I agree that calls to “throw out [all] attempts at doing moral calculus” are overreactions. The badness of fraud (etc.) is not a reason to reject longtermism, or earning to give, or other ambitious attempts to promote the good that are perfectly compatible with integrity and good citizenship. It merely suggests that these good goals should be pursued with integrity, rather than fraudulently.
But I do think it would be a mistake for people to only act with integrity conditional on explicit calculations yielding that result on each occasion. Rather, I think we really should throw out some attempts at doing moral calculus. (It’s never been a part of mainstream EA that you should try to violate rights for the greater good, for example. So I think the present discussions are really just making more explicit constraints on utilitarian reasoning that were really there all along.)
When folks wonder whether EA has the philosophical resources to condemn fraud etc., I think it’s worth flagging three (mutually compatible) options:
(1) Some EAs accept (non-instrumental) deontic constraints, compatibly with a utilitarian-flavoured conception of beneficence that applies within these constraints.
(2) Others may at least give sufficient credence to deontological views that they end up approximating such acceptance when taking account of moral uncertainty (as you suggest).
I don’t think that (2) alone will necessarily do much, because I don’t think we really ought to give much credence to deontology. I give deontology negligible—much less than 1%--credence myself (for many reasons, including this argument). Since my own uncertainty effectively only ranges over different variants of consequentialism, this uncertainty doesn’t seem sufficient to make much practical difference in this respect.
So I’m personally inclined to put more weight on heuristics that firmly warn against fraud and dishonesty on instrumental grounds. I’m not sure whether this is what you’re dismissing as “barely-evidenced heuristics”, as I think our common-sense grasp of social life and agential unreliability actually provides very strong grounds (albeit not explicit quantitative evidence) for believing that these particular heuristics are more reliable than first-pass calculations favouring fraud. And the FTX disaster (at least if truly motivated by naive utilitarianism, which I agree is unclear) constitutes yet further evidence in support of this, and so ought to prompt rethinking from those who disagree on this point.
As you say, we can see that any recent fraudulent actions were not truly rational (or prudent) given utilitarian goals. But that’s a point in support of explanation (3), not (2).
I agree that calls to “throw out [all] attempts at doing moral calculus” are overreactions. The badness of fraud (etc.) is not a reason to reject longtermism, or earning to give, or other ambitious attempts to promote the good that are perfectly compatible with integrity and good citizenship. It merely suggests that these good goals should be pursued with integrity, rather than fraudulently.
But I do think it would be a mistake for people to only act with integrity conditional on explicit calculations yielding that result on each occasion. Rather, I think we really should throw out some attempts at doing moral calculus. (It’s never been a part of mainstream EA that you should try to violate rights for the greater good, for example. So I think the present discussions are really just making more explicit constraints on utilitarian reasoning that were really there all along.)
When folks wonder whether EA has the philosophical resources to condemn fraud etc., I think it’s worth flagging three (mutually compatible) options:
(1) Some EAs accept (non-instrumental) deontic constraints, compatibly with a utilitarian-flavoured conception of beneficence that applies within these constraints.
(2) Others may at least give sufficient credence to deontological views that they end up approximating such acceptance when taking account of moral uncertainty (as you suggest).
(3) But in any case, we shouldn’t believe that fraud and bad citizenship are effective means to promoting altruistic goals, so even pure utilitarianism can straightforwardly condemn such behaviour.
I don’t think that (2) alone will necessarily do much, because I don’t think we really ought to give much credence to deontology. I give deontology negligible—much less than 1%--credence myself (for many reasons, including this argument). Since my own uncertainty effectively only ranges over different variants of consequentialism, this uncertainty doesn’t seem sufficient to make much practical difference in this respect.
So I’m personally inclined to put more weight on heuristics that firmly warn against fraud and dishonesty on instrumental grounds. I’m not sure whether this is what you’re dismissing as “barely-evidenced heuristics”, as I think our common-sense grasp of social life and agential unreliability actually provides very strong grounds (albeit not explicit quantitative evidence) for believing that these particular heuristics are more reliable than first-pass calculations favouring fraud. And the FTX disaster (at least if truly motivated by naive utilitarianism, which I agree is unclear) constitutes yet further evidence in support of this, and so ought to prompt rethinking from those who disagree on this point.
As you say, we can see that any recent fraudulent actions were not truly rational (or prudent) given utilitarian goals. But that’s a point in support of explanation (3), not (2).