deontologizt
Joined 9 years ago
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Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
> Utilitarianism is primarily about maximizing utility of a wide spectrum of the population as it pertains to humans and societies and has nothing to do with animals, wild or domestic except for the utility they provide humanity with.
Actually, utilitarianism is about maximizing the welfare (i.e., happiness minus suffering) of all beings that can be said to have a "welfare". This goes back to the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, who argued that any being capable of suffering deserves moral consideration. (more extensive discussion can be found in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism) More recently, the most prominent living utilitarian philosopher is Peter Singer, who has argued extensively for the moral consideration of animals. Utilitarianism in the philosophical sense is distinct from the anthropocentric economic interpretation.
Comment · 9 years ago
It's not letting me edit my comment, so I'll post this separately.
I can't help but feel that accusing me of "selective quoting" is just a tactic used to deflect a true observation. As far as I can tell, the most well-known EAs who have commented on wild animal suffering have unilaterally come out in support of Tomasik-like conclusions, e.g. CEA's CEO William MacAskill has written an article called "To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators (especially Cecil the lion)", and 80,000 Hours director Rob Wiblin has written a blog post called "Why improve nature when destroying it is so much easier?" (https://archive.fo/HbE2a). This has also been my experience in online EA communities, such as the EA Facebook group. I can think of dozens of articles written by prominent EAs supporting habitat destruction, but only one opposing it (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/14l/the_unproven_and_unprov...).
Since there's no robust evidence (eg surveys) on EA views of wild animal suffering, this is the best evidence available.
Comment · 9 years ago
Thank you for the response and I'm sorry for the tone of my earlier comment.
> As your linked article notes, there is wide disagreement on a range of thorny philosophical issues across a range of cause areas, but the scare quotes/selective quoting makes it seem like these views are unquestioningly accepted by a plurality of people in the community.
There is disagreement within the EA community on ethics. However, almost all the disagreements are between different 'denominations' within the church of consequentialism -- questions like population ethics (total vs. person-affecting vs. negative), theories of well-being (hedonistic vs. preference), and distributional justice (utilitarian vs. prioritarian). The fundamental theory of consequentialism is taken for granted by most EAs. As my linked article says, "ultimately, only people who have a good majority of utilitarians in their moral parliaments are going to be able to get on-board with EA." I think this is true to some extent. While there are non-consequentialist EAs, it's hard to deny that the culture of EA is extremely consequentialist.
Even though I like the abstract idea of effective altruism, my value disagreements make me hesitant to trust certain EA organizations. I'm personally a deontological vegan and very concerned about animals, but if I donate to ACE (see section 7 of https://medium.com/@harrisonnathan/the-actual-number-is-almo...) or the CEA Animal Welfare fund, how do I know the money won't go to something I ethically oppose (like pro-habitat destruction advocacy)?
Comment · 9 years ago
Why does CEA openly support the Foundational Research Institute even though their fringe negative utilitarian value system is dangerous?
Comment · 9 years ago
Actually, most "effective altruists" support habitat destruction because it reduces the number of animals, and therefore also the amount of suffering.
I find this very disturbing. If you want details, see my other comment on this item: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13886954
Of course, EAs won't tell you this up front, as they know it would be bad PR. (cf. https://medium.com/@jacobfunnell/a-year-in-effective-altruis...: "Some effective altruists hold views that would be strongly controversial to most people outside of EA. EA does a pretty good job of either not mentioning (or actively avoiding) these conclusions in its public-facing literature. Examples include the moral imperative to destroy habitat in order to reduce wild animal suffering, the need to divert funds away from causes like poverty relief and towards artificial intelligence safety research, or the extreme triviality of aesthetic value.")
Comment · 9 years ago
This is a great reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism. However, I find it very worrying that the so-called "effective altruism" movement takes this kind of thing seriously. Look up the EA-affiliated "Foundational Research Institute" -- it's an entire pseudo think tank whose philosophy is based on negative utilitarianism, the idea that all that matters is minimizing suffering, and we should do so by any means necessary (not excluding the extinction of all life). There are other organizations that support habitat destruction on utilitarian grounds, such as "Sentience Politics" and "Animal Ethics", but FRI is the brains of the operation, so to speak. (Animal Ethics is the propaganda wing, and Sentience Politics is trying to make it policy.) Brian Tomasik, who is cited in the OP, is the founder of FRI and has written a lot about "wild animal suffering" on his blog. His conclusions are very counter-intuitive; for example, he thinks forest fires are good because they reduce the number of suffering animals in existence. That said, his articles on the possibility of sentience in reinforcement learning algorithms are pretty interesting!
The connection is not direct. There may be more direct connections between YC and OPP, but I am not aware of any.