EA - Puzzles for Everyone by Richard Y Chappell

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Puzzles for Everyone, published by Richard Y Chappell on September 10, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Some of the deepest puzzles in ethics concern how to coherently extend ordinary beneficence and decision theory to extreme cases. The notorious puzzles of population ethics, for example, ask us how to trade off quantity and quality of life, and how we should value future generations. Beckstead & Thomas discuss a paradox for tiny probabilities and enormous values, asking how we should take risk and uncertainty into account. Infinite ethics raises problems for both axiology and decision theory: it may be unclear how to rank different infinite outcomes, and it’s hard to avoid the “fanatical” result that the tiniest chance of infinite value swamps all finite considerations (unless one embraces alternative commitments that may be even more counterintuitive). Puzzles galore! But these puzzles share a strange feature, namely, that people often mistakenly believe them to be problems specifically for utilitarianism. [Image caption: "Fear not: there’s enough for everyone!"] Their error, of course, is that beneficence and decision theory are essential components of any complete moral theory. (As even Rawls acknowledged, “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.” Rossian pluralism explicitly acknowledges a prima facie duty of beneficence that must be weighed against our other—more distinctively deontological—prima facie duties, and will determine what ought to be done if those others are not applicable to the situation at hand. And obviously any account relevant to fallible human beings needs to address how we should respond to uncertainty about our empirical circumstances and future prospects.) Why, then, would anyone ever think that these puzzles were limited to utilitarianism? One hypothesis is that only utilitarianism is sufficiently clear and systematic to actually attempt an answer to these questions. Other theories too often remain silent and non-committal. Being incomplete in this way is surely not an advantage of those theories, unless there’s reason to think that a better answer will eventually be fleshed out. But what makes these questions such deep puzzles is precisely that we know that no wholly satisfying answer is possible. It’s a “pick your poison” situation. And there’s nothing clever about mocking utilitarians for endorsing a poisonous implication when it’s provably the case that every possibility remaining amongst the non-utilitarian options is similarly poisonous! When all views have costs, you cannot refute a view just by pointing to one of its costs. You need to actually gesture towards a better alternative, and do the difficult work of determining which view is the least bad. Below I’ll briefly step through some basic considerations that bring out how difficult this task can be. Population Ethics In ‘The New Moral Mathematics’ (reviewing WWOTF), Kieran Setiya sets up a false choice between total utilitarianism and “the intuition of neutrality” which denies positive value to creating happy lives. (Note that MacAskill’s longtermism is in fact much weaker than total utilitarianism.) He swiftly dismisses the total view for implying the repugnant conclusion. But he doesn’t mention any costs to neutralism, which may give some readers the misleading impression that this is a cost-free, common-sense solution. It isn’t. Far from it. Neutrality implies that utopia is (in prospect) no better than a barren, lifeless rock. It implies that the total extinction of all future value-bearers could be more than compensated for by throwing a good enough party for those who already exist. These implications strike me as far more repugnant than the repugnant conclus...