Thanks for your comment.
It’s not clear to me that (a), (b), and (c) are the only options—or rather, there are a bunch of different variants (c’), (c″), (c‴). Sure, you can say “use principles to guide action until they get too crazy’, but you can also say ‘use a multiplicity of principles to guide action until they conflict’, or ‘use a single principle to guide action until you run into cases where it is difficult to judge how the principle applies’, or so on. There are lots of different rules of thumb to tell you when and how principles run out, none of them entirely satisfactory.
And, importantly, there is no meta-principle that tells you when and how to apply object-level principles. Intuitively there’s an infinite regress argument for this claim, but since infinite regress arguments are notoriously unreliable I also tried to explain in more detail why it’s true in this post: any meta-principle would be vulnerable in the same way to the train to crazy town. And so, if you have the worries about the train to crazy town that are expressed in this post, you have to move away from the realm of pure rationalist moral philosophy and begin to use principles as context-specific guides, exercising particular judgments to figure out when they are relevant.
And so, in order to figure out when to use principles, you have to examine some specific principles in specific context, rather than trying very abstract philosophising to get the meta-principle. That was why I focussed so much of utilitarianism, and the specific context within which it is a useful way to think about ethics: I think this kind of specific analysis is the only way to figure out the limits of our principles. Your comment seems to assume that I could do some abstract philosophising to decide between (a), (b), (c), (c’), (c″), etc.; but for the very reasons discussed in this post, I don’t think that’s an option.
Peter McLaughlin
Getting on a different train: can Effective Altruism avoid collapsing into absurdity?
Deontology is not the solution
[For context, Father, I was raised and confirmed as a Catholic, but I have left the faith. Hopefully that explains something that you might pick up from my comment, a kind of frustration and impatience with attempts to reconcile Christian dogma with developments in secular ethics; and hopefully what I write is nonetheless helpful to you.]
‘theology needs to assimilate awareness of the potestas annihilationis, and so long as no discontinuity of principles arises, any theological implications and adjustments inferred by the discovery of AXRs would constitute authentic development of dogma.’
I simply cannot see how the introduction of AXRs into theology could not introduce a discontinuity into Christian principles. The words of the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds are pretty clear: Christ will come to ‘judge the living and the dead’. The words of St Paul are pretty clear: on the day of judgment, those ‘who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with [the dead] to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever’. The words of Christ himself are pretty clear: ‘on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. ’ When Christ returns, there will still be living humans ‘who are left’, and the church will have been sustained through faith and grace. The obvious inference, then, is that humanity shall not go extinct before the parousia.
That Christ will return to his creation is not just an accidental part of Christian dogma; along with the atonement and the resurrection, it is the centrepiece of Christianity, defining what it even means to be a Christian. But his creation must still be there when he returns. Taking seriously the possibility that humanity might destroy itself undermines this very basic level of dogma. You may be correct that providence must be reconciled with responsibility; but the idea of a species-level extinction event seems to me incompatible with any conception of providence. If any of scripture’s promises of providential protection are to be taken seriously, this must include the very basic providential protection of the human species itself, which was made in imago Dei.
You speak of our ‘awareness’ that humanity might annihilate itself. But this is a purely secular awareness, that has come about after the ‘death of God’ in Western culture (both popular and intellectual) and the emergence of secular science and ethics.[1] I see no way for Christianity to incorporate this awareness while remaining Christian.
- ^
Indeed, it’s my scholarly belief that Derek Parfit’s arguments about the ethical stakes of extinction (which are the foundation of almost all work on existential risk) came about when he moved away from the cyclical and implicitly providentialist understanding of time that his contemporaries had inherited from Malthus, and moved into a purely secular and catastrophist temporal framework. But I’ve not published this work yet!
- ^
Thank you for posting this—I’m going to get a bit critical in this comment, but I think this is a super important topic (one that I’ve cared about since long before I seriously engaged with EA), and I’m happy to see someone post about it.
Still, though, I don’t think a convincing case has been made in this post that funding UK housing policy orgs is cost-effective (even though I suspect that it actually is cost-effective—at least, that it crosses the 100x bar). Some thoughts:
- I have doubts about PricedOut as an organisation. I vaguely know a few people who volunteer for them and I think they are generally very interesting, smart, and capable, but I am not particularly convinced that their interventions are sufficiently effectiveness-oriented. Would be interested to know what convinced you otherwise in conversation with them.
- I’m not so sure that this issue really is timely, unfortunately. Gove’s support for Street Votes seems to have been a passing thing, and the window for action may well have closed. This is especially true given the very weak position of the government at the moment: a couple of years ago this government would have had the power to push through reform, but I don’t think that’s true any more. (Consider: the planning reform bill was basically gutted after a single by-election loss last year that, with hindsight, didn’t actually seem to turn on housing and planning; now that the government’s popularity and Tory poll numbers are in freefall, and backbenchers are much more empowered to rebel, the government would probably be much less likely to risk offending its core of homeowning voters and its many NIMBY backbenchers.)
- It seems to me that Street Votes just wouldn’t produce enough homes. There are a few reasons for this, but the big one I’m worried about is culture: while the analyses that have been done are completely correct on the economic incentives, there are pretty strong cultural incentives that point in the opposite direction. The UK (as well as much of the Western world) has a powerful culture of homeownership, meaning not just ‘owner-occupied dwellings are valued’ but that there’s a certain mythology to the goal of owning one’s own home and having control over it. Consider, for example, the incredibly strong political taboo on cutting subsidies on social care even to wealthy homeowners, precisely because paying for social care might require some of them to sell their house—not to become poor, they’d remain wealthy, just to sell their house and start renting. (If you missed the latest re-emergence of this controversy, just look at the tone of this coverage.) I think these will push quite strongly in the direction of people not endorsing building, because the market-driven logic of Street Votes pushes against the mythology of homeownership. Anecdotally, I have discussed Street Votes with a pretty substantial number of homeowners in various contexts, and I very rarely have gotten the positive response that advocates imagine.
It’s very hard to measure these cultural effects, which makes it completely understandable that analyses have left them out so far; but I think it’s impossible to ignore them in a full analysis of housing policy, not least because it’s a culture of homeowning that leads to supply restrictions in the first place. Perhaps when push comes to shove, the reality of the economic benefits would overcome cultural hesitancies, but I am not as convinced of the strengths of economic incentives in this area compared to a lot of YIMBYs.
- These orgs seem quite concentrated in and around London. On the one hand, this makes sense, as that’s where the crisis is most acute; but from a political perspective, it seems hard to see how any reform passes in the short run without at least some work in more rural areas,* for three reasons: 1) opposition to reform is concentrated in these constituencies; 2) in the short run, Tory governments are at significant risk of rebellion from MPs representing these constituencies; 3) any potential Labour government would not have increasing housing supply as a high enough priority to force it through without support from CLPs outside London. But reducing opposition in these areas seems substantially less tractable.
Ultimately, I second MaxGhenis’ hope that someone might write up a rigourous and comprehensive EA analysis of housing policy interventions: both your post and the FP report are really solid stuff, but unfortunately they largely leaves out all the positive externalities on climate, migration, quality of life, etc. beyond growth. It’s really these that convince me this is probably an area worth funding. (For example, I am of the opinion that housing policy is the primary driver behind rising inequality in the Western world, and so the downstream effects of improvements to housing policy would be pretty enormous both economically and politically.)
*I’m specifically thinking about the seats the Lib Dems are targeting using the label ‘Blue Wall’.
I think that approaches other than MEC + ITT aren’t typically clear enough about universal domain, and can be interpreted in several different ways because they’re not completely formally specified. (Not itself a criticism!) But (a corollary of the argument in this post) these frameworks only actually avoid fanaticism if they deny universal domain. So it isn’t clear whether they fall victim too fanaticism, pace your claim that ‘almost none do’.
I think—purely personal impression—that most people who think very hard about moral uncertainty are committed to quite a rationalistic view of ethics, and that this leads quite naturally to universal domain; so I said that, interpreting this into their frameworks, they will fall victim to fanaticism. But I mentioned the moral parliament as an example of an approach where the proponents have explicitly denied universal domain, as an example of the other possibility. However you interpret it, though, it’s an either/or situation.
(Lexical orders / deontological constraints are a separate issue, as you mention.)
I think you’ve imported some intuitions from the secular free will debate into thinking about providence, in potentially unhelpful ways. e.g., the framing of ‘compatibilism’, which is unhelpful because nobody (not even the Calvinists!) thinks providence is incompatible with agency; the question is not ‘are these two things compatible?‘, but rather ‘how are these two things compatible?’. ‘Compatibilism’ is thus less a position in the debate than the presupposition that makes the debate meaningful in the first place. But you identify the position that agency is compatible with providence with a particular model of the relationship between those two (a model influenced by secular free-will compatibilism), implicitly begging the question against all other models.
Your model implicitly presumes that, when Christ prophecies that he shall return and judge the living (and the dead), the fact that ‘the living’ are still around is fully the causal responsibility of human beings—in the nearest (im)possible world where everyone dies before the parousia, nothing about God would have to be different, only some facts about humans. As you had it, prophecies are about agency.
I think this is false on its strongest readings: prophecies are partly about divine providence. And divine providence cannot just mean that the deist god set everything up just right in the beginning such that everything just worked out as planned; it has to mean that God is actively working in his creation, as is Christian dogma. In this case, in the (im) possible world where the gates of Hades really do prevail against the church and creation is destroyed, some facts about God and his providence must be different—he must be acting in a different way. Your model, I think, is incompatible with Christian dogma, although it might be compatible with other religions (e.g., I think Islam might be closer to this, although I’m no expert).
To put it slightly differently, what you call ‘pre-compatibilist confusions’ are exactly what are necessary for this debate, because secular compatibilism is just the position that arises when you start to ignore divine providence and only bare impersonal determinism remains. Compatibilists all deny that impersonal determinism is at all analogous to some agent intervening in the causal structure (this is part of what it means to be a compatibilist); but divine providence is kinda analogous to that. If you want to call this position a ‘pre-compatibilist confusion’, you are committed to seeing all views on which God is active in his creation as inherently confused. I might be sympathetic to that view; but I doubt that it’s the position you thought you were arguing for.
I partly agree with this, but I think the problem of ‘high-profile gatekeepers’ is much more serious, and that it would exist even in a largely monogamous movement which had the same professional/sexual overlap and the same (blatantly) deficient processes for responding to misconduct from high-profile members.
Put another way, your (b) is more important than your (a). And I can picture a quite idealised situation in which everyone is polyamorous, but they all obey good norms around flirting/displaying interest, and they all keep it strongly separated from money; and so the awful tit-for-tat funding/employment dynamics that have enabled harassment by EAs like Owen Cotton-Barratt don’t exist.
But I do agree that this is a pretty idealised situation, and not really achievable from where the EA community is right now. While it’s unfortunate, it’s also true that long-term relationships are often the main barrier stopping work life and professional life overlapping in these dangerous ways. Widespread polyamory gets rid of this barrier, and so introduces additional danger. Maybe, in an ideal world, the EA community could navigate around this danger; but this is not the ideal world, and after such blatant failures the community really needs to stop seeing itself in such an idealised and sanctified light. EA has failed to navigate these dangers in the past; if EAs stop thinking of their movement as fundamentally holier and analyse it in the same way they analyse any other social movement, they should not expect to be able to navigate them any better in the future. Polyamory might not be a massive priority compared to (say) massively overhauling safeguarding and reporting processes around misconduct; but it’s still important.
I’m not sure what you mean by saying that my Bayesian argument fails in some cases? ‘P(X|E)>P(X) if and only if P(E|X)>P(E|not-X)’ is a theorem in the probability calculus (assuming no probabilities with value zero or one). If the likelihood ratio of X given E is greater than one, then upon observing E you should rationally update towards X.
If you just mean that there are some values of X which do not explain the events of the last week, such that P(events of the last week | X) ≤ P(events of the last week | not-X), this is true but trivial. Your post was about cases where ‘this catastrophe is in line with X thing [critics] already believed’. In these cases, the rational thing to do is to update toward critics.
With the clarification that you specifically meant ‘from first principles’, I’m not sure how your point is supposed to be relevant. I agree that ‘there is no logical way to pick a worldview from first principles’, but just because you can’t rationally conclude something from first principles doesn’t mean you can’t rationally conclude it at all. There’s no way to get to science from first principles, but rational scientific argumentation still exists. Likewise, there might be no logical first-principles derivation of morality, but I can still apply logical reasoning to ethical questions to try to figure things out. So the idea that there’s no first-principles derivation of morality—which the anti-realist and the realist can both accept, by the way, there’s no connection here with anti-realism—is just irrelevant to your other points.
Just on the Gove point: I have no private information, and perhaps I should have hedged more (the verb ‘seems’ was an attempt to communicate uncertainty, but reading my comment back I wasn’t clear enough); but just going on Gove’s patterns of behaviour, I have quite low confidence that he’s still particularly enamoured with Street Votes, albeit with large error bars on that number.
Perhaps I am inferring too much from an absence of evidence, but Gove definitely has a pattern in basically all the portfolios he’s held: he appears to value novelty in policy for its own sake, and jumps at a lot of proposed reforms that are radical and ‘clever’; but, precisely because of this, is very fast-moving and goes through policy proposals very quickly, leaving a lot on the table that he seemed to be a big fan of. I make no judgment on the value of this approach, but I think it’s relatively clear that it is Gove’s approach. This is partly explained by the time he spent with Cummings as his SpAd, but only partly—I think it’s more generally just part of his political ‘style’, that maybe he learned from Cummings but has retained since then.
The endorsement of Street Votes seemed to me to fit this pattern; and because he’s since become relatively silent on housing policy, my confidence that he still cares much about Street Votes is low. But I’ve got large error bars because (a) I’m inferring from Gove not saying something, which is always a risky way of figuring out what someone thinks (b) my reasoning is based on trying to identify patterns of behaviour in someone I don’t actually know or have any particular insight into, and (c) a lot of the evidence could be explained by the alternative hypothesis of ‘Gove genuinely believes in the policy, but hasn’t said much more because the government has just been putting out fires for the last few months’. My prior for ‘Gove says he likes a policy just because it’s novel and clever, but has no real commitment to it’ is thus doing much of the work here, and you can very reasonably make a different judgment.
I don’t have much to say about the rest of your comment except that, yes, I think your considerations are totally reasonable; I think there are some legitimate differences of judgment here.
‘personally… I don’t understand how very many people could sustain a perception of the world as a place that is subject to ongoing divine intervention’.
I agree! But that’s where you differ from Christianity. OP is a Catholic, and it is part of Catholic dogma that miracles are happening all throughout the world right to this day. It is, for example, one of the criteria for sainthood that (excepting cases of martyrdom) the candidate for sainthood must have performed verifiable miracles in their lives. The Vatican often takes this requirement very seriously indeed, sending teams of serious and seemingly-rational men to investigate every facet of the purported miracles; and in a lot of cases—not most, but many—these men are satisfied that the miracle did indeed occur. The most recent canonisations occurred just last month. ‘Miracle’ here isn’t ‘nice thing that happened because of the saint that might seem supernatural but could just be surprising’; it is defined as an event ‘which can only be attributed to divine power’.
You might try to explain it away, by saying that the Vatican is just keeping up appearances and the Catholic hierarchy doesn’t really believe in constant supernatural intervention in the world; but I think this is pretty unsustainable when you actually look closely at how the people in question behave. This might seem odd to you, but it’s a matter of fact that this all happens.
Things are slightly different in other Christian denominations (Protestantism is especially diverse and thus weird), but in general the belief in some kind of divine providence is shared dogma across all different versions of mainstream (Nicene/Chalcedonian) Christianity. Trying to rationalise Christian belief as ‘well I guess they must be compatibilist deists’ isn’t being charitable, it’s potentially offensive as well as philosophically incorrect. It might be hard for you to understand that people genuinely do believe in ongoing divine intervention in the world, but that’s what it is.
Could you unpack “Compatibilists all deny that impersonal determinism is at all analogous to some agent intervening in the causal structure (this is part of what it means to be a compatibilist)” a bit?
Contrast your earlier example (you are writing a comment, and you are certain that you are going to finish it because that’s what you want to do) with an example of coercion (you are writing a comment, and you are certain that you are going to finish it because someone has a gun to your head and is forcing you to write it). In the latter example, there is obviously some sense in which you are ‘unfree’; everyone, except maybe Thomas Hobbes, would agree with that. In the former example, incompatibilists would tend to argue that you are also unfree: if you are able to be certain, your decision must be pre-determined in some sense, and this makes you unfree. Compatibilists, however, insist that the former case is not like the latter case: while you are unfree when an agent intervenes in the causal structure of your decision, you are perfectly free when you are ‘determined’ by the causal structure itself.
The point that I was making is just that God’s providence is more like the former than the latter: it’s an instance of some agent intervening in the causal order of your decision, not the causal structure just playing itself out. But Christians, of course, can’t say that it’s entirely analogous to the gun-to-the-head case, since they want to say that providence is compatible with free agency. So the philosophical question for Christians is how to combine human freedom with divine intervention in the world. This is an entirely different question from the compatibilism question in secular philosophy, which asks how free will might work if we just ignored God or denied that he existed. In that case, issues about divine intervention fall away, and the only question is whether you are free if the initial set-up of the universe was just so such that your decision was in a certain sense ‘pre-determined’. As you write, ‘that is my relationship with nature’. Nature, sure; but not the Christian God.
FWIW, I think you might mean Genesis 15:5.
Thank you for your fantastic summary! Yes, I think that’s a great account of what I’m saying in this post.
Thanks for your comment! I was considering writing much more about moral uncertainty, since I think it’s an important topic here, but the post was long enough as it is. But you and other commenters below have all pulled me up on this one, so it’s worth being more explicit. I thus hope it’s OK for this reply to you to serve as a general reply to a lot of themes related to moral uncertainty in the comment section, to avoid repeating myself too much!
Starting with 1(b), the question of unconditional ‘deontological constraints’: this works in theory, but I don’t think it applies in practice. The (dis)value placed on specific actions can’t just be ‘extremely high’, because then it can still be swamped by utilitarianism over unbounded choice sets; it has to be infinite, such that (e.g.) intentional killing is infinitely disvaluable and no finite source of value, no matter how arbitrarily large, could outweigh it. This gets you around the impossibility proof, which as mentioned relies on order properties of the reals that don’t hold for the extended reals—roughly, the value of utility is always already infinitesimal relative to the infinite sources of (dis)value, so the marginal value of utility doesn’t need to decline asymptotically to avoid swamping them.
But in practice, I just don’t see what marginally plausible deontological constraints could help a mostly-consequentialist theory avoid the train to crazy town. These constraints work to avoid counterexamples like e.g. the transplant case, where intuitively there is another principle at play that overrides utility considerations. In these cases, deontological constraints are simple, intuitive, and well-motivated. But in the cases I’m concerned with in this post, like Hurka’s St Petersburg Paradox, it’s not clear that Kantian-style constraints on murder or lying really help the theory—especially because of the role of risk in the example. To get around this example with deontological constraints, you either have to propose wildly implausible constraints like ‘never accept any choices with downside risk to human life’, or have an ad hoc restriction specifically designed to get around this case in particular—the latter of which seems a) epistemically dodgy and b) liable to be met with a slightly adjusted counterexample. I just don’t see how you could avoid all such cases with any even mildly plausible deontological constraint.Beyond these kinds of ‘lexical’ approaches, there are various other attempts to avoid fanaticism while respecting considerations of utility at scale—your 1(a). But by Cowen’s proof, if these are indeed to work, they must deny the universal domain condition—as indeed, the theories mentioned tend to! I mentioned the moral parliament explicitly, but note also that (e.g.) if you accept that certain intertheoretical comparisons cannot be made, then you have ipso facto denied universal domain and accepted a certain level of incomparability and pluralism.
The difference between me and you is just that you’ve only accepted incomparability at the meta-level (it applies comparing different moral theories), whereas I’m encouraging you to adopt it at the object level (it should apply to the act of thinking about ethics in the first instance). But I see no coherent way to hold ‘we can have incomparability in our meta-level theorising, but it must be completely banned from our object-level theorising’! There are many potential rationalistic reasons you might offer for why incomparability and incommensurability should be banished from moral philosophy; but none of these are available to you if you take on a framework for moral uncertainty that avoids fanaticism by denying universal domain. So accepting these kinds of positions about moral uncertainty just seems to me like an unstable halfway house between true rationalistic moral philosophy (on the one hand) and pluralism (on the other).- 8 Oct 2022 16:39 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on Getting on a different train: can Effective Altruism avoid collapsing into absurdity? by (
Thank you for your reply, Father. You’re right that this conversation has tended towards broader themes of agency and providence, so I just want to briefly return to (anthropogenic) x-risks specifically in this comment, because I think there’s a disanalogy between (a) the well-studied ‘hard-case’ of individual freedom-to-fail (b) the case of species-level freedom-to-fail.
[I hope it’s OK for me to write what follows, purely for convenience’s sake, as if I shared your faith. My first attempt at this comment was quite clunky, with a lot of unnecessary phrases like ‘Catholics believe’ and ‘it is Catholic dogma that’ cluttering up the argument. But I understand that this way of writing is not always taken well coming from an atheist, and not for no reason. Feel free to read it all as if it were in scare quotes and preceded with ‘if I were a Catholic, I would say:’.]
In the case of (a), we know from scripture that (despite God’s hopes) not all will be saved. This is a repeated theme, for example, in Christ’s parables. Now, there is a serious theological problem about how we might reconcile this revealed truth with God’s providence and hope for our salvation; but, as you mention, there are serious proposals for how to answer this question. But (importantly) the question only arises because the Holy Spirit has revealed to us, through scripture, that not all shall be saved. It’s part of our duty to puzzle out the mystery of how this might be true; but it is not up to us to doubt that it is true.
By contrast, when we turn to the case of (b) the revelation of scripture is not that humanity might go extinct before the parousia. Indeed, I think there are many verses which seem plainly to have the implication that this is not a real possibility. This is not a case where God hopes for something to come about, but rather one where he has declared that it will come about: Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. This is not a case where we’re asking how something that God has revealed is true, might be true; we’re essentially asking how it might not be true. The problem for your position, as I see it, is not primarily a philosophical one; rather, it’s a scriptural one.
There are, of course, cases that are more analogous to (b) than (a) that have been discussed by theologians: similar difficulties abound over the question of whether and how Judas might have had the freedom to not betray his Lord, for example, even as Christ has already declared that he will. But none of these cases seem exactly analogous to me. And I think secular thinking about existential risk has been informed, to such an immense degree, by assumptions incompatible with Christianity (e.g., as Thomas Moynihan has emphasised, the separation of fact from value) that it’s an insurmountable challenge to try to turn back around and integrate it into Christianity.
The world is ‘obviously and visibly’ autonomous to you, maybe; but not to Christians. From the CCC:
With creation, God does not abandon his creatures to themselves. He not only gives them being and existence, but also, and at every moment, upholds and sustains them in being, enables them to act and brings them to their final end. Recognizing this utter dependence with respect to the Creator is a source of wisdom and freedom, of joy and confidence.
(Again, similar positions are dogma in other Christian denominations; I focus on Catholicism because I know it best and because OP is a Catholic.) The crucial phrase here is ‘at every moment’: every single act is enabled only by God, every being is sustained by him at all times. Nothing is autonomous; we are ‘utterly dependent’, both metaphysically and ethically, on God.
If you think this is an obviously mistaken view, then you believe that Christianity (at least in its orthodox varieties) is obviously mistaken. For what it’s worth, I’d warn against being so hasty here: you take your view for granted only because you are benefitting from the centuries of hard intellectual labour it took to even state the naturalist worldview clearly, never mind to argue in favour of it. Your mechanistic view of the universe is not the shared common sense of all humans; it’s an incredibly recent intellectual development, and it’s worth reading around to discover just how unobvious it actually is.
But regardless, even if you continue to see some version of your position as ‘obviously correct’, it’s important to be clear that it is not an orthodox Christian view. It’s far too easy to underestimate the intellectual diversity of the world, and it’s something I have seen on this forum in particular innumerable times. When dealing with alternate worldviews, it’s easy to treat them as basically similar to and commensurate with our own, imagining that they share the basic ‘obvious’ foundations even as they differ sharply on important questions. But other worldviews are in fact far more alien than EAs typically imagine.
This is why I’m so impatient with things like ‘EA for Christians’ , which has tended to focus on some surface-level consonances while not even noticing the immense gulf between secular ethics and Christian ethics at the most foundational level. (By contrast, this immense gulf was obvious to proto-EAs like Derek Parfit, who made it the basis of his ethical methodology, and to a lesser extent Peter Singer.) I really enjoyed OP’s post, because he really takes seriously that there is a difficult intellectual challenge in trying to accommodate thinking about x-risk into Christianity. But far too many EAs think of this as a messaging and outreach problem, rather than a fundamental philosophical issue.
I think you’ve run together several different positions about moral epistemology and meta-ethics. Your three bullet points definitely do not describe the whole range of positions here. For example: RM Hare was an anti-realist (the anti-realist par excellence, even) but believed in a first principles derivation of morality; you may have come across his position in the earlier works of his most famous student, Peter Singer. (Singer has since become a realist, under the influence of Derek Parfit). Likewise, you can have those who are as realist as realists can be, and who accept that we can know moral truths, but not that we can prove them. This seems to be what you’re denying in your comment—you think the only hope for moral epistemology is first-principles logic—but that’s a strong claim, and pretty much all meta-ethical naturalists have accounts of how we can know morality through some kind of natural understanding.
For myself, I’m a pretty strong anti-realist, but for reasons that have very little to do with traditional questions of moral epistemology; so I actually have a lot of sympathy with the accounts of moral epistemology given by many different metaethical naturalists, as well as by those who have straddled the realist/anti-realist line (e.g. constructivists, or Crispin Wright whatever name you want to give to his position), if their positions are suitably modified.
I’m not sure I understand your response to Adrian here? The claim is not that we should search for a view that has no weird or counterintuitive claims in it, only that some views might reasonably be rejected on the basis of their weird and counterintuitive claims. There might be no view that is completely un-weird, but handstandism is nonetheless obviously too weird!
Downvoted. I disagree quite strongly on points one and four, but that’s a discussion for another day; I downvoted because point three is harmful.
If people with a long history of criticising EA have indeed claimed X for a long time, while EA-at-large has said not-X; and X is compatible with the events of the past week, while not-X is not (or is less obviously compatible, or renders those events more unexpected); then rational Bayesians should update towards the people with the long history of criticising EA. Just apply Bayes’ rule: if P(events of the last week | X) > P(events of the last week | not-X), then you should increase your credence in X upon observing the events of the last week.
This reasoning holds whether or not these critics are speaking in bad faith, have personal issues with EA, or are acting irrationally. If being a bad-faith critic of EA provides you with better predictive power than being a relatively-uncritical member of the movement, then you should update so that you are closer to being a bad-faith critic of EA than to being a relatively-uncritical member of the movement. You probably shouldn’t go all the way there (better to stop in the middle, somewhere around ‘good-faith critic’ or ‘EA adjacent’ or ‘EA but quite suspicious of the movement’s leadership’), but updating in that direction is the rational Bayesian thing to do.
To be sure, there’s always a worry that the critics have fudged or falsified their predictions, saying something vaguely critical in the past which has since been sharpened into ‘Several months ago, I predicted that this exact thing would happen!’ This is the ‘predicting the next recession’ effect, and we should be vigilant about it. But while this is definitely happening in a lot of cases, in some of the most high-profile ones I don’t think it applies: I think there were relatively concrete predictions made that a crisis of power and leadership of pretty much this kind was enabled by EA structures, and these predictions seem to have been closer to the mark than anything EA-at-large thought might happen.
I think there is a further sense, that many EAs seem to feel that their error was less one of prediction than of creativity: it’s less that they made the wrong call on a variety of questions, but simply that they didn’t ask those questions. This is obviously not true of all EAs, but it is definitely true of some. In cases like this, listening more closely to critics—even bad faith ones! - can open your mind up to a variety of different positions and reasoning styles that previously were not even present in your mind. This is not always inherently good, of course, but if an EA has reason to think that they have made a failure of creativity then it seems like a very positive way to go.
For more context about my worries: I think that it is possible that OP might be including me, and some things I have tweeted, in point three. I have quite a small follower count and nothing I wrote ‘blew up’ or anything, so it’s definitely very unlikely; but I did tweet out several things pretty heavily critical of the movement in recent days which very strongly pattern-match the description given above, including pointing out that prior criticisms predicted these events pretty well, and having relatively well-known EAs reaching out to me about what I had written. Certainly, I ‘felt seen’ (as it were) while reading this post.
I don’t think I am a ‘nefarious actor’, or have a history of ‘hating EA’, but I worry that in some segments of EA (not the whole of EA—some people have gone full self-flagellation, but in some segments) these kinds of terms are getting slung around far too liberally as part of a more general circling-the-wagons trend. And I worry that posts like this one legitimise slinging these terms around in this manner, by encouraging the thought that EA critics who are engaging in some (sometimes fully-justified) ‘told you so’ are just bad actors trying to destroy their tribe. EA needs to be more, not less, open to listening to critics—even bad-faith critics—after a disaster like this one. This is good Bayesianism, but it’s also just proper humility.