This argument doesn’t seem specific to longtermism. You could make the same case for short-term animal welfare. If you’ll be slightly more effective at passing sweeping changes to mitigate the harms of factory farming if you eat a chicken sandwich every day, the expectation of doing so is highly net positive even if you only care about chickens in the near future.
This argument doesn’t seem specific to veganism. You could make the same case for being a jerk in all manner of ways. If keying strangers’ cars helped you relax and get insight into the alignment problem, then, the same reasoning might suggest you should do it.
This isn’t to say the argument is wrong, but I find the implications very distasteful.
I agree! There seems to be a utility monster problem when weighing Longtermist stuff against moral good that has no compounding value. This is why I added the line about not being sure whether this should be weighed as a criticism against Longtermism or against veganism.
It sounds like you didn’t understand Derek’s comment. With his points in mind your response sounds like:
I agree! There seems to be a utility monster problem when weighing short-term chicken welfare against moral good that has no compounding value. This is why I added the line about not being sure whether this should be weighed as a criticism of caring about short-term chicken welfare or against stopping keying strangers’ cars even if it helps you relax.
It seems to me like your argument proves too much, and Derek’s comment helps reveal that, but it doesn’t seem like this comment of yours acknowledges that despite the initial “I agree”.
I’m with both of you in my discomfort, though I’m not sure I would consider this a reason to be suspicious of ” longtermism” so much as “bullet-biting deontic strong longtermism”, but I think there are lots of very counter intuitive implications of the latter anyway.
A couple of thoughts:
This argument doesn’t seem specific to longtermism. You could make the same case for short-term animal welfare. If you’ll be slightly more effective at passing sweeping changes to mitigate the harms of factory farming if you eat a chicken sandwich every day, the expectation of doing so is highly net positive even if you only care about chickens in the near future.
This argument doesn’t seem specific to veganism. You could make the same case for being a jerk in all manner of ways. If keying strangers’ cars helped you relax and get insight into the alignment problem, then, the same reasoning might suggest you should do it.
This isn’t to say the argument is wrong, but I find the implications very distasteful.
I agree! There seems to be a utility monster problem when weighing Longtermist stuff against moral good that has no compounding value. This is why I added the line about not being sure whether this should be weighed as a criticism against Longtermism or against veganism.
It sounds like you didn’t understand Derek’s comment. With his points in mind your response sounds like:
It seems to me like your argument proves too much, and Derek’s comment helps reveal that, but it doesn’t seem like this comment of yours acknowledges that despite the initial “I agree”.
I’m with both of you in my discomfort, though I’m not sure I would consider this a reason to be suspicious of ” longtermism” so much as “bullet-biting deontic strong longtermism”, but I think there are lots of very counter intuitive implications of the latter anyway.