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TLDR: Everyone’s talking about what the money could do, but few about how to decide where it goes.
This post is part of the new series of articles on cross-cause giving and the new wave of philanthropy. Stay tuned to the EA Forum and our Substack for the latest takes on topics such as giving now vs. later, common pitfalls in cause prioritization, and other crucial considerations from the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) team...
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I was born at the end of the cold war, unaware of the danger we were emerging from. Duck and cover drills (as if those could protect schoolchildren from a nuclear blast) were a curiosity of the past.
The farmer-poet Wendell Berry, who wrote about the dread of nuclear war, died recently. From his 1968 “The peace of wild things”:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least...
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I would add the extended episode of the 80,000 Hours podcast with David Chalmers. To my knowledge, some of the views he expresses there—e.g. that phenomenal consciousness is morally valuable even if not hedonically valenced—have not been explicitly discussed in either the EA or the philosophical literature.
Many utilitarian EAs have independently gravitated towards the view that the intrinsic value of pleasure and pain can be known by introspection or "direct acquaintance". Surprisingly, as far as I know no statement of this view exists in the EA literature, though some may be found in the philosophical literature (including publications by philosophers sympathetic to EA):
I also noticed this when I started planning a blogpost on this topic!
De Lazari-Radek and Singer's The Point of View of the Universe has a chapter on hedonism, but I think the argument is less developed than in the two links you give. (BTW, if you have a copy of the paper by Adam Lerner and think it's okay to share it with me, I'd be very interested!)
It's interesting to note that Sinhababu's epistemic argument for hedonism explicitly relies on the premise "moral realism is true." Without that premise, the argument would be less forceful (what remains would be the comparison that pleasure's goodness is similar to the brigthness of the color "lemon yellow" – but that doesn't seem to support the strong version of the claim "pleasure is good.")