Again, I’m worried—and I think people with feminist commitments in general will be worried – about an influential view about our collective priorities which inculcates in people the belief that people can do something morally good by having kids. That’s a concern about the politics of longtermism, which I characterise (in passing!) in terms of moralising procreative choice. Longtermists clearly don’t share this concern, nor do you.
I don’t take a view on the “evaluative fact” of whether the intuition of neutrality is correct; rather, my general argument in the paper is that longtermists have been unwilling to engage with political thought and as a result arrive at political positions that are both ambiguous and unattractive. Your original post and subsequent comments seem illustrative in this regard. Attempting to construe some disagreement about longtermism in terms of a simple logical fallacy serves, in my view, to conceal lots of the detail relevant to criticisms of the view, as I have alluded to in my responses. Likewise, to disparagingly characterise positions as ‘low-decoupling’ looks like asserting the abstract and impartial perspective as the authority for making claims about the social world, which is precisely what is at stake in debates between longtermism and its critics.
Probably we should leave it here, although feel free to send me your future writing on the topic, as I’d be interested in taking a look.
It is certainly an important disagreement. There are loads of literatures in political theory that aim to shed light on the way different political problems and practical contexts might properly shape our normative conclusions. Longtermists seem to ignore those debates, which might be fine if their view wasn’t, as I try and show in the paper, deeply political.
Views that take seriously political concepts, constraints and contexts do not indulge in ‘uncritical vibes and bias’. It’s partly effective altruism’s tendency to ignore questions about politics—for example, about power, democracy and the processes which produce social deprivation—that make it a fundamentally conservative movement, as many critics have pointed out.
I’m not sure whether I fully understand what ‘low decoupling’ is, as I came across the idea for the first time in your post and have looked at it only briefly. But yeah, I don’t think it will be a useful concept around which to locate disagreements between longtermists and critics, although that will depend on the specifics. I’m not sure there is a straightforward term that will carve up the field. The safest approach is to engage with the substantive details of particular arguments—that’s what I at least try to do in the paper!