I graduated from Georgetown University in December, 2021 with degrees in economics, mathematics and a philosophy minor. There, I founded and helped to lead Georgetown Effective Altruism. Over the last few years recent years, I’ve interned at the Department of the Interior, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Nonlinear, a newish longtermist EA org.
I’m now doing research thanks to an EA funds grant, trying to answer hard, important EA-relevant questions. My first big project (in addition to everything listed here) was helping to generate this team Red Teaming post.
Blog: aaronbergman.net
Late to the party (and please forgive me if I overlooked a part where you address this), but I think this all misses the boring and kinda unsatisfying but (I’d argue) correct answer to the question posed:
Because they might be wrong!
Ok, my less elegant, more pedantically precise claim (argument?) is that:
Ethical anti-realists should do ethics iff moral realism is true in such a way that includes normativity (rather than just ‘objective ordering’-flavor realism)
It would be good for anti-realists to do ethics iff moral realism is true (even if normativity is fake but statements like “all else equal, a world with more suffering is worse than its alternative” have truth values )
Anti-realism, if true, would (intrinsically) have no positive implications
I know this is a controversial claim, and kinda what this whole post is about!
(I initially wrote ‘anti-realism⟹nihilism,’ but the latter term seems to be defined in a sentiment-laden way in several places)
A person who accepts the above three bulleted premises and also :
Has (for whatever reason) a desire or goal to ‘do ethics’ conditional on there being good reason to do ethics
Uses (for whatever reason) any procedure consistent with any form of what I’ll call “normal, prima facie non-insane, coherent decision theoretic reasoning” to make decisions...
… would in fact find him/herself (i) ‘doing ethics’ and [slightly less confident about this one] (ii) ‘doing ethics’ as though moral realism were true even if they believe that moral realism is probably not true.
[ok that’s it for the argument]🔚
Two more things...
It looks like Will MacAskill’s book Moral Uncertainty has a chapter on this which I haven’t engaged with, but prima facie I can’t see why his arguments concerning normative moral uncertainty wouldn’t apply at the meta-ethical level as well
I should note that I may be inclined towards this answer because I think anti-realists are wrong (for reasons discussed in this 80k episode )