Academic philosopher, co-editor of utilitarianism.net, writes goodthoughts.blog
Richard Y Chappellšø
Karma: 7,739
Lame parody.* My view is more like: we can reasonably expect that the inventor of the paperclip increased the number of paperclip-shaped structures that ever exist. Arguments to the contrary (according to which, e.g., nobody can reasonably expect new paperclip factories to more likely increase than decrease net paperclip production) rely on epistemic principles that would appear to rule out almost all contestable beliefs (including all philosophical beliefs).
* Edited to add: itās especially lame since I wrote an entire section distinguishing āepistemic difficultyā from cluelessness, which (if you bothered to read it) should have made clear both my sympathy for many everyday doubts, and why such doubts are no reason to embrace more radical claims of cluelessness.
Why should I trust you any more than Anti-Richard? Why should you trust you any more than Anti-Richard?
Youāre asking for a procedural answer to a substantive question, which simply isnāt possible. I canāt emphasize enough that the same questions can be raised for any philosophical question whatsoever. Why trust induction over counter-induction? Why accept anti-suffering moral views rather than pro-suffering moral views? One can always ask skeptical questions, and the only possible answers rely upon contestable judgment calls. Thereās no purely procedural reason why you should trust me over Anti-Richard. You need to actually look at the substantive claims being made and judge for yourself what seems most credible. There is literally no other possible answer (one might try to appeal to certain kinds of simplicity principles, but other philosophers dispute them and so they too ultimately come down to contestable judgment calls), so if you disallow such a process in general then radical skepticism swiftly follows.
This violates the reflection principle. I think youāre going to need to at least give an argument if you want us to give up on this. Why would you believe something your idealized self tells you should not be believed?
Check out the Hare references I offered! He offers many arguments for (what he calls) prospectism over deferentialism. One argument I already shared: itās a straightforward implication of the contrastive account of reasons. Hereās another, from p.78 of LiSW.
(Background: Alpine and Beach are two incommensurably good holidays, between which your idealized self has no preference, even when $20 is added to either option. Still, Hare argues, you plainly ought to prefer the prospect of a mystery bag containing a ticket + $20 over a mystery bag containing just the other ticket. This is because you ought to prefer deals 1 + 3 over deals 2 + 4 in the below passage, and that combination āamounts to taking the right, sweetened bagā over the left, unsweetened one. And again, this all holds despite the fact that you know that once you find out which ticket is in which bag, you will consider the two options to be incommensurable.)
Not sure whether new posts count for the commentary competition, but this seemed too long to paste here as a literal comment!
Hard QuesĀtions Arenāt Hopeless
re: āracial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving ā and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole.āāI actually think this is (tendentiously) getting at a significant difference between EAs and the progressive left. This was made vivid to me when a (very left wing) Princeton philosophy professor invited me to respond to her critique of EA as āableistā because it doesnāt guarantee that disability accommodations should be prioritized for funding if they turn out to be less cost-effective than other ways of helping people. She found this feature of EA objectionable. I think thatās crazy, and we need to be clearer about how a lot of left-wing coalitional priorities violate equal consideration (explicitly favoring people from select groups) in ways that are deeply morally objectionable and unfair to (e.g.) the global poor.
Iām also baffled by the rhetorical martyrdom and self-flagellation that became popular in EA circles post-FTX. Itās surely worth forcefully pushing back against misleading coverage, having some courage in our convictions, and being clear about how ignorant (or sometimes outright dishonest) a lot of the critiques are.
Something Iām a bit torn on is the question of how much itās worth going on the offensive against competing ideologies. EA is a big tent, but itās true that a lot of us think anti-capitalism is bad and stupid. Personally, I do not have a positive opinion of Naomi Klein or others who are more left than liberal, so maybe it shouldnāt be surprising that she wouldnāt have a high opinion of a movement that contains many people who think like me. But a dialectical asymmetry results if those on the far left are constantly criticizing those who are more center-left, while the latter mostly bite their tongues and donāt spend a lot of time explaining why we think the far left is so badly misguided. It leaves the far left with a moral high ground that I donāt think they deserve (given how much they, in my view, prioritize symbolism over actually helping people).
The SchĀmotte-and-Bailey Fallacy
Why Iām OpĀtiĀmistic about MoĀral Philosophy
Yeah, thatās an interesting challenge. One idea that makes sense to me is to split into different sub-agents when you feel like thereās an in-principle tension or tradeoff between different kinds of values. For example, in a previous post I suggested different ābucketsā for the broad goals of (i) pure suffering reduction, (ii) reliable global capacity growth, and (iii) high-impact long-shots. Lots of different concrete ācausesā might compete within each philosophical bucket, but I wouldnāt be tempted to break out a fourth bucket unless I felt like there was a deeper principle at stake (e.g. if I thought that human vs animal pure suffering reduction might be meaningfully different).
(Thereās a separate question of how to decide what to investigate within each bucket, which is also tricky and Iām afraid I donāt have anything helpful to add there. In practice I mostly just defer to people I at least vaguely trust who seem to have looked into the area in greater depth. But as a community, we obviously benefit from people who are willing to do the hard work of novel investigations!)
What are the central virtues a committed utilitarian should cultivate? I would kill for a really great answer to this question
I think Stefan Schubert & Lucius Caviolaās Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians is pretty good!
The Train to Crazy Town
Iām happy to see someone raising these challenges (and itās plausible to me that āwhether EA is functioning well as a truth-seeking community deserves more attention than itās gettingā), but fwiw I remain glad that CEA in particular are leading from a position of greater confidence in EA.
I agree that āGrowth is only good if EA is functioning well,ā but note also that missed growth would be extremely bad if EA is functioning well, so itās hardly costless to forsake potential growth. My personal view is optimistic: it seems like EA does a lot of good, and more people learning about the ideas and getting involved (perhaps taking the š¶ 10% pledge, or identifying and working on a neglected high-impact problem) would also be good. But if Iām wrong about that, I hope others would be able to bring to my attention the reasons why. So I certainly agree that maintaining a good epistemic environment and truth-seeking culture is also important!
ReĀplacĀing UnĀforĀtuĀnate Norms
Why Care About the MoĀral Law?
Not really. Rule consequentialism as an ethical theory has various (implausible) implications about which acts are objectively right or wrong, that can be assessed independently of the question of whether it would be a good thing for (some, many, or all) people to use a rule-based decision procedure.
What EthĀiĀcal TheĀory Is
SidgĀwick Defended
Ok, thanks for expanding upon your view! It sounds broadly akin to how Iām inclined to address Pascalās Mugging cases (treat the astronomical stakes as implying proportionately negligible probability). Astronomical stakes from x-risk mitigation seems much more substantively credible to me, but I donāt have much to add at this point if you donāt share that substantive judgment!
You keep describing possible scenarios in which the actual value of averting extinction would be low. Do you not understand the scenario conditions under which the actual value would be high? Iām suggesting that those kinds of scenario (in which astronomically valuable futures are reliably securable so long as we avoid extinction this century) seem reasonably credible to me, which is what grounds my background belief in x-risk mitigation having high expected value.
Edited to add: You may in a sense be talking about āexpected valueā, but insofar as it is based on a single model of how you expect the future to go (ārapid diminutionā), it seems problematically analogous to actual value ā like the fallacy I diagnose in āRule High Stakes In, Not Outā. We need to abstract from that specific model and ask how confident we should be in that one model compared to competing ones, and thus reach a kind of higher-order (or all models considered) expected value estimate.The point of RHSINO is that the probability you assign to low stakes models (like rapid diminution) makes surprisingly little difference: you could assign them 99% probability and that still wouldnāt establish that our all-models-considered EV must be low. Our ultimate judgment instead depends more on what credibility we assign to the higher-stakes models/āscenarios.
Hi Ben, no, Iām not claiming that any particular preferability judgment is undoubtable. My claim is rather that the epistemic principles grounding arguments that (e.g.) the badness of nuclear war is unbelievable seem likely to entail radical skepticism.
A proposition may be both doubtable (by some) and believable (by others), which I take to be indicative of (resolvable) epistemic difficulty rather than cluelessness.