Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard— Coldplay, The Scientist
In the wake of Dylan Matthews’ recent piece on the cost effectiveness of rebuilding Notre Dame, I have seen many people on Twitter hand wave away the demandingness objection to utilitarianism,[1] which says that always trying to do the most good is an impossible obligation.
To redeem their version of morality from the demangingness objection, the tweeters assert that some good deeds are supererogatory, which is philosophy for “nice to do, but not obligatory.” The problem is that they do not present a reason why doing more good would ever be supererogatory, other than the implicit convenience of ducking the demandingness objection.
That convenience is not a sufficient justification. The universe made you no promise that morality would not be demanding. If your moral reasoning leads you to believe that you ought take some action, even donating your last dollar, the burden is yours to supply an additional argument why the action is supererogatory.
I think it was strategically valuable for the early growth of EA that leaders denied its demandingness, but I worry some EAs got unduly inoculated against the idea.
Until we find a principled reason to reject the demandingness objection, the best available response is still to concede the objection with grace, not to deny it.
- ^
Utilitarianism is often the target of demangingess critiques, but you can make similar arguments about other kind of ethics. Even deontologists face the same burden to provide a reason why certain kinds of actions are supererogatory.
"To redeem their version of morality from the demangingness objection, the tweeters assert that some good deeds are supererogatory, which is philosophy for “nice to do, but not obligatory.” The problem is that they do not present a reason why doing more good would ever be supererogatory, other than the implicit convenience of ducking the demandingness objection."
I think this might be addressed to me. My reasoning is at https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/ . Other than that, I'm not sure how you get a coherent theory of obligatory vs. supererogatory.
What would it mean for a thing which nobody does (donate literally all their money beyond minimum required to live) to be obligatory? I think of "obligatory" as meaning that if someone doesn't do a thing, then we all agree to consider them a bad person. But we can't make that agreement regarding donating 100% of income beyond survival level, because we'd never stick to it - I think of the EAs who donate 50% of their income as extremely good people, I can't self-modify to not do that even if I wanted to, and I don't want to.
Without something like that, how do you distinguish "obligatory" from simply "a good thing to do" (which I and IIUC everyone in the discussion agrees that donating more is).
For what it's worth I didn't have your tweets in mind when I wrote this, but it's possible I saw them a couple weeks ago when the Discourse was happening.
Thanks for linking to the post! It satisfies most of my complaint about people not providing reasoning.
I still have some objections to it, but now I'm arguing for "there are no good reasons for certain actions to be supererogatory," which is a layer down from "I wish people would try to give reasons."
- The post mostly gives a description of people's attitudes toward different actions, but not so much a just
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