Cross-posted from my Substack.
Epistemic status: I’ve puzzled over this for a long time but I’m not sure I came to the right answers. I'm sharing this partly because it might help others work on resource allocation, but mostly because some smarter reader might tell me how to do it better.
TL;DR:
* I he...
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
Act utilitarians choose actions estimated to increase total happiness. Rule utilitarians follow rules estimated to increase total happiness (e.g. not lying). But you can have the best of both: act utilitarianism where rules are instead treated as moral priors. For example, having a strong prior that killing someone is bad, but which can be overridden in extreme circumstances (e.g. if killing the person ends WWII).
These priors make act utilitarianism more safeguarded against bad assessments. They are grounded in Bayesianism (moral priors are updated the same way as non-moral priors). They also decrease cognitive effort: most of the time, just follow your priors, unless the stakes and uncertainty warrant more complex consequence estimates. You can have a small prior toward inaction, so that not every random action is worth considering. You can also blend in some virtue ethics, by having a prior that virtuous acts often lead to greater total happiness in the long run.
What I described is a more Bayesian version of R. M. Hare's "Two-level utilitarianism", which involves an "intuitive" and a "critical" level of moral thinking.