I understand your point, but I think you are especially harsh on these examples which would all require a lot of complex investigation on good vs harm done before writing them of as net harm. At least you could list potential good done by those people/orgs as well as harm and state that the EV is very unclear.
The EU is very complex. Horrendous harm done on the farming subsidies front, but what about the good in making war almost inconceivable within the union? And In allowing poor laborers to move freely and get better lives? To be fair you do acknowlege the difficulty assessing the EU harm/good tradeoff.
Mother Theresa and her organisation cared for people who were often completely neglected, and was a small part of opening up a global revolution in caring for the dying. Yes medical care wasn’t good enough and many her organisation cared for could have been cured with proper medical care. I’m open to this being net harm but my sense is it was probably net good (but again so hard to know).
Chaves supported hundreds of thousands of workers’ to get improved pay and important public health measures like hand washing at sites, protection from pesticides, clean drinking water etc. Sure he will have done harm but enough to offset that good?
The Vatican is head office of a large religious body that has probably done both enormous good and enormous harm over their 2000 year history. Writing them off without explanation apart from a link to the clear and horrendous sexual abuse atrocities exposed in only the last 50 years seems too harsh
If one is a secular agnostic (like me) who doesn’t believe in God, Jesus, salvation, or an infinitely long, infinitely blissful afterlife in Heaven, then the Catholic Church over the last couple millennia probably looks like a net negative (arguably).
But if one believes in all these things, then insofar as the Catholic Church ‘saved’ hundreds of millions of souls, it’s been an enormous net positive.
We EAs need to be a bit more epistemically humble about these religious issues.
After all, many of us believe in the Simulation Hypothesis, which would imply that almost any conceivable theology that any human has ever believed, has a non-zero probability of being true—and our assessments of total utility generated by any particular person, movement, or organization should be modulated accordingly.
I didn’t vote it down, but I think giving the Catholic Church the “benefit of the doubt” is off-base. You could say the same about anyone doing bad—“Maybe they’re right on some level.” The Catholic Church has simply done tons and tons of bad. And I think I’m saying this not just because of my personal hatred of the Catholic Church. https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Matt—I’m not arguing that we should give the Catholic Church the ‘benefit of the doubt’. Only that if—big if—their theology and metaphysics are correct, and if they actually managed to ‘save some souls’ (switching their fate from infinite suffering in hell to infinite bliss in heaven), then their net consequentialist impact in the afterlife would totally swamp any evil they’ve done on Earth.
You may think there’s zero % chance their theology and metaphysics are correct, but their beliefs are basically a variant of a Simulation Hypothesis, in which human actions ‘in simulation’ (during mortal life) determine rewards ‘out of simulation (in the ‘real’ afterlife).
There’s obviously a variant of Pascal’s wager that raises some thorny problems here. And it applies equally to every other religion that posits reincarnation or an afterlife....
I understand your point, but I think you are especially harsh on these examples which would all require a lot of complex investigation on good vs harm done before writing them of as net harm. At least you could list potential good done by those people/orgs as well as harm and state that the EV is very unclear.
The EU is very complex. Horrendous harm done on the farming subsidies front, but what about the good in making war almost inconceivable within the union? And In allowing poor laborers to move freely and get better lives? To be fair you do acknowlege the difficulty assessing the EU harm/good tradeoff.
Mother Theresa and her organisation cared for people who were often completely neglected, and was a small part of opening up a global revolution in caring for the dying. Yes medical care wasn’t good enough and many her organisation cared for could have been cured with proper medical care. I’m open to this being net harm but my sense is it was probably net good (but again so hard to know).
Chaves supported hundreds of thousands of workers’ to get improved pay and important public health measures like hand washing at sites, protection from pesticides, clean drinking water etc. Sure he will have done harm but enough to offset that good?
The Vatican is head office of a large religious body that has probably done both enormous good and enormous harm over their 2000 year history. Writing them off without explanation apart from a link to the clear and horrendous sexual abuse atrocities exposed in only the last 50 years seems too harsh
Nick—strongly agree, esp. regarding the Vatican.
If one is a secular agnostic (like me) who doesn’t believe in God, Jesus, salvation, or an infinitely long, infinitely blissful afterlife in Heaven, then the Catholic Church over the last couple millennia probably looks like a net negative (arguably).
But if one believes in all these things, then insofar as the Catholic Church ‘saved’ hundreds of millions of souls, it’s been an enormous net positive.
We EAs need to be a bit more epistemically humble about these religious issues.
After all, many of us believe in the Simulation Hypothesis, which would imply that almost any conceivable theology that any human has ever believed, has a non-zero probability of being true—and our assessments of total utility generated by any particular person, movement, or organization should be modulated accordingly.
PS Folks who disagree-voted with this comment—I’m genuinely curious why you disagree?
I didn’t vote it down, but I think giving the Catholic Church the “benefit of the doubt” is off-base. You could say the same about anyone doing bad—“Maybe they’re right on some level.” The Catholic Church has simply done tons and tons of bad. And I think I’m saying this not just because of my personal hatred of the Catholic Church. https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Matt—I’m not arguing that we should give the Catholic Church the ‘benefit of the doubt’. Only that if—big if—their theology and metaphysics are correct, and if they actually managed to ‘save some souls’ (switching their fate from infinite suffering in hell to infinite bliss in heaven), then their net consequentialist impact in the afterlife would totally swamp any evil they’ve done on Earth.
You may think there’s zero % chance their theology and metaphysics are correct, but their beliefs are basically a variant of a Simulation Hypothesis, in which human actions ‘in simulation’ (during mortal life) determine rewards ‘out of simulation (in the ‘real’ afterlife).
There’s obviously a variant of Pascal’s wager that raises some thorny problems here. And it applies equally to every other religion that posits reincarnation or an afterlife....