Josh Piecyk 🔹
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Donating 2% of my income this year to charities recommended by The Life You Can Save
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Morality is Objective
As an atheist-leaning agnostic, I find Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape to be the closest approximation of objective morality I have encountered, and it best captures the form of subjective morality I follow. However, I still view morality as a human construct: the flourishing of life is not objectively good, and the suffering of life is not objectively bad.
Congrats! Your table of contents seems very thoughtfully structured and piques my interest. I'm curious how you arrived at the marginal cost of ~$10,000/procedure and ~$1000/year in storage costs and QALY estimations, but I assume that will be discussed more in detail in the book.
Also as a heads up, your link to the study about erasing memories leads to a server error (at least on my end).
In your Welfare Range Estimate and your Introduction to Moral Weights, you don't mention the potential of humans to make a positive impact, instead focusing only on averting DALYs. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but isn't this neglecting the hedonic goods from a positive utilitarian perspective and only addressing it from the negative utilitarian side of things?
Please let me know if this topic is addressed in another entry in your sequence, and thank you for the time you have spent researching and writing about these important topics!
Thank you for showing me that calculation. Upon further thought, I think my belief is more along the lines of 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 chickens being equivalent to a single human life.
Based on suffering reduction alone, my opinion is that the weight of human suffering carries at least 1,000,000 times more weight than a chicken. When also considering the potential indirect positive impacts a human can have, as well as the difference in experience size between humans and animals, the decision to prioritize human welfare over animal welfare becomes even clearer to me. I hope our society reaches a point at which human suffering has been reduced to the point that we can focus on animal welfare, but I think we're likely decades away.
I'd like to caveat this by saying I'm rather new to effective altruism, and I expect my views to evolve the more I learn. I'm curious to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying philosophical premises inherent in some of the views expressed here.
Congrats! Do you have any plans on publishing it in english too? I've been looking for more recently published books that cover "classical EA"