anonymous question from a big fan of yours on tumblr:
“Re: Nate Soares (thanks for doing this btw, it’s really nice of you), two questions. First, I understand his ethical system described in his recent “should” series and other posts to be basically a kind of moral relativism; is he comfortable with that label? Second, does he only intend it for a certain subset of humans with agreeable values, or does it apply to all value systems, even ones we would find objectionable?”
(I’m passing on questions without comment from anyone without an e-a.com account or who wants anonymity here. )
I am also not an expert on designing surveys, but it seems really hard to get meaningful data on something like the ‘consent philosophies’ that you describe, at least without broadly-understood and theorised examples of different versions of them. Imagine trying to get an idea of the different ethical views of EAs without being able to rely on terms like ‘utilitarianism’ and ‘condequentialism’ and others that have a well-developed meaning from the philosophical literature.
Asking people to describe their ethical views in such a situation seems like a really bad idea—not only would it require a ton of work in reading through all the responses to get even a vague idea of the common threads, it requires the survey-taker to do a ton of work in writing up their views; not only to describe them, which itself might take some time, but also to reflect and come up with verbal descriptions of things they don’t neccessarily think explicitly about.