Naive consequentialism is the view that, to comply with the requirements of consequentialism, an agent should at all times be motivated to perform the act that consequentialism requires. By contrast, sophisticated consequentialism holds that a consequentialist agent should adopt whichever set of motivations will, in fact, cause her to act in ways that consequentialism requires.
Terminology
Sometimes the terms “sophisticated consequentialism” and “naive consequentialism” are used to describe the contrast between applications of consequentialism that do and do not, respectively, consider less direct, less immediate, or otherwise less visible consequences into account.[1]
As a concrete example, a naive conception of consequentialism may lead an agent to believe that breaking certain commonsense moral rules is right if it seems that the immediate effects on the world will be net-positive. Such rule-breaking typically has negative side-effects, however—for instance, it can lower the degree of trust in society, and for the rule-breaker’s group specifically. Hence, sophisticated consequentialists tend to oppose rule-breaking more than naive consequentialists.
Further reading
Caviola, Lucius (2017) Against naive effective altruism, EAGx Berlin, November 20.
Ord, Toby (2009) Beyond Action: Applying Consequentialism to Decision Making and Motivation, Ph.D. thesis, University of Oxford.
Related entries
accidental harm | consequentialism | fanaticism | indirect long-term effects
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Cf. 80,000 Hours’ discussion of “simplistic” vs. “correct” replaceability in Todd, Benjamin (2015) ‘Replaceability’ isn’t as important as you might think (or we’ve suggested), 80,000 Hours, July 27.
This seems a bit inaccurate to me in a few ways, but I’m unsure how accurate we want to be here.
First, when the entry talks about “consequentialism” it seems to identify it with a decision procedure: “Consequentialists are supposed to estimate all of the effects of their actions, and then add them up appropriately”. In the literature, there is usually a distinction made between consequentialism as a criterion of rightness and a decision procedure, and it seems to me like many endorse the latter and not the former.
Secondly, it seems to identify consequentialism with act-consequentialism, because it only refers to consequences of individual actions as the criterion for evaluation.
I think we should have an entry on something like this, so I grabbed the related EA Concepts title and text.
But maybe the entry should be called just Naive consequentialism, or maybe just Sophisticated consequentialism or something else.
Cool. There are a number of existing or projected entries with names of the form ‘x vs. y’, such as ‘criteria of rightness vs. decision procedures’, ‘broad vs. narrow interventions’, ‘near vs. far thinking’, etc. Alternative forms for these entries are ‘x versus y’ and ‘x and y’ (e.g. ‘broad versus narrow interventions’ and ‘broad and narrow interventions’, respectively). In addition, sometimes using just one of these terms may be most appropriate, though I don’t think this is always the case. I don’t have a clear preference for one form over the others, but I do think we should follow one form consistently. Thoughts?
Some quick thoughts:
Brevity seems good, to avoid this one tag taking up weirdly much space compared to other tags when applied to a post
As we discussed here
I think there’s no substantial reason to prefer “versus” over “vs.” or “vs”, so I prefer the latter options for brevity
Brevity also pushes in favour of “adjective1 vs adjective2 noun”, rather than “adjective1 noun vs adjective2 noun”, and I don’t see a strong push in the other direction, so now I prefer the first approach
E.g., “Naive vs. sophisticated consequentalism” rather than “Naive consequentialism vs. sophisticated consequentialism”
I’ve now updated this tag’s name to reflect that
Brevity also pushes in favour of just picking one or the other term rather than using both, but I think that can be outweighed in many cases
E.g., I think the primary topic of the broad vs narrow interventions entry really will be the distinction itself, not just broad interventions or narrow interventions, so the name should keep both
Whereas this entry might be primarily basically about “What is naive consequentialism, why is it bad, and how can you avoid it?”, with sophisticated consequentialism only really coming into play as part of answering those questions
At least that’s how I might see it
But it’s not clear-cut in this case, which is why I kept both terms in the name for now
I think “vs.” vs “and” should just be a matter of what’s clearer and more appropriate for the case at hand?
E.g., “broad and narrow interventions” seems confusing; when I read that, I initially think we’re describing one set of interventions that meets both criteria
Cool, that all seems sensible. I’ll update the guide to reflect this.