Personally I wonder how much of this disagreement can be attributed to prematurely settling on specifc fundamental positions or some hidden metaphysics that certain organizations have (perhaps unknowingly) committed to—such as dualism or pansychism. One of the most salient paragraphs from Scott’s article said:
Morality wasn’t supposed to be like this. Most of the effective altruists I met were nonrealist utilitarians. They don’t believe in some objective moral law imposed by an outside Power. They just think that we should pursue our own human-parochial moral values effectively. If there was ever a recipe for a safe and milquetoast ethical system, that should be it. And yet once you start thinking about what morality is – really thinking, the kind where you try to use mathematical models and formal logic – it opens up into these dark eldritch vistas of infinities and contradictions. The effective altruists started out wanting to do good. And they did: whole nine-digit-sums worth of good, spreadsheets full of lives saved and diseases cured and disasters averted. But if you really want to understand what you’re doing – get past the point where you can catch falling apples, to the point where you have a complete theory of gravitation – you end up with something as remote from normal human tenderheartedness as the conference lunches were from normal human food.
I feel like this quote has some extremely deep but subtly stated insight that is in alignment with some of the points you made. Somehow, even if we all start from the position that there is no univeral or ultimately real morality, when we apply all of our theorizing, modeling, debate, measurement, thinking, etc., this somehow leads us to making absolutist conclusions about what the “truly most important thing” is. And I wonder if this is primarily a social phenomenon: In the process of debate and organizing groups of people to accomplish things, it’s easier if we all converge to agreement about specific and easy to state questions.
A possible explanation for Scott’s observed duality between the “suits” on the one hand who just want to do the most easily-measurable good, and the “weirdos” on the other hand who want to converge to rigorous answers on the toughest of philosophical questions (and those answers tend to look pretty bizarre), and the fact that these are often the same people—my guess is this has something to do with coverging to agreement on relatively formalizable questions. Those questions often appear in two forms: The “easy to measure” kind of questions (how many people are dying from malaria, how poor is this group of people, etc.), and the “easy to model or theorize about” questions (what do we mean by suffering, what counts as a conscious being, etc.), and so you see a divergence of activity and effort spent between those two forms of questions.
“Easy” is meant in a relative sense, of course. Unfortunately, it seems that the kind of questions that interest you (and which I agree are of crucial importance) fall into the “relatively hard” category, and therefore are much more difficult to organize concerted efforts around.
Personally I wonder how much of this disagreement can be attributed to prematurely settling on specifc fundamental positions or some hidden metaphysics that certain organizations have (perhaps unknowingly) committed to—such as dualism or pansychism. One of the most salient paragraphs from Scott’s article said:
I feel like this quote has some extremely deep but subtly stated insight that is in alignment with some of the points you made. Somehow, even if we all start from the position that there is no univeral or ultimately real morality, when we apply all of our theorizing, modeling, debate, measurement, thinking, etc., this somehow leads us to making absolutist conclusions about what the “truly most important thing” is. And I wonder if this is primarily a social phenomenon: In the process of debate and organizing groups of people to accomplish things, it’s easier if we all converge to agreement about specific and easy to state questions.
A possible explanation for Scott’s observed duality between the “suits” on the one hand who just want to do the most easily-measurable good, and the “weirdos” on the other hand who want to converge to rigorous answers on the toughest of philosophical questions (and those answers tend to look pretty bizarre), and the fact that these are often the same people—my guess is this has something to do with coverging to agreement on relatively formalizable questions. Those questions often appear in two forms: The “easy to measure” kind of questions (how many people are dying from malaria, how poor is this group of people, etc.), and the “easy to model or theorize about” questions (what do we mean by suffering, what counts as a conscious being, etc.), and so you see a divergence of activity and effort spent between those two forms of questions.
“Easy” is meant in a relative sense, of course. Unfortunately, it seems that the kind of questions that interest you (and which I agree are of crucial importance) fall into the “relatively hard” category, and therefore are much more difficult to organize concerted efforts around.