For a medium-sized march around a potentially higher-impact issue like, say, open borders or animal agriculture, it seems plausible to me that attendance at a march would be high-impact. Given that we are habit-forming creatures, I think an effective person ought to make a habit of showing support for small- to medium-sized protests around highly important causes.
Do you mean “ought” in the same sense of “morally ought” that you meant in your previous post about collective action? If so, I think you need to rise to a much higher standard of proof to be convincing about this. So far, all you’ve shown is that a highly-speculative quantitative analysis of a single protest shows that it might plausibly be competitive with not protesting, setting aside any regression from the fact that the estimate has probably four orders of magnitude of variance. You don’t provide very much evidence for the assumption of an S-curve of marginal effectiveness (or any arguments about where the inflection points are); or any argument that the highly important causes are equally easy to influence (for instance, swinging a presidential election probably has much smaller implications for factory farming than for climate action).
That’s how I meant ought, given a consequentialist view along the lines of Singer’s Famine Affluence, and Morality or Shelly Kagan’s The Limits of Morality. I’m not sure the uncertainty problem is unique to this form of action—if the evidence for this action is speculative or uncertain, then that makes the opportunity cost for the alternatives uncertain. Uncertainty is infectious, and I don’t think that undoes our moral commitments.
I think you interpreted my parent comment as saying:
Even though the expected benefits of protesting may be high, I think the case is too uncertain and therefore shouldn’t be an obligation.
That’s not what I meant; sorry if I wasn’t clear. I meant that you haven’t provided enough evidence to move my prior on participating in protests from “not very effective” to “very effective”.
Do you mean “ought” in the same sense of “morally ought” that you meant in your previous post about collective action? If so, I think you need to rise to a much higher standard of proof to be convincing about this. So far, all you’ve shown is that a highly-speculative quantitative analysis of a single protest shows that it might plausibly be competitive with not protesting, setting aside any regression from the fact that the estimate has probably four orders of magnitude of variance. You don’t provide very much evidence for the assumption of an S-curve of marginal effectiveness (or any arguments about where the inflection points are); or any argument that the highly important causes are equally easy to influence (for instance, swinging a presidential election probably has much smaller implications for factory farming than for climate action).
That’s how I meant ought, given a consequentialist view along the lines of Singer’s Famine Affluence, and Morality or Shelly Kagan’s The Limits of Morality. I’m not sure the uncertainty problem is unique to this form of action—if the evidence for this action is speculative or uncertain, then that makes the opportunity cost for the alternatives uncertain. Uncertainty is infectious, and I don’t think that undoes our moral commitments.
I think you interpreted my parent comment as saying:
That’s not what I meant; sorry if I wasn’t clear. I meant that you haven’t provided enough evidence to move my prior on participating in protests from “not very effective” to “very effective”.