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[AI Use Disclosure: Asked Claude to draft this, then entirely rejected its suggestions]
I've read a lot of good moral philosophy linked from the EA Forum, but not much of it (Joe Carlsmith excepted) has focused on some of the not-evidently-utilitarian traits and dispositions one could cultivate to become the kind of person that does the most good.
I'm discovering there's some meticulous writing on that topic as well, and I wanted to share here a piece that is currently resonating with me:
History and literature provide striking examplesof people who are morally admirable, in part, because of theirprofound faith in people’s decency. But moral philosophers have largely ignored this trait, and I suspect that many philos-ophers would view such faith with suspicion, dismissing it as aform of naïvete or as some other objectionable form of irrationality. I argue that such suspicion is misplaced, and that having a certain kind of faith in people’s decency, which I call faith inhumanity, is a centrally important moral virtue. In order tomake this view intuitively more plausible, I discuss two moralexemplars – one historical and the other literary – whose lives vividly exhibit such faith. Then I provide a rationale for theview that having such faith is morally admirable. Finally, I discuss cases in which someone’s faith in humanity can lead her tomake judgments that are, to some degree, epistemically irrational. I argue that the existence of such cases does not pose a serious objection to the view that having faith in humanity is amoral virtue. Rather, it makes salient important limits on therole that epistemic, as opposed to practical, rationality shouldoccupy in our ideals of how to live.
Paper: Faith in Humanity, Ryan Preston-Roedder, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2013). https://philpapers.org/archive/PREFIH-2.pdf
Thanks for sharing. I think in particular about the environmental movement, where a kind of mistrust of humanity--which often crosses the line into misanthropy--holds the movement back from what it could achieve. There are systems of thought such as ecomodernism which try to present a pro-human environmentalism, but I don't think anyone has really done it right yet, at least to my knowledge.