The Myth of the 'Perfect Altruist'

JoeJones

Regarding "To be a good EA, in the sense that it is conceived of by most EAs, you must enjoy your life to some degree. This is because living one’s life is rarely an exclusively moral decision", you may also like Tyler Alterman's reflections, in particular this paragraph:

Totalized by an ought, I sought its source outside myself. I found nothing. The ought came from me, an internal whip toward a thing which, confusingly, I already wanted – to see others flourish. I dropped the whip. My want now rested, commensurate, amidst others of its kind – terminal wants for ends-in-themselves: loving, dancing, and the other spiritual requirements of my particular life. To say that these were lesser seemed to say, “It is more vital and urgent to eat well than to drink or sleep well.” No – I will eat, sleep, and drink well to feel alive; so too will I love and dance as well as help.

Regarding "Utilitarianism is the most demanding moral framework I’m aware of, in the modern world", I think Scott's distinction between axiology, morality and law is useful. Quoting liberally from that essay:

These three concepts are pretty similar; they’re all about some vague sense of what is or isn’t desirable. But most societies stop short of making them exactly the same. Only the purest act-utilitarianesque consequentialists say that axiology exactly equals morality, and I’m not sure there is anybody quite that pure. And only the harshest of Puritans try to legislate the state law to be exactly identical to the moral one. To bridge the whole distance – to directly connect axiology to law and make it illegal to do anything other than the most utility-maximizing action at any given time – is such a mind-bogglingly bad idea that I don’t think anyone’s even considered it in all of human history.
These concepts stay separate because they each make different compromises between goodness, implementation, and coordination. ...
Axiology is just our beliefs about what is good. If you defy axiology, you make the world worse.
At least from a rule-utilitarianesque perspective, morality is an attempt to triage the infinite demands of axiology, in order to make them implementable by specific people living in specific communities. ...
Law is an attempt to formalize the complicated demands of morality, in order to make them implementable by a state with police officers and law courts. ...
In a healthy situation, each of these systems reinforces and promotes the other. Morality helps you implement axiology from your limited human perspective, but also helps prevent you from feeling guilty for not being God and not being able to save everybody. The law helps enforce the most important moral and axiological rules but also leaves people free enough to use their own best judgment on how to pursue the others. And axiology and morality help resolve disputes about what the law should be, and then lend the support of the community, the church, and the individual conscience in keeping people law-abiding.
In these healthy situations, the universally-agreed priority is that law trumps morality, and morality trumps axiology. ...
In unhealthy situations, you can get all sorts of weird conflicts. Most “moral dilemmas” are philosophers trying to create perverse situations where axiology and morality give opposite answers. For example, the fat man version of the trolley problem sets axiology (“it’s obviously better to have a world where one person dies than a world where five people die”) against morality (“it’s a useful rule that people generally shouldn’t push other people to their deaths”). And when morality and state law disagree, you get various acts of civil disobedience, from people hiding Jews from the Nazis all the way down to Kentucky clerks refusing to perform gay marriages.

Mo Putera

Totalized by an ought, I sought its source outside myself. I found nothing. The ought came from me, an internal whip toward a thing which, confusingly, I already wanted – to see others flourish. I dropped the whip. My want now rested, commensurate, amidst others of its kind – terminal wants for ends-in-themselves: loving, dancing, and the other spiritual requirements of my particular life. To say that these were lesser seemed to say, “It is more vital and urgent to eat well than to drink or sleep well.” No – I will eat, sleep, and drink well to feel alive; so too will I love and dance as well as help.

These three concepts are pretty similar; they’re all about some vague sense of what is or isn’t desirable. But most societies stop short of making them exactly the same. Only the purest act-utilitarianesque consequentialists say that axiology exactly equals morality, and I’m not sure there is anybody quite that pure. And only the harshest of Puritans try to legislate the state law to be exactly identical to the moral one. To bridge the whole distance – to directly connect axiology to law and make it illegal to do anything other than the most utility-maximizing action at any given time – is such a mind-bogglingly bad idea that I don’t think anyone’s even considered it in all of human history.
These concepts stay separate because they each make different compromises between goodness, implementation, and coordination. ...
Axiology is just our beliefs about what is good. If you defy axiology, you make the world worse.
At least from a rule-utilitarianesque perspective, morality is an attempt to triage the infinite demands of axiology, in order to make them implementable by specific people living in specific communities. ...
Law is an attempt to formalize the complicated demands of morality, in order to make them implementable by a state with police officers and law courts. ...
In a healthy situation, each of these systems reinforces and promotes the other. Morality helps you implement axiology from your limited human perspective, but also helps prevent you from feeling guilty for not being God and not being able to save everybody. The law helps enforce the most important moral and axiological rules but also leaves people free enough to use their own best judgment on how to pursue the others. And axiology and morality help resolve disputes about what the law should be, and then lend the support of the community, the church, and the individual conscience in keeping people law-abiding.
In these healthy situations, the universally-agreed priority is that law trumps morality, and morality trumps axiology. ...
In unhealthy situations, you can get all sorts of weird conflicts. Most “moral dilemmas” are philosophers trying to create perverse situations where axiology and morality give opposite answers. For example, the fat man version of the trolley problem sets axiology (“it’s obviously better to have a world where one person dies than a world where five people die”) against morality (“it’s a useful rule that people generally shouldn’t push other people to their deaths”). And when morality and state law disagree, you get various acts of civil disobedience, from people hiding Jews from the Nazis all the way down to Kentucky clerks refusing to perform gay marriages.

^{^}

Exempting perhaps some extremely demanding cults, or extremely demanding interpretations of existing moral doctrines (or individuals who have developed their own extremely demanding frameworks based on some other idea or neurosis).