"So, for instance, suppose you take a baby and hit it with great force with a hammer. Moral realism says: 1. You’re doing something wrong."
Moral realism doesn't say that hitting a baby with a hammer is wrong. Moral realism entails that there is some fact about the morality of hitting a baby with a hammer. Probably, that moral fact is that it is wrong to do this, but moral realism is not a theory about specific moral facts. It's a theory that moral facts are possible.
This is a pedantic point, but the more commitments you unnecessarily build into moral realism, the more likely someone is to reject it. Someone might be open to there being moral facts, and yet believe that the wrongness of torturing babies isn't one of these facts. If someone like that accepted your claim that moral realists necessarily believe it is wrong to torture babies, they might think, "Oh, I guess I'm not a moral realist then." The belief that it's wrong to torture babies is a promising contender for one of the world's most popular moral beliefs. Still, the less you commit the moral realist to, the more plausible moral realism is going to seem.
Although it might not get to this point, it's not hard to imagine the White House eventually operating on a new, looser definition of treason in which "aid and comfort to the enemy" could include words that Trump or others in his admin don't like. (They probably can't legally redefine treason, but that might not matter since Trump has already shown he can enforce the law as he wants the law to be as opposed to enforcing the law as it is. Khalil is an example of this, as he might have his green card revoked without it going through an immigration court, which is the required process.)
The Trump admin has a list of universities it might financially punish for allowing Palestinian protests, which include top universities in New York and California, and it's freezing/cutting funding for science research through universities in the US. Even non-science PhD programs in the US are reducing their budgets as a result.
The last point is probably the most obviously relevant for EAs right now, especially if they are deciding between studying at a US university or in another country—although anyone who cares about democracy and freedom of speech has reason to worry.
You might enjoy "On the Survival of Humanity" (2017) by Johann Frick. Frick makes the same point there that you quote Torres as making—that total utilitarians care about the total number and quality of experiences but are indifferent to whether these experiences are simultaneous or extended across time. Torres has favorably cited Frick elsewhere, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were inspired by this article. You can download it here: https://oar.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/pr1rn3068s/1/OnTheSurvivalOfHumanity.pdf
I don't know if StrongMinds explicitly has a goal of reducing suicides, or what its predicted effect on suicide risk might be, but searching for "suicide" on the StrongMinds site (https://strongminds.org/?s=suicide) brings up a lot of results. Whether or not suicide prevention is part of their mission, treating depression would seem to potentially reduce the risk of suicide for some people . If so, some of the value of StrongMinds might come from the extension of lives. This would mean the value of StrongMinds could vary depending on which view of the harm of death we take.
I'm currently taking a class with Jeff McMahan in which he discusses prenatal injury, and I'm pretty sure he would agree with how you put it here, Richard. This doesn't affect your point, but he now likes to discuss a complication to this: what he calls "the divergent lives problem." The idea is that an early injury can lead to a very different life path, and that once you're far enough down this path—and have the particular interests that you do, and the particular individuals in your life who are important to you—Jeff thinks it can be irrational to regret the injury. So, if someone's being injured as a fetus leads them to later meet the particular life partner they love and to have particular the children they have, and if their life is good, Jeff thinks they probably shouldn't regret the injury—even if avoiding the injury would have led to their having a life with more wellbeing. That's because avoiding the injury would have led to them having particular people and interests in their life which they don't in fact care about from their standpoint now. However, Jeff does add that if an early injury makes the later life not worth living, or maybe even barely worth living, then the future person who developed from the injured fetus does have reason to regret that injury. He would say that children of mothers who took Thalidomide have reason to regret that.
The article seems to contradict itself in the end. In the beginning of the article, I thought you were saying you're not an EA because you're not a utilitarian (because utilitarianism is poison), and to be an EA is just to be a utilitarian in some form—and that even if EAs are utilitarians in a very diluted form, the philosophy they are diluting is still a poison, no matter how diluted, and so is unacceptable. So, I was expecting you to offer some alternative framework or way of thinking to build an altruistic movement on, like moral particularism or contractualism or something, but the solution I read you as giving is for EAs to keep doing exactly what you start off saying they shouldn’t do: for them to base their movement on utilitarianism in a diluted form.
I hope this isn't uncharitable, but this is how your core argument actually comes across to me: “I’m not an EA because EAs ground their movement on a diluted form of utilitarianism, which is poisonous no matter how much you dilute it. What do I suggest instead? EAs should keep doing exactly what they’re doing—diluting utilitarianism until it’s no longer poisonous!” (Maybe my biggest objection to your article is that you missed the perfect opportunity for a homeopathy analogy here!) This seems contradictory to me, which makes it hard to figure out what to take from your article.
To highlight what made me confused, I'll quote what I saw as the most contradictory seeming passages. In the first four quotes here, you seem to say that diluting utilitarianism is futile because this can’t remove the poison:
“the origins of the effective altruist movement in utilitarianism means that as definitions get more specific it becomes clear that within lurks a poison, and the choice of all effective altruists is either to dilute that poison, and therefore dilute their philosophy, or swallow the poison whole.
“This poison, which originates directly from utilitarianism (which then trickles down to effective altruism), is not a quirk, or a bug, but rather a feature of utilitarian philosophy, and can be found in even the smallest drop. And why I am not an effective altruist is that to deal with it one must dilute or swallow, swallow or dilute, always and forever.” …
“But the larger problem for the effective altruist movement remains that diluting something doesn’t actually make it not poison. It’s still poison! That’s why you had to dilute it.”
“I’m of the radical opinion that the poison means something is wrong to begin with.”
It seems like you’re saying we should neither drink the poison of pure utilitarianism nor try to fool ourselves into thinking it’s okay to drink it because we have diluted it. Yet here, at the end of the article, you sound like a Dr Bronner’s bottle commanding “dilute dilute dilute!”:
“So here’s my official specific and constructive suggestion for the effective altruism movement: … keep diluting the poison. Dilute it all the way down, until everyone is basically just drinking water. You’re already on the right path. …
“I really do think that by continuing down the path of dilution, even by accelerating it, the movement will do a lot of practical good over the next couple decades as it draws in more and more people who find its moral principles easier and easier to swallow…
“What I’m saying is that, in terms of flavor, a little utilitarianism goes a long ways. And my suggestion is that effective altruists should dilute, dilute, dilute—dilute until everyone everywhere can drink.”
If “everyone everywhere” is drinking diluted utilitarianism at the end, doesn’t that include you? Are you saying you’re not an EA because EAs haven’t diluted utilitarianism quite enough yet, but eventually you think they’ll get there? Doesn’t this contradict what you say earlier about poison being poison no matter how diluted? You seem to begin the essay in fundamental opposition to EA, and you conclude by explicitly endorsing what you claim is the EA status quo: “Basically, just keep doing the cool shit you’ve been doing”!
I assume there are ways to re-phrase the last section of your article so you’re not coming across as contradicting yourself, but as it’s written now, your advice to EA seems identical to your critique of EA.
What made you shy away from suggesting EA shift from utilitarianism to a different form of consequentialism or to a different moral (or even non-moral) framework entirely? It can't be that you think all the utilitarian EAs would have ignored you if you did that, because you say in the article that you know you’ll be ignored and lose this contest because your critique of EA is too fundamental and crushing for EAs to be able to face. Do you think diluted utilitarianism is the best basis for an altruistic movement? It certainly doesn't seem so in the beginning, but that's all I am able to get out of the ending.
The original argument you're reacting to is flawed, which carries over into your second one. To make both arguments clearer, we need to know the significance of an embryo being human, why this matters to utilitarians, and what sort of utilitarians you mean. Does an embryo being human mean it has the same moral status as an adult human? Does it mean it has a similar interest in continued living as an adult embryo does? Does it mean it is harmed by death -- and if so, does this harm of death leave it worse off than if it were never conceived at all?
And what type of utilitarians do you have in mind? Total hedonic utilitarians presumably wouldn't be that worried about miscarriages for the sake of the embryos themselves even if the embryos were human, had the same moral status as adult humans, and had an interest in continued existence. That's because embryos are usually relatively replaceable and their deaths are usually less traumatic for others than the deaths of those who are already born.
As for the harm of death, total utilitarians care about intrinsic value of outcomes, and most philosophers of death don't think of death as an intrinsic harm. This means that for a total utilitarian, if someone pops into existence, has a good fleeting moment of existence and then dies painlessly without anything else being affected, the only thing that counts is the good moment. We don't count the death as something bad, or something worse than the being never existing in the first place. It would be better if the being lived longer and had more good experiences, but it's not worth preventing an existence just to prevent a death.
Total hedonic utilitarians care about saving lives because that seems like an effective way to increase good. Stopping miscarriages does not seem like an effective way to do that.
But maybe you have other sorts of utilitarians in mind. There could be some utilitarians with certain person-affecting views, or who think of death as an intrinsic harm, who might be more worried about this. But even then it would be important for them what the moral status of embryos is and whether embryos have an interest in continued existence. I would expect them to think an interest in continued existence would require sentience at least, or a greater conscious awareness than we expect embryos to have.
Balliol tends to have a lot of philosophy graduate students, and Wadham is considered to be one of the most left-wing colleges. Looking at the list of current Oxford philosophy graduate students, I noticed there are a lot at St Anne's right now as well. But this can change depending on the year, and philosophy student obviously doesn't mean EA. I would be surprised if any college reliably had a higher number of EAs.
AlasdairGives' suggestion to consider funding options makes sense, though you should also keep in mind that the wealthiest colleges get the most applications, so if you apply to St John's, there's more of a risk they won't pick you, and then there's more randomness in the college you end up at.
I had a similar question myself. It seems like believing in a "long reflection" period requires denying that there will be a human-aligned AGI. My understanding would have been that once a human-aligned AGI is developed, there would not be much need for human reflection—and whatever human reflection did take place could be accelerated through interactions with the superintelligence, and would therefore not be "long." I would have thought, then, that most of the reflection on our values would need to have been completed before the creation of an AGI. From what I've read of The Precipice, there is no explanation for how a long reflection is compatible with the creation of a human-aligned AGI.
In interested in how Demeny Voting is expected to work psychologically. I would expect just about everyone who is given a second vote (which they are told to submit on behalf of future generations) to use that second vote as a second vote for whatever their first vote was for. I imagine they would either think their first vote was for the best policy/person, in which case they could convince themselves that's best for future generations too, or they would realize their first vote is only good for the short term, but they would double vote for short-termism anyway because that's what matters to them. Either way, I wouldn't expect them to vote against their own preferences with the second vote for future generations. I wouldn't expect many people to vote in some way that they saw as directly good for themselves, and then to cast a second contradictory vote that they saw as possibly neutral or bad for themselves but good for future people.
The system could be set up so they cannot vote for the same thing twice, but then I would expect most people to not use their second vote, unless there were at least two options they happened to like. (To prevent this, it could be set up so everyone voting was required to vote twice, for two different options, but then people may be more likely to just stay home when there's not two options they like. Maybe then there could be fines for not voting, but fining people for not voting for a candidate they don't like might lead to resentment.) However, people being required to vote for more than one option could be interesting as a version of approval voting in which everyone has two totally separate votes for different candidates.
If double voting were allowed, I would expect most people to do exactly that, but framing the second vote as allegedly on behalf of future generations could at least get people thinking more about the longterm, which might change which candidate some people double vote for. Is this sort of indirect effect what you'd be going for with this?
"So, for instance, suppose you take a baby and hit it with great force with a hammer. Moral realism says: 1. You’re doing something wrong."
Moral realism doesn't say that hitting a baby with a hammer is wrong. Moral realism entails that there is some fact about the morality of hitting a baby with a hammer. Probably, that moral fact is that it is wrong to do this, but moral realism is not a theory about specific moral facts. It's a theory that moral facts are possible.
This is a pedantic point, but the more commitments you unnecessarily build into moral realism, the more likely someone is to reject it. Someone might be open to there being moral facts, and yet believe that the wrongness of torturing babies isn't one of these facts. If someone like that accepted your claim that moral realists necessarily believe it is wrong to torture babies, they might think, "Oh, I guess I'm not a moral realist then." The belief that it's wrong to torture babies is a promising contender for one of the world's most popular moral beliefs. Still, the less you commit the moral realist to, the more plausible moral realism is going to seem.
Thanks for this post.
Over the weekend, the White House ordered the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, an American permanent resident with an American wife, because he was a leader of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. Khalil might have his green card canceled for his role in these protests.
Although it might not get to this point, it's not hard to imagine the White House eventually operating on a new, looser definition of treason in which "aid and comfort to the enemy" could include words that Trump or others in his admin don't like. (They probably can't legally redefine treason, but that might not matter since Trump has already shown he can enforce the law as he wants the law to be as opposed to enforcing the law as it is. Khalil is an example of this, as he might have his green card revoked without it going through an immigration court, which is the required process.)
The Trump admin has a list of universities it might financially punish for allowing Palestinian protests, which include top universities in New York and California, and it's freezing/cutting funding for science research through universities in the US. Even non-science PhD programs in the US are reducing their budgets as a result.
The last point is probably the most obviously relevant for EAs right now, especially if they are deciding between studying at a US university or in another country—although anyone who cares about democracy and freedom of speech has reason to worry.
You might enjoy "On the Survival of Humanity" (2017) by Johann Frick. Frick makes the same point there that you quote Torres as making—that total utilitarians care about the total number and quality of experiences but are indifferent to whether these experiences are simultaneous or extended across time. Torres has favorably cited Frick elsewhere, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were inspired by this article. You can download it here: https://oar.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/pr1rn3068s/1/OnTheSurvivalOfHumanity.pdf
I don't know if StrongMinds explicitly has a goal of reducing suicides, or what its predicted effect on suicide risk might be, but searching for "suicide" on the StrongMinds site (https://strongminds.org/?s=suicide) brings up a lot of results. Whether or not suicide prevention is part of their mission, treating depression would seem to potentially reduce the risk of suicide for some people . If so, some of the value of StrongMinds might come from the extension of lives. This would mean the value of StrongMinds could vary depending on which view of the harm of death we take.
I'm currently taking a class with Jeff McMahan in which he discusses prenatal injury, and I'm pretty sure he would agree with how you put it here, Richard. This doesn't affect your point, but he now likes to discuss a complication to this: what he calls "the divergent lives problem." The idea is that an early injury can lead to a very different life path, and that once you're far enough down this path—and have the particular interests that you do, and the particular individuals in your life who are important to you—Jeff thinks it can be irrational to regret the injury. So, if someone's being injured as a fetus leads them to later meet the particular life partner they love and to have particular the children they have, and if their life is good, Jeff thinks they probably shouldn't regret the injury—even if avoiding the injury would have led to their having a life with more wellbeing. That's because avoiding the injury would have led to them having particular people and interests in their life which they don't in fact care about from their standpoint now. However, Jeff does add that if an early injury makes the later life not worth living, or maybe even barely worth living, then the future person who developed from the injured fetus does have reason to regret that injury. He would say that children of mothers who took Thalidomide have reason to regret that.
The article seems to contradict itself in the end. In the beginning of the article, I thought you were saying you're not an EA because you're not a utilitarian (because utilitarianism is poison), and to be an EA is just to be a utilitarian in some form—and that even if EAs are utilitarians in a very diluted form, the philosophy they are diluting is still a poison, no matter how diluted, and so is unacceptable. So, I was expecting you to offer some alternative framework or way of thinking to build an altruistic movement on, like moral particularism or contractualism or something, but the solution I read you as giving is for EAs to keep doing exactly what you start off saying they shouldn’t do: for them to base their movement on utilitarianism in a diluted form.
I hope this isn't uncharitable, but this is how your core argument actually comes across to me: “I’m not an EA because EAs ground their movement on a diluted form of utilitarianism, which is poisonous no matter how much you dilute it. What do I suggest instead? EAs should keep doing exactly what they’re doing—diluting utilitarianism until it’s no longer poisonous!” (Maybe my biggest objection to your article is that you missed the perfect opportunity for a homeopathy analogy here!) This seems contradictory to me, which makes it hard to figure out what to take from your article.
To highlight what made me confused, I'll quote what I saw as the most contradictory seeming passages. In the first four quotes here, you seem to say that diluting utilitarianism is futile because this can’t remove the poison:
“the origins of the effective altruist movement in utilitarianism means that as definitions get more specific it becomes clear that within lurks a poison, and the choice of all effective altruists is either to dilute that poison, and therefore dilute their philosophy, or swallow the poison whole.
“This poison, which originates directly from utilitarianism (which then trickles down to effective altruism), is not a quirk, or a bug, but rather a feature of utilitarian philosophy, and can be found in even the smallest drop. And why I am not an effective altruist is that to deal with it one must dilute or swallow, swallow or dilute, always and forever.” …
“But the larger problem for the effective altruist movement remains that diluting something doesn’t actually make it not poison. It’s still poison! That’s why you had to dilute it.”
“I’m of the radical opinion that the poison means something is wrong to begin with.”
It seems like you’re saying we should neither drink the poison of pure utilitarianism nor try to fool ourselves into thinking it’s okay to drink it because we have diluted it. Yet here, at the end of the article, you sound like a Dr Bronner’s bottle commanding “dilute dilute dilute!”:
“So here’s my official specific and constructive suggestion for the effective altruism movement: … keep diluting the poison. Dilute it all the way down, until everyone is basically just drinking water. You’re already on the right path. …
“I really do think that by continuing down the path of dilution, even by accelerating it, the movement will do a lot of practical good over the next couple decades as it draws in more and more people who find its moral principles easier and easier to swallow…
“What I’m saying is that, in terms of flavor, a little utilitarianism goes a long ways. And my suggestion is that effective altruists should dilute, dilute, dilute—dilute until everyone everywhere can drink.”
If “everyone everywhere” is drinking diluted utilitarianism at the end, doesn’t that include you? Are you saying you’re not an EA because EAs haven’t diluted utilitarianism quite enough yet, but eventually you think they’ll get there? Doesn’t this contradict what you say earlier about poison being poison no matter how diluted? You seem to begin the essay in fundamental opposition to EA, and you conclude by explicitly endorsing what you claim is the EA status quo: “Basically, just keep doing the cool shit you’ve been doing”!
I assume there are ways to re-phrase the last section of your article so you’re not coming across as contradicting yourself, but as it’s written now, your advice to EA seems identical to your critique of EA.
What made you shy away from suggesting EA shift from utilitarianism to a different form of consequentialism or to a different moral (or even non-moral) framework entirely? It can't be that you think all the utilitarian EAs would have ignored you if you did that, because you say in the article that you know you’ll be ignored and lose this contest because your critique of EA is too fundamental and crushing for EAs to be able to face. Do you think diluted utilitarianism is the best basis for an altruistic movement? It certainly doesn't seem so in the beginning, but that's all I am able to get out of the ending.
The original argument you're reacting to is flawed, which carries over into your second one. To make both arguments clearer, we need to know the significance of an embryo being human, why this matters to utilitarians, and what sort of utilitarians you mean. Does an embryo being human mean it has the same moral status as an adult human? Does it mean it has a similar interest in continued living as an adult embryo does? Does it mean it is harmed by death -- and if so, does this harm of death leave it worse off than if it were never conceived at all?
And what type of utilitarians do you have in mind? Total hedonic utilitarians presumably wouldn't be that worried about miscarriages for the sake of the embryos themselves even if the embryos were human, had the same moral status as adult humans, and had an interest in continued existence. That's because embryos are usually relatively replaceable and their deaths are usually less traumatic for others than the deaths of those who are already born.
As for the harm of death, total utilitarians care about intrinsic value of outcomes, and most philosophers of death don't think of death as an intrinsic harm. This means that for a total utilitarian, if someone pops into existence, has a good fleeting moment of existence and then dies painlessly without anything else being affected, the only thing that counts is the good moment. We don't count the death as something bad, or something worse than the being never existing in the first place. It would be better if the being lived longer and had more good experiences, but it's not worth preventing an existence just to prevent a death.
Total hedonic utilitarians care about saving lives because that seems like an effective way to increase good. Stopping miscarriages does not seem like an effective way to do that.
But maybe you have other sorts of utilitarians in mind. There could be some utilitarians with certain person-affecting views, or who think of death as an intrinsic harm, who might be more worried about this. But even then it would be important for them what the moral status of embryos is and whether embryos have an interest in continued existence. I would expect them to think an interest in continued existence would require sentience at least, or a greater conscious awareness than we expect embryos to have.
Balliol tends to have a lot of philosophy graduate students, and Wadham is considered to be one of the most left-wing colleges. Looking at the list of current Oxford philosophy graduate students, I noticed there are a lot at St Anne's right now as well. But this can change depending on the year, and philosophy student obviously doesn't mean EA. I would be surprised if any college reliably had a higher number of EAs.
AlasdairGives' suggestion to consider funding options makes sense, though you should also keep in mind that the wealthiest colleges get the most applications, so if you apply to St John's, there's more of a risk they won't pick you, and then there's more randomness in the college you end up at.
I had a similar question myself. It seems like believing in a "long reflection" period requires denying that there will be a human-aligned AGI. My understanding would have been that once a human-aligned AGI is developed, there would not be much need for human reflection—and whatever human reflection did take place could be accelerated through interactions with the superintelligence, and would therefore not be "long." I would have thought, then, that most of the reflection on our values would need to have been completed before the creation of an AGI. From what I've read of The Precipice, there is no explanation for how a long reflection is compatible with the creation of a human-aligned AGI.
A lot of good ideas here!
In interested in how Demeny Voting is expected to work psychologically. I would expect just about everyone who is given a second vote (which they are told to submit on behalf of future generations) to use that second vote as a second vote for whatever their first vote was for. I imagine they would either think their first vote was for the best policy/person, in which case they could convince themselves that's best for future generations too, or they would realize their first vote is only good for the short term, but they would double vote for short-termism anyway because that's what matters to them. Either way, I wouldn't expect them to vote against their own preferences with the second vote for future generations. I wouldn't expect many people to vote in some way that they saw as directly good for themselves, and then to cast a second contradictory vote that they saw as possibly neutral or bad for themselves but good for future people.
The system could be set up so they cannot vote for the same thing twice, but then I would expect most people to not use their second vote, unless there were at least two options they happened to like. (To prevent this, it could be set up so everyone voting was required to vote twice, for two different options, but then people may be more likely to just stay home when there's not two options they like. Maybe then there could be fines for not voting, but fining people for not voting for a candidate they don't like might lead to resentment.) However, people being required to vote for more than one option could be interesting as a version of approval voting in which everyone has two totally separate votes for different candidates.
If double voting were allowed, I would expect most people to do exactly that, but framing the second vote as allegedly on behalf of future generations could at least get people thinking more about the longterm, which might change which candidate some people double vote for. Is this sort of indirect effect what you'd be going for with this?