cause against corrosion from influence seekers. Without morally urgent causes, it’s less motivating to go all-out by adopting an identity around some viscerally motivating, morality-inspired life goal.
Instead, reflection inside the reflection procedure may feel more like writing that novel you’ve always wanted to write – it has less the feel of a “mission,” and more the feel of “doing justice to your long-term dream.”
Note that whether this is a good or bad thing is an open question. It still remains morally important what you decide in the reflection procedure. The stakes remain high because your deliberations determine how to allocate your caring capacity. Still, you’re deliberating from a perspective where everything is well, so what’s missing is moral urgency. Unless you take counteracting measures, I could imagine that you’re more likely to form an identity as “someone who prevents plans for future utopia from going poorly” than “someone who addresses ongoing/immediately foreseeable risks or injustices.”
For better or worse, the state of the world in the reflection procedure could change the nature of your moral reflection (as compared to how people adopt strong moral convictions in our more familiar circumstances).
The above comment is probably hard to understand. Here’s a better explanation of what I wanted to say:
Lack of morally urgent causes:
In the blogpost On Caring, Nate Soares writes: “It’s not enough to think you should change the world — you also need the sort of desperation that comes from realizing that you would dedicate your entire life to solving the world’s 100th biggest problem if you could, but you can’t, because there are 99 bigger problems you have to address first.”
In that passage, Soares points out that desperation can be a strong motivating factor to why some people develop an identity around effective altruism. Interestingly enough, in some moral reflection procedures , the outside world is on pause. Reflection procedures are thinking-and-acting sequences we’d undergo if we had ample time and resources (no opportunity costs from urgent moral issues!).
When you’re in the reflection procedure, there’s no reason to experience the phenomenology of “desperation” that Soares describes. If you’ve suffered from poverty, illnesses or abuse, these hardships are no longer an issue. Also, there are no people to lift out of poverty and no factory farms to shut down. You’re no longer in a race against time to prevent bad things from happening, seeking friends and allies while trying to defend your cause against corrosion from influence seekers. Without morally urgent causes, it’s less motivating to go all-out by adopting an identity around some viscerally motivating, morality-inspired life goal.
Instead, reflection inside the reflection procedure may feel more like writing that novel you’ve always wanted to write – it has less the feel of a “mission,” and more the feel of “doing justice to your long-term dream.”
Note that whether this is a good or bad thing is an open question. It still remains morally important what you decide in the reflection procedure. The stakes remain high because your deliberations determine how to allocate your caring capacity. Still, you’re deliberating from a perspective where everything is well, so what’s missing is moral urgency. Unless you take counteracting measures, I could imagine that you’re more likely to form an identity as “someone who prevents plans for future utopia from going poorly” than “someone who addresses ongoing/immediately foreseeable risks or injustices.”
For better or worse, the state of the world in the reflection procedure could change the nature of your moral reflection (as compared to how people adopt strong moral convictions in our more familiar circumstances).