I feel that similar reasoning could have been applied to historically successful protest movements in their early stages. The civil rights movement didn’t start with the march on Washington, it started small and got bigger, and the participants risked their health in their protests. More recently I think the climate activist movement has achieved an immense amount of good through their tactics.
I don’t actually believe that AI x-risk is a serious problem at the moment, so I don’t support this particular protest. However I want to protect the principle of protesting being good: I want people who think there is a serious danger to be willing to actively protest that danger, not wait around passively for the media to give them permission to do so.
I think we can cleave a reasonable boundary around hunger strikes specifically. They work well when the person you’re striking against has a duty of care over you so is forced to address your protest (ex. Guantanamo Bay), or if you’ll garner significant attention (ex. Gandhi). These, I think, reasonably outweigh the harms to the subjects and people they might inspire.
Risking other forms of harm in a protest has a different character. This is because those harms are often inflicted by the subject of the protest, which fairly reliably causes backlash or exposes some inconvenient aspect of the oppressor (ex. Civil rights). This risk is significant, but IMHO can be justified by its likelihood to further the aims of the protest.
(I guess it’s possible to believe that it’s morally good to face harms when protesting even if you’re absolutely certain you will achieve nothing, because you believe that self-sacrifice for your protest is good in and of itself. But I suspect in your example the only option for protest was to face harm, whereas this person has extensive non-harmful avenues available to them)
I feel that similar reasoning could have been applied to historically successful protest movements in their early stages. The civil rights movement didn’t start with the march on Washington, it started small and got bigger, and the participants risked their health in their protests. More recently I think the climate activist movement has achieved an immense amount of good through their tactics.
I don’t actually believe that AI x-risk is a serious problem at the moment, so I don’t support this particular protest. However I want to protect the principle of protesting being good: I want people who think there is a serious danger to be willing to actively protest that danger, not wait around passively for the media to give them permission to do so.
I think we can cleave a reasonable boundary around hunger strikes specifically. They work well when the person you’re striking against has a duty of care over you so is forced to address your protest (ex. Guantanamo Bay), or if you’ll garner significant attention (ex. Gandhi). These, I think, reasonably outweigh the harms to the subjects and people they might inspire.
Risking other forms of harm in a protest has a different character. This is because those harms are often inflicted by the subject of the protest, which fairly reliably causes backlash or exposes some inconvenient aspect of the oppressor (ex. Civil rights). This risk is significant, but IMHO can be justified by its likelihood to further the aims of the protest.
(I guess it’s possible to believe that it’s morally good to face harms when protesting even if you’re absolutely certain you will achieve nothing, because you believe that self-sacrifice for your protest is good in and of itself. But I suspect in your example the only option for protest was to face harm, whereas this person has extensive non-harmful avenues available to them)