I am a Senior Research Manager in the Animal Welfare department at Rethink Priorities. The views I express here do not represent Rethink Priorities unless stated otherwise.
Before working in effective altruism, I completed a Ph.D. in psychology studying the evolution of cooperation in humans, with a concentration in quantitative psychology. After that, I was a postdoctoral fellow studying public health. My main interests now are animal welfare and social science methodology/statistics.
Chekhov’s The Petcheneg is a delight that touches on vegetarianism, farmed animal welfare, wild animal welfare, and moral cluelessness, all just in service of character and plot development...Link: https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/petcheneg.htm
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Your post piqued my interest enough that I am finally getting around to reading Susan Haack’s Evidence and Inquiry, which is a theory of justification that builds on Peirce and has an entire chapter devoted to Rorty. She is very unsympathetic to Rorty, but I suspect that other commentators on pragmatism, such as Cornel West and Louis Menand, are more sympathetic. It may not be a coincidence that the latter folks have more applied, political interests, which would jibe with EA as you say.
I am a big fan of Peirce but less keen on James and subsequent pragmatists who took the movement in a direction closer to James’s views. Peirce, for instance, does hold a correspondence theory of truth. He just also cashes it out in a “third level” of clarity, in which truth is what we would all agree upon a hypothetical “end of inquiry” in which there is no longer any uncertainty. I prefer Peirce’s views because he is a realist about just about everything and sought to make philosophy more scientific (but not scientistic). For instance, he believes we can obtain capital-T truth but that our evidence is always fallible. What makes it a “pragmatic” view is that concepts are defined by their empirical consequences under particular circumstances, and that invalid/poorly-thought-out concepts do not well-specified empirical consequences. In my view this is more compatible with EA than Rorty- or James-type views because on the Peircean view there is a fact of the matter about, say, a given species’ sentience or lack thereof that we can at least get fallible evidence about. For James, and especially Rorty, the question of whether a given species is sentient would be more like a sociological phenomena—we “understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation.” I think part of what EA is about is that we want to actually make a difference, merely appearing well-justified about whether we are making a big difference is not of interest. Indeed, a distinctive aspect of the EA community seems to be an obsession with figuring out whether the entire community might collectively be wrong about something; I’m not sure how to reconcile this practice with “defending against all comers” if your conversation peers are already on the same page as you.
However, I would be very interested to hear what attracted you to Rorty or papers by him you think would be good to check out that could be particularly relevant to EA. When I took a class in pragmatism my professor was a big critic of Rorty so it is possible that I have unfairly dismissed him. It’s also been several years since I studied the movement closely.
James does some have interesting speculations about the origins of morality (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/intejethi.1.3.2375309). Explicit discussions of morality are pretty absent from Peirce to my knowledge, so he would be more likely relevant to EA for his contributions to philosophy of science.
Huemer’s book is what convinced me to go vegan after being a vegetarian for a number of years. I like his approach of putting general normative frameworks to the side. My only complaint is that, by downplaying the probability of invertebrate sentience and the ability to help wild animals, he has made the ethical landscape appear less complex than it really is. I also appreciate his (largely unsuccessful) attempts to engage libertarians on this issue, who often focus arbitrarily on state coercion rather than all coercion.