I’m not an EA and I have reservations with the total utilitarian tendencies of the movement, but I think that your argument assumes an extreme form of EA that may not characterize the mainstream position of the movement (though I wouldn’t say it’s a strawman since some significant part of the movement may endorse it).
A consistent strict total utilitarian must necessarily oppose abortion in the general case, since a strict total utilitarian endorses the “repugnant conclusion” of maximizing the number of humans in existence conditional on their lives being barely worth living, and arguably most fetuses would live lives at least barely worth living if they were being born. A strict total utilitarian might endorse abortion in some special cases, but not in general.
However, typical EAs, as far as I can tell as an outsider watching the movement from the Internet, are not strict total utilitarians. They consider morally permissible for an agent to give priority to their own selfish preferences over the wellbeing of others. That’s why EAs can consider morally permissible not to donate all of their disposable income to charity. In fact, EA organizations such as Giving What We Can and high status EA Yvain endorse donating 10% of one’s income. If you carry this kind of moral principles to the abortion case, it is easy to see that a pregnant EA woman doesn’t have to value her selfish utility loss of carrying the pregnancy to term and then giving the child to adoption equally to the utility loss of the fetus being aborted, and may therefore choose abortion consistently with her stated morality.
high status EA Yvain endorse donating 10% of one’s income.
Yvain’s EA tithing is much like a resource sliced utilitarianism, similar to the time sliced utilitarianism I’ve often seen around here. There is a natural fit between the two, sliced or not.
By time sliced utilitarianism, I mean operating as a utilitarian for some percentage of time. Well, not really, but that’s close.
In discussions about utilitarianism, some people here call it utilitarianism when for a particular choice, they choose to maximize total utility. Sometimes, they’re a utilitarian. Or so they say. That’s what I’m referring to by “time sliced utilitarian”.
If you take a chunk of your money, and say “I want to maximize total utility with this money”, that could similarly be called a resource sliced (some chunk of my assets) utilitarian, but it also seems to accurately be EA.
Sure, maybe you think it’s not morally obligatory. But EAs who think it’s good to give 10% generally think it’s better to give 20%, and similarly maybe it is permissible to abort a baby but morally better to not.
I’m not an EA and I have reservations with the total utilitarian tendencies of the movement, but I think that your argument assumes an extreme form of EA that may not characterize the mainstream position of the movement (though I wouldn’t say it’s a strawman since some significant part of the movement may endorse it).
A consistent strict total utilitarian must necessarily oppose abortion in the general case, since a strict total utilitarian endorses the “repugnant conclusion” of maximizing the number of humans in existence conditional on their lives being barely worth living, and arguably most fetuses would live lives at least barely worth living if they were being born.
A strict total utilitarian might endorse abortion in some special cases, but not in general.
However, typical EAs, as far as I can tell as an outsider watching the movement from the Internet, are not strict total utilitarians. They consider morally permissible for an agent to give priority to their own selfish preferences over the wellbeing of others.
That’s why EAs can consider morally permissible not to donate all of their disposable income to charity. In fact, EA organizations such as Giving What We Can and high status EA Yvain endorse donating 10% of one’s income.
If you carry this kind of moral principles to the abortion case, it is easy to see that a pregnant EA woman doesn’t have to value her selfish utility loss of carrying the pregnancy to term and then giving the child to adoption equally to the utility loss of the fetus being aborted, and may therefore choose abortion consistently with her stated morality.
Yvain’s EA tithing is much like a resource sliced utilitarianism, similar to the time sliced utilitarianism I’ve often seen around here. There is a natural fit between the two, sliced or not.
Can you explain these terms, please?
I made them up.
By time sliced utilitarianism, I mean operating as a utilitarian for some percentage of time. Well, not really, but that’s close.
In discussions about utilitarianism, some people here call it utilitarianism when for a particular choice, they choose to maximize total utility. Sometimes, they’re a utilitarian. Or so they say. That’s what I’m referring to by “time sliced utilitarian”.
If you take a chunk of your money, and say “I want to maximize total utility with this money”, that could similarly be called a resource sliced (some chunk of my assets) utilitarian, but it also seems to accurately be EA.
Sure, maybe you think it’s not morally obligatory. But EAs who think it’s good to give 10% generally think it’s better to give 20%, and similarly maybe it is permissible to abort a baby but morally better to not.
And they may also think that it is even better to give 100% minus living expenses, but at the end of the day most of them don’t do it.