Much viral mockery focused on (i) Dylan Matthews’ Vox post on how the cost of repairing Notre Dame could instead have saved 47,500 lives; (ii) Bentham’s Bulldog’s post on the aggregate importance of insect welfare or (iii) an AI-generated parody of longtermism.

The first prompted philosopher Jennifer Frey to describe scale-sensitive beneficence (which she mischaracterized as “consequentialism”) as “rot”. The last inspired Brian Leiter to declare EA “an embarrassment to philosophy” (a remarkably unphilosophical attitude to take towards some of the deepest puzzles in ethics — how to coherently extend beneficence and decision theory to extreme cases — but I guess there’s no accounting for taste). Christopher Frey implied that the work of (some? all?) EA philosophers was “neither true nor good.”

I doubt any of these insults could withstand an extended critical dialogue (or even just, say, reading my paper). But they are, sad to say, par for the course when it comes to how many philosophers talk about effective altruism on social media. This seems messed up. As my paper argues, there’s room to dispute the specifics, but the core ideas or principles are about as close to indisputable as moral claims can be, while at the same time remaining extremely (almost universally!) neglected in practice.1 Or as Andy Masley recently put it:

When people first hear the basic argument for “effective” giving, that we should direct our donations wherever they save the most lives, their reaction is often “That’s so obvious, why would you even need a special name for that?” It may seem obvious, but almost no one does it, anywhere.

Many make misguided motte-and-bailey accusations at this point, and thereby miss the substantive point. More people really ought to endorse and act upon the neglected truisms of effective altruism, even if they reject our more controversial claims!

It’s worth encouraging people to attend more to reasons of scale-sensitive beneficence, and to use reason and evidence rather than just vibes or untutored intuition to determine how to target their moral efforts most effectively. If you don’t often think about moral prioritization, there’s likely low-hanging fruit available by which you could significantly increase your moral impact at minimal personal cost.2

Scott Alexander has described effective altruism as a “tower of assumptions”, where even if you knock off the top few floors, more foundational ones remain standing.

The way I think of it: there are many different streams of effective altruist thought, and no objection that targets them all simultaneously.3 So it’s a mistake to assess “EA thought” as if it were a single, monolithic thing. It’s much more modular than that. Even if you have objections to how “expected value”-loving longtermists reason about tiny probabilities, or how Rethink Priorities’ Moral Weight Project balances human and non-human welfare,4 there are almost certainly a lot of remaining insights from EA thinkers that you could and should take on board, to end up in a place that’s broadly “EA-adjacent”.

In this post, I’ll highlight a few that stand out to me:5

• We have strong moral reasons to donate to effective charities—and, more generally, to seriously try to improve the world in an efficient, goal-directed way. We should all want more people to (i) make this a personal priority (i.e., endorse beneficentrism and take the🔸10% pledge if they can afford it) and (ii) encourage others to do likewise.

• Beneficent endeavors vary so much in cost-effectiveness that it’s worth trying to distinguish top-tier options. It isn’t immediately obvious how best to improve the world, so it’s very helpful to have researchers like those at GiveWell look into these details for us.

• Many common—and apparently intuitive—evaluative heuristics (e.g. assessing charities based purely on accounting metrics like “overhead costs”; or catastrophizing trivial contributions to salient collective harms while neglecting worse but less-salient ones) are simply no good. It’s extremely helpful to have a community of inquirers reflecting critically on which heuristics actually work in pursuit of better outcomes.

• Moral status depends on what a being is like, not how appealing we personally find them. But our gut moral judgments are driven by emotion (especially sympathy), which is predictably biasing. We should all appreciate that activating our sympathy is not necessary for moral status: ugly goblins could still matter morally, even if we found them aesthetically repulsive. Children out of sight matter just as much as those who enter our field of vision (or appear in the news). Abstract benevolence is a vital corrective virtue in light of this bias.

• Most people are excessively conformist, fail to appreciate the moral significance of scale, and as a result also overlook the extremely strong reasons to care about non-human animals (especially the less cute ones) and existential risk mitigation.

• More generally, we should expect that—as has always been the case in the past—there are ongoing moral catastrophes that conventional thinking is blind to, but that careful reasoning with an eye to stakes-sensitive impartial beneficence may help us to identify early.

• Lots of people finally getting on board with AI risk previously mocked longtermists for thinking ahead “indulging in sci-fi fantasies”. Examples like this (and Peter Singer’s pioneering work on the moral status of animals, or the early utilitarians for that matter) provide some inductive evidence about the value of the “EA toolkit” for getting ahead of the curve on identifying the most important yet neglected causes. (Doesn’t mean we have the solutions, of course, which is why it would’ve been nice to have more people willing to think seriously about these issues earlier.)

• Assessing major policy issues with an eye to stakes-sensitive impartial beneficence (or cost-benefit analysis) is like a superpower for improving policy analysis, relative to unprincipled vibes that are driven largely by social desirability bias. (See also: theory-driven applied ethics.)

• EA forces us to acknowledge the reality of tradeoffs, which is a crucial first step for better navigating them. Estimated quantitative comparisons can be especially helpful, though of course one needs to take care with how these are used. (Again, none of this guarantees we get the answer right. But the question of what to prioritize is the right question to ask, and too often neglected or even denigrated by others.)

Moderating radical conclusions

A good general habit of thought, when you come across a moral thesis that just seems “too extreme” for you to accept, is to ask whether your moral perspective could be improved by taking on board a moderated version of the claim.

This is how we get moderate beneficentrism and the🔸10% pledge as a response to Peter Singer’s radical demands in ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’. As many philosophy professors have surely experienced, it can be a frustrating article to teach, because so many students respond as though saying “it’s a bit extreme” establishes that there’s nothing to learn from the argument. But it can challenge us to revise our views—and behavior—even if we don’t go all the way to Singer’s conclusion.

Alas, many people seem determined to not learn anything if they can possibly help it. They treat arguments as threats or enemies to be dismissed. Many of the Twitter responses to BB’s insects post seemed worried that EAs would be willing to wipe out humanity for the sake of bugs. That would be worrisome! Obviously we shouldn’t do that. But as I wrote in The Train to Crazy Town, we can implement a mix of guardrails and “worldview diversification” strategies (like splitting resources between different “sub-agents” representing different worldviews) that together mitigate the downside risk of speculative reasoning while still securing massive potential upside (for protecting against neglected moral catastrophes) compared to conventional thinking.

In short: the practical lesson of speculative reasoning about insects is not that we should fanatically wipe ourselves out for their sake, but that given the sheer scale of what’s at stake, we should surely dedicate marginally more resources to research insect sentience (e.g. whether they experience pain, and how tractable it would be to reduce any pain they might feel) rather than entirely neglecting their (possible) interests.

People similarly love to dismiss longtermism by focusing on its most radical forms, while neglecting the practical significance of more moderate versions. As I wrote in my review of What We Owe the Future:

Because it’s targeted at a general audience, the book doesn’t probe at edge cases or test longtermist principles in extremis in the way that academic philosophers might prefer. So, don’t expect discussion of whether it would (in principle) be worth torturing everyone alive today in order to reduce extinction risk this century by some tiny fraction of a percentage point. (If you’re after this sort of pure philosophy, see ‘The Case for Strong Longtermism’, Bostrom’s ‘Astronomical Waste’, or Beckstead & Thomas’s ‘A paradox for tiny probabilities and enormous values’.) Instead, this book sensibly focuses on the urgent yet undeniable point that we really ought to take greater care not to wipe ourselves out (or otherwise neglectfully slip into a bad long-term trajectory).

Like many of the most important claims in practical ethics, this shouldn’t be controversial, once it’s drawn to our attention. But it does involve a major change in mindset. So the real value of the book, as I see it, is to bring this basic moral insight to our attention, and guide us in applying this lens to see things in a new light.

It’s very common for critics to hallucinate that the purpose of longtermism is to justify violating moral constraints. This is dopey, for reasons I’ve explained in posts like Stakes Can Be High and Astronomical Cake. (In short: justified constraints represent our most reliable procedures for maintaining social cooperation and promoting the good over the long run. Otherwise, moderate deontologists couldn’t explain why, e.g., political assassination is a bad idea: the stakes are surely high enough to exceed any moderate deontic threshold.)

The real practical significance of longtermism is simply to raise the priority of preserving and advancing human civilization relative to other worthy ends like reducing animal suffering. There are lots of worthy moral goals floating around, but existential risk mitigation may be the most neglected in comparison to its objective importance. (And remember, you can endorse this practical conclusion even from a position of broad agnosticism about the precise risks. It’s bizarre how many people get hung up on arguing against the “doomer” position that extinction risk this century is over 50%. The important practical question is simply whether the risk is negligible or non-negligible. If the latter—and tractable interventions can be found that are unlikely to backfire—then we obviously ought to be doing more about it!)

What are you assessing, and why?

There are many different questions one could ask about effective altruism. The one I’m most concerned with is:

First-personal guidance: Can I learn anything from these ideas that will help me to make morally better decisions and/or do more good in the world?

For almost everyone (who hasn’t already thought for thousands of hours about beneficence and effectiveness), the answer is surely “yes”. This post alone is full of neglected ideas that most people would benefit from taking on board to a greater extent, and I’m just listing these off the top of my head: it’s far from an exhaustive survey of what one might learn from the broader EA community.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a critic ask this question. But what question could be more important for you to ask than what is the lowest-hanging fruit available for me to make better decisions? Perhaps the best question you could ask about any moral framework is how it could help in this way. But many people seem more interested in some form of:

Group evaluation: Do I find EAs as a group likeable and sympathetic? Do they seem like weirdos? Would it be socially embarrassing to affiliate with them? Can I score status points with my in-group by attacking them?

I find these questions much less interesting, so I’ll just reiterate the familiar point that it doesn’t matter whether you identify as an EA. What matters is whether (some of) the ideas and principles are helpful. Perhaps a better question in this vicinity is:

Political evaluation: Will EA ideas tend to make others act better or worse? Should we trust EAs with power?

I don’t think you should blindly trust anyone with power. I’m a fan of liberal rights for this reason. Checks and balances are important. EA is a big tent, and I have significant disagreements with some corners of it.6

I also think we should be worried about Machiavellian sorts who follow a naive instrumentalist decision procedure. (SBF’s fraud was clearly very bad, and plausibly falls under this umbrella. Other EAs have been very vocal about opposing such norm-breaking or illegal behavior.) Many people confuse naive instrumentalism with consequentialism, and then further confuse consequentialism with effective altruism, and so this double confusion may make them misperceive effective altruism as encouraging bad acts. Again, it’s always worth thinking clearly and identifying where the real problem lies. We can then target it more effectively (e.g. with strong social norms against naive instrumentalist reasoning), and with less unnecessary collateral damage.

Conclusion

Impartial beneficence and cost-effectiveness are both gravely underappreciated. On current margins, everyone should want to see more rather than less of these good things. (This could be expected to save a lot of lives, and generally do immense good.) So it’s worth advocating for rather than against them. You don’t have to like effective altruists, or accept their most speculative conclusions. But you almost certainly should think more about prioritization, rely less on gut feelings when drawing moral conclusions, and care about doing more rather than less good. Remember that the numbers we talk about bottom out in real people (or other moral patients), and their lives or well-being can depend on our choices.

The funny thing is that once Effective Altruists started pursuing this strategy more prominently—investing more in speculative “longtermist” projects like AI safety and fancy conference venues from which they might better influence policymakers—they were met with a chorus of critics lamenting their betrayal of “old-school EA values” (personal asceticism and a strong focus on reliably helping the global poor) in favor of more speculative strategies.

It’s worth noting that these two popular objections are in tension. If you’re unwilling to countenance uncertainty or “speculation” (perhaps because you discount ungrounded expected value estimates as too easily biased by personal interests) then you’re committed to embracing some form of measurability bias: prioritizing rigor over reach. Conversely, if you’re optimistic about the prospects of pursuing contestable “systemic change” to radically improve the world, you can hardly rule out a priori that influencing the trajectory of what is plausibly the most transformative technology ever invented would be a reasonable way to implement that strategy! It’s obviously highly uncertain, but that’s the tradeoff one accepts when pursuing higher potential impact: prioritizing reach over rigor.

Of course, one could always try to argue on the merits that standard EA views on both global poverty and AI safety are empirically mistaken. That’s fine. All I’m saying here is that one had better not endorse higher-level heuristics, applied prior to any engagement with the specific details, that rule out both rigorously-supported global health charities (simply for being insufficiently ambitious) and speculative longtermist longshots (simply for being insufficiently rigorous). After all, if you prioritize rigor, the prima facie case for global health charities is going to be hard to beat. And if you prioritize reach (potential impact), nobody else is even in the same ballpark as the longtermists. Many worry about the potential for bias in longtermists’ judgments, but does anyone seriously expect radical politics to be less subject to bias?

I think it will be difficult to articulate a principled case for thinking that one’s preferred politics is a better bet in expectation for improving the world than both the neartermist and longtermist wings of Effective Altruism. The odds of your individual political actions (voting, protesting, etc.) making a significant difference are comparable to those from contributing to longtermist projects,2 but the potential benefits are vastly lower, and the odds of misjudgment and proving counterproductive strike me as higher, if anything. (The risks will depend on the precise details of your preferred politics; the more radical your proposed economic overhauls, the more I worry about them proving counterproductive if successfully implemented.)

The upshot: I’d like to see more of the rigor-seeking anti-longtermists taking the side of the neartermist EAs against their speculative socialist critics. And I’d like to see fans of ambitious “systemic change” acknowledge that the longtermist branch of EA is following the right methodology in principle; the disagreement is just about which systemic changes are most promising. It’s worth figuring out where you stand, in principle, on the question of how to navigate rigor-reach tradeoffs: Pick your poison!

Watch in full screen HD to catch more of the small details. And maybe read Shuffling Around Expected Value first (if you haven’t already), to help make the argument clearer.

While I find philosophy songs fun to play around with, there seems a lot of potential here to make drier, more explicitly educational animated lectures. If you’re tempted to try it yourself, start here or just give Claude Code some art samples in a style you like and an idea you’d like them to illustrate. Feel free to share your results (or favorites from others) in the comments.

Living in a Strange World explores the practical implications of three descriptive hypotheses that we have surprisingly strong reason to believe: (1) Many everyday actions radically change the entire course of the future, by changing who will later exist. (2) In the vicinity of every person there exists a vast number of sentient sub-people, like the being consisting of all of me minus one particular hair. (3) The universe is spatially infinite, and contains infinitely many qualitative duplicates of any state of affairs that had a non-zero chance of being realized in our visible universe. In each case, Hare first motivates the descriptive claim, then explains its potentially radical practical implications, and finally argues that we can block some but not all of those putative implications. Crucially, Hare eschews the “base accommodation” of a mere Moorean shift: “If there are good independent reasons to believe the metaphysics, and there are good, independent reasons to believe that the metaphysics demands of us that we reform, then we must reform” (20). Clearly written, carefully argued, and readable within a couple of afternoons (while rewarding closer study), the book offers a rollercoaster ride of mind-bending analytic philosophy at its finest.

I found the first and third parts especially enjoyable, since the underlying descriptive claims are both credible and definitely concern the real world. The second is more debatable. It hinges on the ‘special composition question’ (SCQ): “Which plural collections… of material things are such that their members make up a material thing?” (109). As Hare charmingly relates, non-philosophers uniformly dismiss this as a bad question. I suspect they’re right to do so, as the competing answers offered by ontologists don’t correspond to any clear difference in reality. If there’s a sense in which we can say there exists a multitude of overlapping individuals sharing my thoughts and experiences, that may say more about our conceptual schemes than about the world itself.

If you don’t share my deflationary metaontology, you may find Part 2 more gripping. And even for deflationists, there is a puzzle about how we can most coherently talk about individual existents without getting ourselves into practical difficulties. (Hare flags that larger people, with more atoms to subtract, will contain vastly more sub-people. If all sentient individuals count equally and independently, then the largest sentient being and its “subbers” collectively form a utility monster.)

Hare’s own solution might be considered a form of stealth deflationism. He argues that what is bad about someone’s suffering is “what makes your fully imagining being [them] in the phenomenal centered way an accurate representation of some aspect of reality” (165). He also argues that to fully imagine being a person just is to thereby imagine being each corresponding sub-person. That’s how he gets the conclusion that what’s bad about any sub-person’s suffering is nothing over and above what’s bad about the person suffering—there’s no further, independent harm or bad to count here. But that seems to be because there’s no independent aspect of reality. When we talk about a sentient sub-person, the sentience in question just is that of the person. But then it’s unclear what the sub-person’s “existence” really amounts to. There’s a person, with some atoms as parts that we can imagine subtracting. But it seems unnecessarily confusing to characterize the result as a sentient individual in their own right.

Granted, the claim that it’s “unnecessary” can’t be fully vindicated without an alternative conceptual framework that’s less apt to confuse. Consider how different the problem looks from the vantage of an explicitly mind-first view like Berkeleyan idealism. There’s no temptation to attribute each being’s mind to any particular collection of atoms. Our bodies are our physical avatars for interfacing with the world, but ontological fussiness about their precise boundaries would seem beside the point. Any suggestion that each sub-body (containing enough of our brains, perhaps) possesses our consciousness gets things backwards. Now relax the assumption of idealism, while holding on to the idea that we (as mental creatures) possess our bodies rather than vice versa. A view along these lines, fully fleshed out, may dissolve the problem.

On Hare’s revisionary view, we literally contain multitudes. The question, “Which individual am I?” falsely presupposes that only one individual is thinking that thought. Once we disambiguate the indexical, we can truly think “I_person am a person,” along with any number of other, equally true, self-attributions of sub-personhood (154). But I think it makes more sense to think of oneself as a basically mental being—a bundle of co-conscious experiences, perhaps—that is merely derivatively associated with a body. Co-conscious experiences don’t seem to be merely optional parts in the way of a stray hair or atom. Our mental boundaries may be more secure than our physical ones.

Let’s turn to the more substantial challenges from the first and third parts of the book. Both may motivate a kind of practical axiological nihilism: a sense that nothing we do will make things “better or worse, on aggregate, for strangers” (67, cf. 189). The fragility of future identities (Part 1) threatens this result if we combine it with the parity view that most lives are “on a par” rather than precisely comparable in welfare value. Since any significant action can be expected to radically change who subsequently comes to exist, widespread parity between possible lives would imply that almost nothing we do could be expected to make the future overall better or worse. (Perhaps existential risk mitigation would be an exception? Having no future lives would surely be worse.) Part 3 suggests that the universe may contain infinitely many lives, in which case it’s obscure how to compare the overall value of different possible outcomes. It seems there will be infinite value (and infinite disvalue) no matter what we do.

Hare’s solution, in both cases, appeals to the surprisingly helpful principle that Reasons are Contrastive: “A consideration is a reason to do X rather than Y, only if it is something that can be said for doing X, but not for doing Y” (69, 191).

We have some reason to help any identifiable individual. The fact that helping would neither increase nor decrease aggregate welfare is not a reason against helping; it is, Hare notes, “not suitably contrastive” (193). Nor does it undermine our reason to help an identified individual, assuming (as seems right) that we ought to care about individuals and not just “how often the qualities associated with [their] thriving are instantiated in the universe” (195). So that’s something.

It’s still a bit unsettling, though. If Hare is right, our reasons of beneficence may be significantly weaker than I’ve always taken them to be. (I care about individuals, but I also care a lot about making things go overall better; I’d feel much less motivated to give to charity if I knew it would fail at the latter goal.)

Hare concludes that “if the world is spatially infinite and suitably homogeneous, then when we are in the business of helping people, we have most reason to help the people we know” (211). Why is this? Curiously, it stems from a kind of impartiality principle that Hare calls Morality Is Not First and Foremost About Relations to Me. Individuals you know can appear in “non-self-involving considerations” that pick them out directly by name. We ordinarily assume that there are non-self-involving considerations about how our actions affect strangers, like “More strangers will live on if I do this, fewer strangers will live on if I do that” (210). But in an infinite and suitably homogeneous world, an infinite number of strangers will live on no matter what we do. The best we can do is appeal to self-involving considerations like “I will save a stranger by doing this,” or “More strangers will live on my planet if I do this.” Such considerations may carry some weight—but less, Hare suggests, than the weight we should give to a non-self-involving consideration like “Jasmine will live on if I do this.”

Why can’t we appeal to the fact that more strangers will live on Earth if I do this? Hare replies that it turns on “whether moral reasoning should be exclusively focused on people” (214). It may seem objectionably arbitrary to be especially concerned about the events on a particular planetary surface as such. (It may be more comprehensible to be especially concerned for those who share a planet with you, but that’s self-involving.)

I wonder if we could instead bracket the unaffected universe, and welcome aggregate improvements among those affected by our choices? The individuals whose well-being hinges on my choices presumably form a finite population, since the infinite spaces lie beyond my causal reach. Suppose that this finite population fares better in aggregate if I act. That’s not about me, it’s about affected people, wherever they may be. A move along these lines might rescue the idea that we have non-self-involving reasons to help strangers, even in an infinite universe. Making things better in aggregate for everyone with a stake in my choice, and no worse for anyone else, would seem to capture what I originally cared about when I hoped to make things better overall. The mere existence of (even infinitely many) other galaxies unaffected by my actions shouldn’t undermine my reasons to help those I can.

Let’s return to Part 1’s challenge from parity. On Hare’s view, we can’t expect to bring about a better (or worse) future, even just considering the finite future population of our planet. The different lives that would exist in either case are too different; the resulting populations are on a par. As a result, Hare thinks, “we know that it is never the case that, in the objective sense of ‘ought’, we ought to give to strangers” (80). But so long as we don’t know too much about the competing candidate lives, we may yet have contrastive subjective reasons to help strangers.

I find it hard to believe that it’s never the case that we objectively ought to help strangers, as I find it hard to believe that this never makes things better in aggregate. For example, I expect that, thanks to the eradication of smallpox, the individuals who exist now are better off than the different individuals who would otherwise have existed in our place. If someone invents a cure for cancer, I would similarly expect the next generation of people to have better lives (on net) than those that would otherwise exist. So Hare’s parity claim seems wrong to me. It may be difficult to make precise welfare comparisons with any confidence, but I don’t see much reason to infer from this epistemic difficulty that there typically is no fact of the matter about which of two lives is in fact better for the person living it.

If I’m right that the barrier to comparing lives is merely epistemic, then subjective betterness is also a (fallible, but reasonable) guide to objective betterness. If all you know about two possible lives is that one would live a year longer than the other, then that is some reason to expect (with probability slightly greater than 0.5) that the longer life is also the objectively preferable life. Similarly, we have some reason to expect (with probability just barely greater than 0.5) that saving someone’s life will result in an objectively preferable outcome for people on the whole.

So I remain optimistic about objective oughts. Massive invisible effects don’t affect the case for beneficence, to my mind, since we’ve no reason to expect the unforeseeable consequences of helping to skew negative. Hare worries about a normative asymmetry, however. He thinks the near-50% chance that we “end up an unwitting villain”—in the sense that our best efforts prove counterproductive in the long run—is “a further strike against making serious efforts to give to strangers” (61).

I think the heightened normative stakes here are symmetrical. It’s certainly unsettling to dwell on the risk that our best efforts prove counterproductive. But as far as others’ interests are concerned, that risk is balanced by the likelihood that our efforts prove even better than expected. From behind a veil of ignorance, but otherwise knowing just what we do about the likely effects of our actions, any reasonable person would want the helpful action to be performed. So it would seem objectionably self-indulgent to refrain merely due to unwillingness to risk oneself proving an “unwitting villain.” That narrative property is not morally significant in comparison to the effects on others, and we’ve seen that the risks to others are decisively outweighed by the expected benefits. So helping others remains worthwhile in expectation.

Consider also that treating inaction as morally “safe” by default makes most sense against a background of general safety and abundance, in which unexpected downsides of high-variance actions can be expected to straightforwardly outweigh unexpected upsides. That is not the situation we are considering here—where the status quo includes far too many global deaths from cheaply preventable illnesses—so we should be wary of misapplying a heuristic that is meant for a different context. However worried you are about being an “unwitting villain,” you should worry even more about being a “passive villain” who easily could have prevented very bad things from happening, but didn’t even try.

Still, if one remains unconvinced by my normative claims, Hare offers another response (besides parity) for mitigating the risk of unwitting villainy. Given counterfactual indeterminacy, there is no unique alternative to pick out as the way things would have gone if you’d done otherwise. Any number of possible worlds (varying radically in long-run value) may count as equally close. So if things turn out unexpectedly badly, there’s no guarantee—only a likelihood—that it would have been better to do nothing. That is, Hare suggests, “not so unwittingly villainous” (63).

Let me conclude with my favorite argument from the book. According to The Great Yes (95), we all ought to be (something like) grateful for every actual event that occurs. Given chaos, every actual individual owes their existence—and all the good it contains—to almost every event that occurred prior to their conception. Assuming that most lives are worth living, the beneficiaries of any event thus vastly outnumber and outweigh the victims. Of course, we should still hope for better events rather than worse ones beforehand, and help victims of injustice when we can. But once the facts are settled, we could not reasonably prefer an alternative that would deprive every actual future person of their entire lives. The Great Yes and Reasons are Contrastive are my two main takeaways from the book.

The ethical implications of revisionary metaphysics form a comparatively neglected topic, but also, as Hare demonstrates, a delightfully interesting and philosophically fruitful one. I rarely come across a book as thought-provoking as Living in a Strange World. I highly recommend it, and wish there were more like it—unless that would rob future people of their existence, of course.

If someone is being both (i) well-intentioned, and (ii) reasonable, then they don’t warrant hostility. To justify hostility, you need to demonstrate ill will and/or unreasonableness on the part of your target. Mere first-order policy disagreement is not enough.

Most online hostility that I observe seems to violate this constraint. People are often hostile to others even when they have no apparent grounds to regard their target as unreasonable or ill-willed. (Do-gooder derogation is perhaps the clearest example of this.) I’m often unsure whether the haters reject the above constraint, or (blinkered by motivated reasoning) don’t realize that they’re violating it. But either way, it seems bad and worth discouraging.

You might be tempted by a view on which we should be hostile to anyone causing (net) objective harm, even if they reasonably regard themselves as helping rather than harming. But there’s a reason why blameworthiness norms track the target’s epistemic situation rather than objective consequences: an agent can only ever be guided by the former, so any attempt to inculcate reliable virtue via social incentives to conform to inaccessible facts is a non-starter. Even if you successfully incentivize more people to conform to your position on a specific issue (without achieving general virtue), using unwarranted social aggression to achieve your goals seems like a deplorable instance of naive instrumentalism. Mistreating people when they don’t actually deserve it is paradigmatically unjust, not something to routinely recommend to fallible humans.

Alternatively, you may just be very confident that the people you dislike must be unreasonable and/or ill-willed. But we know such assumptions are often biased and unreliable. Since people usually believe themselves to be reasonable and well-intentioned, it’s worth taking a moment to check why they might believe that (and assess whether it could be true) before assuming that they’re not. I think that’s the key step that’s too often missing.

(Note: you can be as harsh as you like in your honest assessment of propositions—views, policies, etc.—the chance of making progress on substantive discourse is worth the risk of being wrong. Here I’m rather talking about unreasonably criticizing people.)

As a general rule, we should extend to others the sort of interpretive charity we’d want them to apply to us: don’t assume the worst when there’s a perfectly innocuous alternative explanation available; that sort of thing. Too often, online discourse seems to lack any attempt to check for charitable interpretations. I think discourse would be a lot better if there were more social pressure to abide by this basic norm of charity.

At a minimum, when criticizing others, we should be especially open to correction and be willing to retract our criticism (or at least publicly acknowledge the reasons why it may not be warranted after all) if presented with a reasonable defense. This strikes me as a foundational component of intellectual integrity, yet it’s very rare to see anyone live up to it. To be clear: I very much want to live up to this norm myself, so please let me know—via comments, DMs, or whatever—if you ever think I’m failing to do so. I only want to think badly (let alone speak badly) of people when it’s really warranted!2

Recent Examples

I may fail to notice lots of warranted criticism, so I don’t really know whether most online hostility is unwarranted. But I sure do come across a lot of unreasonable-seeming hostility even just from philosophers on social media. (It’s easiest to notice, of course, when they’re targeting groups to which I either belong or am sympathetic.) A handful of (fairly minor) recent examples off the top of my head:

1. A pseudonymous commenter on Daily Nous called Effective Altruists “philosophically dogmatic”, and upon follow-up it emerged that they had no basis for this charge other than that they happened to be personally dubious of utilitarianism. (They appeared unaware both that EA does not in fact depend on utilitarianism’s most controversial features and that someone could reasonably dispute the objections to utilitarianism without thereby being “dogmatic”.)

2. A couple of days later, I saw another philosopher publicly complain about the time an EA organization funded a red-teaming contest to surface new criticisms of EA assumptions and ideas. Apparently this was “self-important” behavior. Suitably humble people, you see, do not encourage public testing of their ideas—especially not before making high-stakes cause prioritization decisions in grant-making.

3. After highlighting existential risks from AI, a philosopher in a public FB post concluded: “Why, then, do thoughtful philosophers go out of their way to find ‘use cases’ for AI? It strikes me as quite narcissistic.” I left a brief comment explaining why I think it’s helpful to find helpful uses for things while also supporting regulations to mitigate the risk from bad uses. I don’t think that distinguishing good from bad uses constitutes narcissism, but I got no reply, so don’t know whether the original poster has revised his opinion.

4. A philosopher on X conflated a lab employee’s believing that the AI industry has a 10% chance of killing everyone with believing that one’s own alignment work has a 10% chance of killing everyone, and on this basis called the lab employee “reckless, selfish, incredibly arrogant” and “ok to hate”—all because they are trying to reduce AI risk from within the industry.

In each case, it’s not difficult to discern that the critic has fallen far short of justifying their insults or establishing their target to be blameworthy. Professional philosophers, of all people, ought to be better at reasoning than this. So I take that to indicate insufficient concern for whether their hostility is actually warranted.

Of course, “Internet denizen angry, reasons poorly” is not exactly a newsworthy headline. I don’t think any of the above examples are particularly unusual or involve worse behavior than the typical internet user indulges in.3 Transparently bad reasoning is, alas, commonplace. But I do find it especially disappointing to see philosophers indulging in it, and would like to encourage better norms if possible. If anyone has ideas for how to achieve that goal (besides simply highlighting its desirability as this post does), I’m all ears.

1. Either: (a) God has reasons for what he commands, or (b) he does not.

2. If (a), then God’s reasons (not God’s commands, per DCT) determine what is morally required.

3. If (b), then God’s commands (and thus the moral facts) are arbitrary.

Therefore,

4. Either morality is independent of God’s will (i.e., DCT is false), or the facts of morality are arbitrary.

He then responds:

The force of the dilemma depends on a crucial assumption — namely, that if God has reasons for commanding what he does, then those reasons must be external to God… On classical theism, God necessarily exists with a perfectly good nature, and his commands will flow from that nature… This response preserves DCT while avoiding the arbitrariness concern.

I’ve always found this response puzzling. For one thing, I don’t see that any of premises 1 - 3 depend on the claimed “crucial assumption”. So it’s unclear how appeal to God’s nature actually engages with the Euthyphro dilemma as stated.

Since J.P. grants that God has reasons, I guess he must intend to undermine premise 2? But even if God’s commands “flow from [his perfectly good] nature”, it still seems true that a moral requirement to do X is better explained by the reasons why a good God would command X than by the mere command itself. (Notably, the explanatory hypothetical does not require a good God to actually exist. If you agree there are objective facts about what a good God would prefer or command, that would seem to suffice to establish objective morality.)

Many theists want to claim that God grounds morality, such that there could be no morality without God. If they appeal to God’s nature rather than his commands to do the grounding work, the Euthyphro dilemma can be reapplied to this new target: Either God’s nature matches a standard of goodness that we can grasp independently of any commitment to theism, or God’s essential nature, whatever that turns out to be, provides the substantive content of “goodness”. But the latter renders the attribution vacuous: for all we know a priori, God’s nature / moral perfection might consist in delighting in suffering. (Compare: the standard meter stick could be any length whatsoever, and we’d call that length ‘one meter’ as a result. A priori, attributing a length of one meter to the stick shares no information beyond that it is as long as itself. There’s no epistemic substance to the attribution: it rules out no conceivable scenarios.) If calling God good is supposed to mean something more than calling him self-identical, we need an independent normative property to attribute to him.1

Even if you take two terms to co-refer, if they differ in cognitive significance (like Clark Kent and Superman) there must be distinct properties (like being a reporter and being a superhero) associated with each term to explain the cognitive difference.

The problem is that metaethical reductionists—whether naturalists or supernaturalists—don’t appear to have any eligible properties available to explain the cognitive significance of moral attributions. No non-normative property could provide the cognitive significance of “good” without prematurely closing and trivializing what should be open, substantive questions. That’s the substantive question argument in a nutshell,2 and it seems just as devastating to theistic as to naturalist metaethical reductionism.

So I think theists would do best to embrace the view that moral truths, like other philosophical truths, are what they are independently of God’s will or nature. That way, when you say that God is necessarily good, your claim actually means something.

Skeptical Burdens

Open-minded people may be tempted by a discourse norm on which we should treat our interlocutors as epistemic equals in a sense that requires us to refrain from holding to conclusions that we cannot prove to their satisfaction. A striking thing about philosophy is that you soon learn that this discourse norm would prevent you from having almost any beliefs at all. A “radical skeptic” who doubts the existence of the external world, or the past, or the principle that the past is some guide to the future, cannot be logically compelled to abandon his skepticism. So we’d best not pin our hopes on such an impossible ambition. We must settle for merely establishing to our own satisfaction that we can reasonably maintain our beliefs in the face of the skeptic’s contrary arguments. The question is not whether we can persuade him, but whether we are persuaded by him to change (i.e., lose) our minds.

Most philosophers are, of course, not convinced by radical skepticism, for various reasons. (I’ve elsewhere summarized some of the considerations I find most stabilizing. In short, I think it can be worth epistemically wagering on our best chance of being right, even in the face of immense uncertainty. In slogan form: use your best judgment, don’t suspend it!) Cluelessness may have more defenders. But a similar methodological principle holds: In this post I’ll be explaining why I’m not convinced, rather than trying to prove that the proponent of cluelessness must agree with me. (They needn’t.)

Epistemic Difficulty vs Cluelessness

I first want to grant something in the vicinity of cluelessness concerns, by way of an important distinction. The thing I grant: it can be extremely difficult to discern what would be best. Absolutely. We face immense epistemic challenges, and it’s often extremely non-obvious how to resolve them.

If one demands that a solution to cluelessness must show how it’s easy to tell what to do, or perhaps must actually provide the correct answer to whatever difficult tradeoffs you’re struggling with, the most reasonable response will often be, “Sorry I can’t help you with that; I’m not sure either.” I’m often “clueless” in the colloquial sense that I am deeply uncertain about the answer to a difficult empirical question, and not in a position to tell anyone else what they should conclude about it. But I typically don’t doubt that others could reasonably conclude one way or the other, depending on the details of their epistemic position.

So what I typically experience is just ordinary epistemic difficulty, not philosophical cluelessness. In the former case, I haven’t reached a conclusion, and can’t even predict where further investigation would lead me — but I’m open to future clarification. Philosophical cluelessness, by contrast, commits one to the much stronger claim that nobody can (realistically) form any reasonable judgments or expectations about this question, no matter how carefully they investigate it. That’s an extremely strong skeptical claim!

I think it’s really important to bear this distinction in mind. It’s easy to come up with examples that motivate epistemic difficulty: the world is full of difficult questions. But I think it’s wildly premature to close the door on further inquiry by taking full-blown cluelessness as a conclusion settled in advance. We should (ironically) be more uncertain and epistemically humble than that.

DiGiovanni’s Argument

I’ve responded to Lenman’s original cluelessness argument over at utilitarianism.net. Anthony DiGiovanni offers an arguably tighter variant on the EA Forum:

• Let’s say that we c-prefer A over B if the reason we prefer A is an impartial altruistic comparison of the actions’ possible consequences.

• P1. Normative premise: To justify c-preferring A over B, it’s not enough to say (e.g.) that A seems heuristically good. Rather, we need to argue that A has higher “expected value” broadly speaking, meaning: In some sense we “expect” that, if we were idealized agents who could aggregate all of A’s and B’s possible consequences into literal EVs, then we’d say A has higher EV. (We ourselves don’t need literal EVs to justify c-preferences, hence the scare quotes.) Otherwise, it’s unacceptably arbitrary to c-prefer A.

• P2. Conceptual premise: If our understanding of A’s and B’s possible consequences is sufficiently coarse-grained, then we don’t have an argument for “expecting” our idealized self’s EV for A to be higher, lower, or equal to B’s. So A’s and B’s “EVs” are incomparable. In particular:

  • a. Against precise EVs: We shouldn’t represent actions’ degrees of c-preferability with literal precise expected values.

  • b. Against “best guesses”: Even if we don’t use literal precise EVs, we shouldn’t always force ourselves to compare A’s and B’s “EVs”.

• P3. Empirical premise: Due to unawareness (at least), our understanding of any pair of actions’ possible consequences is indeed very coarse-grained — enough that the conclusion of (P2) follows (i.e., these actions’ “EVs” are incomparable). In particular, the actions’ “EVs” are too severely imprecise to compare them, regardless of whether we (a) formally model these “EVs” or (b) appeal to informal/heuristic arguments.

• Conclusion: We aren’t justified in c-preferring any action over any other.

It’s a neat argument! But as with Lenman’s, it’s far from clear to me that we should have much confidence in any of the premises, let alone all of them. In the remainder of this post, I want to focus on two pressure points: numerical precision and prospective reasons. But my highest-level claim is that (as with arguments for radical skepticism) we should have less confidence in the conjunction of the premises than in the falsity of the conclusion. (We can, for example, reasonably expect that starting a nuclear war would be impartially dispreferable in prospect. You’ve gone badly awry if you lose sight of this.)

Numerical Precision

DiGiovanni’s case for imprecise credences rests heavily on the intuition that it would be objectionably arbitrary to settle on any precise number given the breadth of our uncertainty in the face of conflicting considerations. I get the intuition: from the inside, I’m not sure how I would go about determining a precise credence in non-arbitrary fashion. But I think this confuses a procedural question (by what process should we settle on a credence?) with the substantive epistemic question of what credence is in fact most warranted. The latter question might have a precise answer even if we can’t easily articulate a general high-level process that will reliably yield this correct answer. (This general phenomenon is familiar from philosophy more generally. There is no general philosophical method that reliably yields true answers. If that suffices for you to rule out belief, then you’re back in radical skeptical territory.)

So I’m inclined to think P2 is false (and certainly reasonably rejectable): in many cases we can reasonably—albeit tentatively—expect “our idealized self’s EV for A to be higher, lower, or equal to B’s,” rather than committing ourselves to incomparability, even when our current grasp of their consequences is quite coarse-grained and incomplete.

Prospective Reasons

Alternatively, if you posit incommensurable values then you should probably reject P1. As Caspar Hare argues in ‘Take the Sugar’ (and his recent book Living in a Strange World), (i) one option can be better in prospect than another, even when you know that, given more information, you would (correctly) regard the two outcomes as incommensurable or on a par; and (ii) in such cases, it’s rational to pick the better prospect rather than deferring to the idealized perspective.

One way Hare argues for this conclusion in LiSW is by appeal to the idea that reasons are contrastive: “A consideration is a reason to do X rather than Y, only if it is something that can be said for doing X, but not for doing Y.” (p. 69)

Cluelessness is not a reason to do one thing rather than another. Nor does it cancel or undermine the force of the knowable reasons we have, e.g., to save a particular person’s life. (It may be reason to believe that if we knew more, our reasons to save this one life would be swamped by other reasons. But outweighing is not undermining: the original reason still retains its original force. And again, since we’ve no grounds for expecting the balance of unknown reasons to count against rather than for our currently-preferred action, the fact of cluelessness is normatively inert: it makes no difference to our reasons for action.)

In the absence of competing reasons, impartial concern (regarding the consequences for individuals) should lead us to prefer to save someone’s life rather than have them die prematurely. This remains true even if we have no expectation that a more-informed agent would necessarily concur. (We’d better not expect them to have the reverse preference, of course, but we may expect them to be overwhelmed by incommensurability without being so overwhelmed ourselves.)

Or, as I previously wrote in response to Lenman:

Lenman distinguishes the “visible” (epistemically accessible) and “invisible” (entirely unknowable) consequences of an action. Using this distinction, there is a very quick argument that saving lives has positive expected value. After all, if we’ve no idea what the long-term consequences of an action will be, then these “invisible” considerations are (given our evidence) simply silent—that is, speaking neither for nor against any particular option. So the visible reasons win out, unopposed. For example, saving a child’s life has an expected value of “+1 life saved”, which doesn’t change when our long-term ignorance is pointed out.

It’s less straightforward when we see a range of considerations and just aren’t sure how to weigh them. (Perhaps you’ve heard that clearing forests to create factory farms might sufficiently reduce insect numbers in the area as to result in a net reduction in suffering, but you aren’t sure how credible the claim is, or even how likely it is that insects have net-negative lives on average.) I can then no longer say, in schematic terms, what the “correct” EV is in such a case: it’s rather a judgment call. That brings us back to the earlier point about “epistemic difficulty”—still not the same thing as strict cluelessness.

The Value Correlation Thesis

Finally, I want to wrap up by proposing a principle that helps a lot with general cluelessness concerns, and I think warrants tentative endorsement.

Value Correlation: An action’s short-run/visible value is a positive predictor of its long-run/invisible value. Actions that look good on the visible margin are more likely to be good than bad in the long run.

For example, we should expect that saving someone’s life, or increasing people’s capabilities to pursue their own goals and live autonomous lives, is more likely to have positive than negative instrumental effects in the long run. There could be many specific exceptions, of course. (It’s a defeasible default, not a universal generalization.) But we shouldn’t expect that most short-term goods are long-term bad, or vice versa.

This strikes me as a datum of common sense, somewhat akin to expecting the future to be like the past (though obviously change happens, so there are plenty of exceptions there too). Consider, again, whether we should really regard nuclear war as equally likely to prove good in the long run as bad. Other cases are less drastic, but trigger the same principle in miniature. So I think this principle is a reasonable starting point, and indeed more reasonable than the sorts of alternative starting points that lead to radical cluelessness.

I do not believe paywalls for the public writing of professors are ethical. They violate many of the values that most of us academics usually stand up for.

The very point of being a public intellectual in academia, of public philosophy or popular science, is to educate and inform the public. One of the biggest debates in academia concerns the problem of paywalled journals. Almost all of us oppose the profit-driven nature of this enterprise, which prevents the widespread distribution of knowledge, especially in developing countries. Research, academics almost universally agree, should be freely available. For knowledge is a common good that humanity should share.

It’s good to find a way to see our research freely shared, e.g. via open-access journals or repositories like PhilArchive, especially when it costs us nothing.1 But we aren’t obliged to record and share our classroom lectures, conference talks, or philosophical banter over drinks. Nor is it generally considered unethical for professors to give paid talks, to write op-eds for paywalled newspapers, or to publish a book commercially. So we aren’t obliged to freely share our every academic output. Walter suggests that “using one’s paid university time to write a blog that one then asks others to pay for” amounts to double-dipping. But then why isn’t the same true of writing a trade book?2

Personally, I am (like many academics) a big fan of open-access publication. I do think it’s better to make one’s writing freely available, which is why I personally paywall very few posts (and none that I consider important). I’d encourage other academic bloggers to do likewise. But since they don’t have any obligation to blog at all, I don’t see how it could be “unethical” to do something better than baseline, like writing a post and making it available only to those who consider it worth paying for.

The argument in short:

1. It’s supererogatory for professors to blog about their areas of expertise.

2. Paywalled expert blogging is better than not blogging at all.

3. If an act is optional, and charging for it is better than not doing it at all, then charging for it is permissible.

4. So paywalled blogging by professors is permissible.

Beware Prohibiting the Imperfectly Good

Criticizing Kate Manne in particular, Walter continues:

I cannot shake the feeling that there is something deeply problematic about placing articles on feminism behind a paywall when lower-income women, who are even more likely to suffer from discrimination, are less able to afford access to them.

Here’s a possible method for shaking that feeling: Reflect on whether there’s anything deeply problematic about failing to write articles about feminism at all. Assuming that’s permissible (I’ve never seen anyone criticized for this), next reflect on whether feminists should prefer that there be paywalled articles on feminism over nothing. If so, it seems rather incoherent to selectively criticize just the option that you regard as better!

Now there are some cases with this curious structure, as seen in Horton’s “All or Nothing Problem”. It would be wrong to gratuitously save only one of two children at the cost of your arms if you could have saved both for the same cost, even though it’s permissible to refuse to sacrifice your arms at all. (It’s a nice case for showing that avoiding wrongdoing isn’t the most important thing in the world. We should prefer that the agent wrongly save one rather than permissibly save none, after all. Though it would, of course, be better still for them to permissibly save both.) But the paywall case doesn’t seem anything like this. The suboptimality is not gratuitous,3 and no one can seriously claim that they’ve been grievously wronged by their lack of access to our writing.

Again, I do agree that it’s (even) better to make supererogatory efforts for free. But it’s a dangerous practice to criticize people for doing something that is imperfectly good, if they could instead avoid criticism by doing nothing at all. It perversely incentivizes the worse option.4 (Compare how billionaires are subject to more criticism if they donate to charity than if they don’t. Or how critics of “price gouging” punish entrepreneurs for turning a profit while remedying shortages.)5 As I explain in ‘Utopian Enemies of the Better’, removing options for supposed inadequacy while failing to guarantee better alternatives risks just making things worse. So until we have a plan for getting more philosophers writing on Substack for free, let’s not discourage what writing we can get.

Moral truisms may still be widely ignored. The moral truism underlying Effective Altruism is that we have strong reasons to do more good, and it’s worth adopting the efficient promotion of the impartial good as one among one’s many life projects.

Most people do not, in fact, adopt the efficient promotion of the impartial good as even one among their many life projects. That’s a shame! I think more people should try this, and I take encouraging this change to be a constitutive aim of the EA movement (along with helping those attempting this project to pursue it more effectively).

Those who don’t like this idea generally don’t reject it explicitly. Nobody says, “As one of the wealthiest people in history, I would really much prefer to keep over 90% of my income for personal consumption, get moral kudos for purely symbolic acts, and not have to think at all about the interests of emotionally unappealing moral patients like shrimp or distant future generations.” But nor will they endorse the moderate EA ask. Perhaps the only option left is to change the subject.

One way to do that is to set aside the EA truism (what I call beneficentrism) and engage with a more extreme—and hence reasonably disputable—alternative view instead. This is, as Bentham’s Bulldog explains, a common way to shut off your brain. The familiar reasoning goes something like, “All your talk of reasons of beneficence vaguely reminds me of utilitarianism, so let me ignore everything you said and instead start talking about why I don’t like utilitarianism!” A+ rhetorical move.

After my most recent attempt to correct this mistake on Twitter/X, I got a couple of responses accusing me (or EA more generally) of a motte-and-bailey: dishonestly retreating from the “real” view—one that allegedly “entails the disintegration of America”1—to a more defensible but trivial view when pressed.

This is, I think, the exact opposite of what’s going on. EAs typically want to discuss, and get people on board with, moderate beneficentrism. That’s the ask — not anything like full-blown utilitarianism. (As I flag in the footnote, we’re only asking for a small portion of your “subagents” to be guided by impartial beneficence.) Critics avoid engaging with the ask by imaginatively inflating it into a more radical and disputable view to attack instead. It’s a schmotte-and-bailey fallacy: you take your interlocutor’s long-advocated view, pretend it is an uninteresting “motte”, and replace it with a straw “bailey” of your own invention.

In a motte-and-bailey, recall, the motte is supposed to be “dark and dank… the defensible but undesired position to which one retreats [only] when hard pressed.” I don’t think that’s an accurate description of EA attitudes towards beneficentrism. If more folks endorsed (and acted upon) beneficentrism, I’d be satisfied! Further, if you look at actual EA recommendations, it’s pretty clear that they don’t require anything like hegemonic impartiality governing your every life decision: preferring effective charities over less effective ones does not prevent you from caring for your kids or doing jury duty. So these seem like two good tests of whether the “motte-and-bailey” charge is really warranted: (1) Is the proponent satisfied if you join them in the motte? and (2) Do they need the bailey you’re attributing to them in order to meet the commitments of their view?

Now as it happens, I also like utilitarianism, so I’m happy to defend it against objections when that’s the topic of conversation. (For example, it’s worth noting that while utilitarianism is an impartial theory, even it does not recommend that we neglect our families or otherwise attempt to be impartial at all times, if that wouldn’t actually lead to better outcomes.) But for practical purposes, I don’t think it matters much whether utilitarianism or some more moderate alternative is ultimately correct. The important thing is that—on any reasonable moral view—we should want to see more rather than fewer efforts to effectively promote the impartial good on current margins. That’s the debate I care about, practically speaking. I think it’s important, so if people think they have good reasons to disagree with the moderate EA view then I want to hear them. “Boo utilitarianism” does not suffice.

Stefan Schubert—riffing off a recent post from Dan Williams—explains that we’re epistemically flexible but stubbornly self-regarding. It makes sense that evolutionary pressures would support flexible thinking (given the value of learning from experience) even while firmly locking in motivations that serve our selfish genes. (These include genuine care for others, but perhaps only for a narrow circle.)

Abstract reasoning can thus easily lead us to conclude that we ought to be much more impartial and altruistic than we actually are. The most fundamental problem in practical ethics is then how we react to this internal inconsistency. Motivated reasoning will clearly pull in one direction. Much of my public philosophy is directed at encouraging people to instead tolerate (recognizing) their imperfection while looking for relatively low-cost ways to move their moral margin in the impartially better direction. (Important to keep true belief practically affordable.)

I think it shouldn’t be that hard for ordinary, non-saintly people to do this to some extent. It helps that there can be personal rewards to doing good: I think that most people who take the 🔸10% pledge, for example, are (like me) very glad they did, and value how it adds meaning to their lives. We also have some reason to want others to be more utilitarian / impartially altruistic (or follow whatever norms would, in practice, best serve those ends),1 which may give us all some incentive to set up appropriate social scaffolding to incentivize abstract benevolence in (ourselves and) others.

So that’s why I’m (moderately) optimistic about moral philosophy, in a nutshell. Not all of it is great. There’s too much vibe-laundering and not enough principled thinking. But compared to the alternatives, (appropriately guardrailed) abstract thinking seems the best means we have for minimizing bias and identifying what would truly constitute moral progress. And from there, a mix of social incentives and the desire to think well of oneself can provide at least some motivational pressure to also (sometimes) do the better thing. Or at least vote for it, praise others who do it, and similar cheap — yet helpful — moves. And once the better thing is socially normalized (within one’s subculture), the force of social conformity may make it easier to follow suit.2

(1) External funding may be biasing individual philosophers, incentivizing them to lie for profit or at least engage in motivated reasoning that distorts their judgment.

(2) External funding may distort the literature by “flooding the zone” with work from (even reasonable and sincere) “aligned” researchers, resulting in distraction and agenda capture compared to what’s objectively warranted.

I’m a bit dubious about whether either concern really makes much sense in relation to academic philosophy—there’s a kind of epistemic transparency to our work in that everything you need to assess it is right there on the page; there’s no such thing as a fraudulent thought experiment. But I’d welcome correction if I’m missing something.

Are there financial incentives to reach certain verdicts?

The most obvious source of academic corruption is when one has financial incentives to publish certain pre-determined verdicts. I think an indirect form of this is ubiquitous: we all know you’re more likely to get a job in academia if you work on faddish topics and spout the generally-approved political and naturalist orthodoxies, for example. But I don’t see much scope for direct financial incentives in philosophy, even from external funding. At least in my experience, a typical research grant doesn’t provide any extra income;1 it just provides supplemental work-related resources like teaching relief or conference funding to do more research on a certain topic than you otherwise could have. There’s no obvious incentive for a tenured professor to pursue that except insofar as it is work that they independently want to do. (Matters may be different for the precariously employed, desperate for extra publications on their CV. But they’re also less likely to publicly express controversial opinions, for fear of offending future hiring committees.)

It may be worth flagging here that, unlike in the sciences, there’s no expectation (at least in American universities) that philosophers pursue or secure external grant funding. Stronger still, I don’t even see much benefit to securing such funding except insofar as it helps you to pursue a project that you independently value more than teaching. As a result, I don’t really see much potential for motivating researcher “bias” here.2

Consulting jobs, by contrast, provide extra income. But they won’t always change speech incentives. For example, like many philosophers, I’ve done some side work (of the sort Dan Greco describes here) creating training data to improve AI’s philosophical reasoning. But I don’t even know which AI labs end up using the training data, and I can’t imagine that anyone involved in the project cares in the slightest about the personal views of the contributors. So I also can’t see how this sort of consulting could be at all biasing.

So I’m not actually aware of any financial incentives for philosophers to adopt “industry-friendly” views. If others know something I don’t, I’d welcome hearing it. (I don’t know what happens when academics are directly hired by AI labs—what those jobs involve or what constraints they might place on one’s extramural speech. If anyone with direct experience can shed light on this, I’d be very curious to learn more.)3

I wonder what those with the first concern are imagining—especially those panicking about the occasional “pro-AI” take on social media. Do they think AI companies are hiring academic philosophers to lie about their views, paid per comment? Or that doing any sort of consulting work will automatically dispel past concerns and turn a critic into an uncritical cheerleader for the industry? The concrete mechanism being imputed isn’t clear to me. (I’m also not aware of any academic philosophers who could reasonably be characterized as “uncritical cheerleaders” for the industry. Are you? I can point to plenty of blind dismissal that seems very clearly ideologically motivated, on the other hand!)

Do external funders increase or decrease distortion?

The second concern—about distorting the overall literature—makes (slightly) more sense mechanistically, but I think may be normatively harder to defend. Ideologically motivated research grants may marginally “boost” a specific perspective by providing aligned researchers with the time (via teaching buyouts) to publish more on the specified topic. Or they might fund postdocs for aligned researchers who might otherwise have dropped out of academia. But it isn’t clear to me why we should regard any of that extra support for philosophy as a bad thing. (In general, more philosophical research seems good to me, even though some particular instances can be misguided.)

Concern about external influences “distorting” the status quo balance of academic attention assumes that we have some reason to think well of the status quo balance. I’m not sure that we do. I don’t know that philosophers in general have especially good research taste. Which topics become “fads” has (to my eye) little discernible correlation with objective interest or importance. I expect it’s pretty rare for academics to actually reason themselves into their political positions, as opposed to “laundering vibes” or rationalizing the position that’s determined for them by social desirability bias, though of course their resulting arguments still need to be engaged with on their merits. (Just flagging that I don’t think we should defer to popular academic views as reliable by default. And the direction of error may well be systematic rather than random noise.) The standard political ideology of academics, while better than the most prominent alternative, still strikes me as misguided in many ways. Insofar as there’s an uncritical intellectual and political monoculture in academia, external influence—including industry funding—could plausibly serve as a corrective4 by supporting meritorious work that the academic monoculture is unwarrantedly neglecting or even suppressing.5

(I don’t know that there’s any way to adjudicate that question independently of one’s first-order assessments of the merits of various positions. Not every viewpoint merits scholarly representation, of course. But I do think academics should take political bias more seriously. There are some pretty striking recent examples of the monoculture “flooding the zone” to the exclusion of obviously more important issues, after all.)

Do you know anything about the politics of “Big AI”?

Something I find especially striking is how many philosophers will speak of “AI companies” and “industry interests” as a monolith, apparently unaware that the two leading AI labs have diametrically opposed politics. OpenAI’s unofficial super PAC, Leading the Future, is opposed to industry regulation and spent millions opposing Alex Bores’s congressional run. (They also apparently funded false-flag sockpuppets to discredit the AI safety movement by attributing to them unhinged, violent “supporters”.)

Anthropic, by contrast, seems genuinely committed to AI safety, has consistently called for thoughtful regulation and oversight of the industry, and unofficially spent millions supporting Bores.6 They also famously gave up a lucrative Pentagon contract (and suffered significant political retaliation from the Trump administration labelling them a “supply chain risk”)7 rather than grant the Pentagon a blank check to use their AI models for autonomous killings or domestic surveillance. (OpenAI and Google both swept in to fill the gap.)

So the common assumption that “industry funding” necessarily means “anti-regulation” reveals remarkable ignorance of the central political conflict within the AI industry.

Correcting the biggest biases

While I remain dubious of the case for COI disclosures in philosophy, I don’t mind sharing my own disclosures (as I have at relevant points in this post). I disagree with Victor Kumar that “If you find out someone’s research is funded by the Mellon Foundation, its credibility slips.” Mellon and Templeton each select (in different ways) for perspectives that systematically differ from my own, so I can predict disagreeing with the work (at least in emphasis). But if I read the paper, I’ll form my own judgment on it. I don’t think the funding information should affect my philosophical judgment in the slightest. The arguments stand or fall on their own merits; the authors could be dogs (or LLMs) for all I care. (Again, it’s not as though philosophical thought experiments are subject to p-hacking or other forms of background research fraud.)

If we really care about distortions threatening our collective academic integrity, my top recommendation would be to look out for areas of false consensus and social pressure to conform. Then work on being more tolerant of disagreement and curious about research that doesn’t immediately “vibe” with orthodoxy—especially while serving on hiring committees.

I worry about our more ideological colleagues pouncing on any excuse to dismiss or delegitimize disagreement. In my experience, it’s already rare for philosophers to be willing to invest in serious cross-camp engagement. The last thing we need is more excuses to avoid hearing each other out.

Earlier still, back in 2015, Scott Alexander wrote about the dilemma that either we shouldn’t care about non-human animals at all, or they should totally swamp every other moral concern. There’s no realistic chance that the correct moral weighting conveniently turns out to be that precise value needed to justify a balanced approach on first-order grounds. His response was to “safeword out” of that whole line of abstract reasoning for the sake of his sanity. I actually think that’s a pretty good response, but would like to try to give it a more principled backing—one that turns out to carry a surprising upshot: that moral theories may not be meant to guide us directly at all.

As a first step, I want to highlight how important it is that people feel free to not act on their beliefs. It might not sound ideal, but it’s a practical guardrail that’s essential for protecting unbiased inquiry. Teaching applied ethics, especially topics like charitable giving or eating meat, I find that undergraduate students engage in the most transparently motivated reasoning because they feel like they need to defend their current actions. My bet is that we’d make more moral progress as a society if people felt more comfortable saying, “Yeah, I don’t do as much as I should in this arena. It’s on my moral to-do list.” And then make sure your to-do list is sensibly prioritized. Your next step may then involve doing a lot more good than would be likely to happen if you were just stuck rationalizing your existing behavior, unwilling to even consider where it might improve, let alone prioritizing among the many such opportunities for moral improvement.

So: let your beliefs roam free, and if you don’t like where they end up, just don’t act upon it. That’s your prerogative. But I do think we should make serious efforts to be intellectually honest and try to figure out what’s true. And hopefully that’ll help us to identify significant marginal improvements that we can make for others at low personal cost.

Returning to the train of abstract reasoning, there are the two big worries:

(1) Swamping effects, leading to the neglect of current people’s interests

(2) Motivating fanatical or extremist behavior (neglecting downside risk)

My thesis is that both can be successfully addressed by suitable application of the distinction between ideal theory and imperfect practice — which you’ll notice we’ve already applied once in the discussion above. The remaining core challenge is to introduce suitable guardrails on how we put theory into practice that limit downside risk without symmetrically2 capping the upside of rational reflection.

Meet my foil. One prominent longtermist famously endorsed “double or nothing” existence gambles: he said he’d accept a 49% chance of destroying the world for a 51% chance of doubling it and all the value it contains. He later became even more notorious for gambling with customer deposits, riding the train all the way to federal prison.

As a moral philosopher, I’m interested in the question of when it’s helpful to be guided by abstract moral reasoning, and when we should be more cautious and conservative. If there’s one thing philosophers know, it’s that human minds often struggle to identify the flaw in a chain of superficially-plausible reasoning. If we were committed to accepting any conclusion whose argument we couldn’t logically refute, we would be easy dupes, at the mercy of anyone more analytically skilled than ourselves.

But if there’s a second thing we know, it’s that historically, unreflective deference to socially conventional common sense has enabled moral disasters—slavery, homophobia, factory farming. It would be an extraordinary coincidence if our generation were the first whose conventional wisdom was morally perfect. So we have two opposing failure modes to protect against—the easy dupe and the dogmatist—my question is how best to balance these risks.

I view Effective Altruism as basically “applied moral philosophy”. Whereas most social movements are pushing certain predefined interests or values, EA’s cause neutrality and concern for the abstract good makes it open to an unusually wide range of concrete goals. The usual first stop, combining cosmopolitan moral concern with a concern for real evidence of effectiveness, is I think widely recognized as an improvement over ordinary vibes-based giving. But people worry about taking the train of moral optimization any further. It’s one thing to prioritize the global poor over the local homeless. It’s quite another to prioritize shrimp or digital minds or speculative AI safety risks. And that’s before we even get to the worries about violent extremism.

So I want to explore our options for mitigating the downsides of moral optimization and abstract reasoning, without losing the most valuable upsides. People are often tempted by “all or nothing” reasoning, but I think there’s a lot to be said for moderation and messy compromises. My route to this conclusion goes via taking our philosophical uncertainty and fallibility seriously: shifting from ideal to non-ideal theory. But the question of how best to do that gives us our first major choice point.

Moral Uncertainty

Suppose we’re torn between multiple moral theories, accounts of which entities are truly sentient, or other broad “worldviews”. How we respond to this uncertainty may be very different depending on whether we opt for maximizing expected choiceworthiness or worldview diversification. The former involves centralized agency, weighing the possible stakes of each option in proportion to the credibility of the theory that assigns it such stakes, and then potentially going “all in” on whatever option yields the best prospect in expectation. Perhaps a good approach for ideal agents, but (I suggest) too risky for the rest of us. The latter alternative decentralizes and devolves power or resources to an ensemble of subagents representing different philosophical worldviews in rough proportion to their credibility.3 Notice what this does to the usual picture: the moral theories aren’t directly guiding me; they’re guiding the subagents I’ve delegated to. (I’ll come back to this.) By design, this prevents moral “swamping”: you can easily ensure that any credible worldview maintains some power and agency to improve the world by its lights.

I’m a big fan of worldview diversification: I think it is the solution for fallible, non-ideal agents, as we all are. Not only does it avoid swamping worries, but it also avoids the opposite problem of conventional dogmatism neglecting novel moral disasters. We can have a subagent who looks out for shrimp, and another who looks out for the longterm future, and yet another that focuses on the most robust and reliable ways to improve human welfare today. The resources we assign to each can shift in proportion to how credible we find each subagent’s underlying philosophical worldview. And I think someone who undertakes this process responsibly can feel pretty confident that they’re going to do a lot of good for the world, or at least not gratuitously overlook low-hanging fruit.

That’s not to say that this approach is optimal. Just that it’s hard to be confident in what alternative would beat it. I don’t necessarily want to discourage anyone who is more willing to personally go all-in on a neglected high-impact cause area (shrimp welfare, for example). Especially if you imagine what your ideal moral portfolio would look like at the level of all of society, you might well find that going “all in” on the most neglected of your ideal cause areas is — on present margins — actually the best way for you to diversify society’s moral portfolio, and make up for others’ mistaken neglect of important causes.

But I do think we shouldn’t want society to go all-in on any one cause area — speculative longtermism, for example — even if it would seem to have higher expected value than diversification. I think there are several reasons for this. One involves principled hedging against the risk of disaster from miscalculation (especially given a default prior of diminishing marginal value for concentrated funding of cause areas, it seems plausible to me that the objectively correct expected value calculation would support some degree of diversification, whereas our subjective EV calculations could easily go wrong by missing this). Even if expectational reasoning is objectively ideal, we can’t trust human brains to do it right. We need a more diverse portfolio.

Some of my motivation here may just be a brute unwillingness to follow the train of argument to certain destinations if they seem too crazy. But even that can be given a principled backing, since gut intuitions often encode a lot of subconscious information that’s difficult to capture and model explicitly. So again, this ultimately comes back to maintaining a degree of skeptical distrust in abstract reasoning and calculations. We should take them on board to a non-zero extent, to protect against neglected moral disasters, but a kind of blind 100% deference risks disaster too. Intermediate weighting, relying on good judgment, strikes me as a much safer general approach.

Comparing Risks

It’s important to recognize that conventional thinking is far from risk-free, given its outright dismissal of unusual causes like shrimp welfare and longtermism. Given the scales involved, it’s not just that neglecting these things could conceivably be morally disastrous. Unless one has sufficient evidence to support overwhelming confidence in one’s dismissal of the worldviews on which these causes matter immensely, dismissal is a disaster in expectation. (We can recognize this fact without putting excessive trust in any precise calculations.)

This bears emphasizing because people often move from the unfamiliarity of these cause areas to the conclusion that they must require some really weird, distinctive philosophical commitments to justify supporting these cause areas at all. But actually the very opposite is true. Any suitably agnostic, moderate view of the possibility space will entail that we have very strong reasons to support these credibly ultra-high-stakes cause areas. It’s the dismissal that requires super niche views to really justify.

(If you’re pattern matching to being mugged by minuscule probabilities, I think it makes a big practical difference whether we actually have sufficiently good reasons to regard the speculative claims as substantively credible. Made-up numbers won’t automatically qualify. It’s a judgment call whether any given speculative claim is genuinely credible — answerable to evidence and argument, but not settled by any algorithm I can offer you. And note that proportional representation of subagents caps the downside: a worldview I shouldn’t have seated gets only its small share, rather than swamping the whole portfolio as it could under expected-value or expected-choiceworthiness maximization.)

My claim is that the most sensible, moderate view gives neither zero nor 100% of our collective moral resources to weird speculative causes. We should all want to see a more balanced approach, and hence think about how our marginal contributions could bring us closer to that goal.

So there’s a kind of speculative reasoning that I’m very open to, and I think people in general should be open to, and that is speculative reasoning that expands our options and protects against a wider range of possible moral disasters.

There’s a very different kind of speculative reasoning that I think should be quarantined to the philosophy seminar room and should not affect our practice. And that’s, roughly speaking, reasoning that has a tendency to narrow our options and leave us more vulnerable to downside risks and possible moral disasters. Examples include things like:

• Double or nothing existence gambles

• Wireheading people into experience machines

• Violence / social defection (e.g. stealing to give, assassination)

It’s a very familiar point in the utilitarian tradition that naive instrumentalist calculations in support of norm-breaking for the greater good are apt to be unreliable (more often resulting from motivated reasoning or other mistakes than from objectively accurate calculation). Since we can’t tell if we’re mistaken from the inside, we simply can’t trust the results of convenient-but-usually-misguided modes of thought like this. Once we take this into account, we find that the higher-order expected value of disreputable norm-breaking behavior is almost always negative.

A good test is to ask whether common sense would recognize one’s situation as a legitimate exception to the usual rule or not: like lying to the murderer at the door. There are two reasons to like this test: one is that common sense may encode valuable heuristic information.4 The other, more cynical reason is that common sense will shape how others react and thus the reputational costs of the action.

So that practical endorsement of something like commonsense deontic constraints (though ultimately justified on pragmatic rather than intrinsic grounds) is how I think we can address worries about extremist behavior in light of high-stakes beliefs.

This is another point I want to dwell on a moment, because public discourse here is painfully stupid. You see people on Twitter claiming that to call AI an existential risk constitutes incitement to violence against AI company CEOs. I feel like they’re really telling on themselves if they’re so bought in to naive instrumentalism that they don’t even notice the gap between recognizing high stakes and resorting to violence. It’s baffling, because it’s undeniable that the world contains high stakes — in politics, for example — and it must be possible to recognize this truth without thereby supporting political assassination.

How is it possible? Here’s where bad philosophers appeal to deontology: “We just have to reject consequentialism,” they say, “and there’s no longer any temptation to take bad means to good ends.” That’s bad reasoning because it neglects the fact that moderate deontology (no one endorses absolutism these days) also mandates doing the best act when the stakes are sufficiently high — which is precisely the scenario we’re concerned with here. So deontology is no help.

The real solution is more epistemic than moral. What we need is for people to reject naive instrumentalism and come to sincerely believe that taking the bad means would be counterproductive to good ends. It’s ultimately an empirical belief, but—like favoring liberal democracy over dictatorship—it’s one that I think we clearly ought to hold as a matter of very robust expectation. Even if there are possible exceptions, we shouldn’t expect to be able to reliably identify them in advance.

Wrapping up

So, that’s my response to extremism: reject naive instrumentalism. We saw my response to swamping was to appeal to worldview diversification (rather than maximizing expected choiceworthiness) as our method for dealing with philosophical uncertainty. Both are practical fixes mandated by the realization that we can’t be trusted to reason perfectly. And they’re fixes that serve as asymmetric guardrails: limiting downside risk without symmetrically capping the upside.

When we combine these two solutions, there’s no longer anything to fear from Crazy Town. In fact, it’s a mistake to think that we have to choose a single destination along the train line, putting all our eggs in one basket. Instead, we (at least collectively) ought to diversify, and ensure that every credible philosophical worldview gets to exert proportionate power and influence in shaping the world for the better. Rather than being, as Scott Alexander feared, a “series of unprincipled exceptions”, I think we can reasonably view this stance as meta-optimal, taking higher-order uncertainty into account, despite the fact that no worldview would identify the resulting compromise as optimal on first-order grounds.

These practical thoughts suggest a curious theoretical upshot. It turns out that the role of moral theories and related “worldviews” is not to directly guide us as moral agents, but rather to guide our subagents. This way of structuring the connection between theory and practice has a salutary tendency towards moderation, and I think towards reaping the low-hanging fruit of abstract reasoning while limiting downside risks. Those are my thoughts. I look forward to hearing yours.5

It’s an intervention with demonstrable efficacy from past trials, including one in Singapore which reduced dengue spread by up to 77%. (The current proposal targets a different mosquito species—the vector for West Nile Virus—but it’s the same basic mechanism.)

The EPA’s public consultation has so far elicited overwhelmingly negative responses. (I searched the database of 207 comments for the word “support”, but every hit turned out to be someone supporting our local mosquitoes.)

While there’s always a risk of bad side-effects, I’m not currently aware of any evidence to suggest that they outweigh the clear benefits in expectation.1 (Please correct me if I’m wrong!) Many public comments are clearly just expressing status quo bias. Consider the reversal test: If an unexpected natural event drastically cut the mosquito population, how many citizens would be clamoring to release extra fertile mosquitoes in order to restore the population to its prior levels? No-one really believes that the current mosquito population size is objectively optimal. But many are knee-jerk opposed to “human intervention” against what they perceive as “natural”.

Many “natural” infectious diseases are worth combatting with human intervention, and so are the vectors by which these diseases spread. Debugging should only be opposed if our best available evidence suggests that the risks outweigh the benefits. Blind opposition to human intervention is not a good enough reason to condemn more people to preventable illness and disease. If you like, feel free to submit a comment to the EPA saying so—their consultation period closes on June 5.

Even given objectivism, I think that true claims about well-being or welfare value must connect to the subject’s perspective in the following sense: any failure to care about an objective good or harm must reveal some degree of irrationality or unreasonableness on the part of the subject. It would be incoherent to say, “X is bad for you, but it damages nothing you have reason to care about—it’s perfectly reasonable for you to remain indifferent to it.” This conceptual constraint may sound trivial, but insofar as we have an independent grip on what’s worth caring about, it can actually help to ground some pretty substantive limits on paternalistic judgments.

In particular, we can appeal to the (disputable, but I think substantively very plausible) datum that we shouldn’t care about metaphysics to block the entire class of excessively “metaphysical” putative harms. As I previously wrote about “moralized” harms:

Conservative sexual morality posits arbitrary rules that we’ve no obvious reason to care about. They might try to add that it is in some sense “for the sake of” the affected individuals: if masturbation is a stain on your soul, then caring about someone might entail caring that they refrain from masturbation, for example. But such claims remain normatively dubious. There’s no independent reason why caring about someone should lead you to care in this way about what they do in private. It’s a made up, “moralized” harm, not an independently recognizable real harm. And we should be skeptics about this sort of made-up morality.

More intellectual conservatives appeal to “natural law” metaphysics to ground their incomprehensible paternalism. They posit natural “functions” for reproductive organs, and claim that it is bad for us to use our organs in a way that is “contrary to” their true metaphysical purpose. Similarly, in ‘What is Marriage’ (a notorious anti-gay marriage paper from 2010), the authors argue (badly) for what they call the Conjugal View of marriage, and assume that marriage law ought to reflect this putative metaphysical fact about what marriage is.

As I responded at the time:

Methodologically speaking, I find the “metaphysics first” approach to public policy rather bizarre. For example, when instituting an intellectual property regime, the core question is not “what is intellectual property?” (as if there were some pre-legal fact of the matter), but something more like, what values are at stake here and what policies/laws would best serve these values? [Ed. note: see here for more on IP.]

I don’t here intend to engage further with natural law theorists (you can read my linked response if you’re interested in that). Rather, I mention them in the hope that their example will help more of my readers to intuitively appreciate how deeply misguided the “metaphysics-first” approach to ethics is. It’s not just that they got some details wrong about the true purposes of our organs. Rather, they’re talking about stuff that we clearly have no reason to care about. It’s transparent nonsense, and I’d go so far as to say there’s something fundamentally wrong with your grasp of what ethics is all about if you take anything like natural law theory to be a credible candidate view.1

A more progressive example: LLM pseudo-friendship

While her conclusions are much less offensive than theirs, I was reminded of these conservative arguments when I read Grace Helton’s metaphysics-first argument for the intrinsic badness of human-LLM pseudo-friendships.2 Helton argues that (1) people are objectively harmed by the thwarted exercise of a valuable human capacity—this constitutes a form of “degradation”—and (2) engaging in pseudo-friendship interactions with an LLM essentially involves attempting, unsuccessfully, to exercise the valuable human capacity for friendship.

I’m not sure that (2) is true. But my main concern is with (1): a principle that seems straight out of natural law theory. Consider that reproduction is a valuable human capacity, and non-procreative sex or masturbation “thwarts” it in almost exactly the same way that pseudo-friendship with LLMs “thwarts” our social capacities. Anyone who grants Helton’s theoretical premise faces the challenge of how they avoid the implication that masturbation and non-procreative sex are similarly “degrading” intrinsic harms. (Deliberately engaging in pseudo-friendship activities with an LLM is effectively masturbating your social capacities, after all.)

Read more

So I have two main responses to those who—like Curtis Yarvin—oppose efforts to extend one’s circle of moral concern beyond those to whom one (currently) has “real sympathy”: (1) Broader “abstract sympathy” is both possible and, when it occurs, more virtuous; and (2) When our actual motivations fall short of full virtue, it’s better to at least be strong-willed (or “continent”, as Aristotle would say) and muster the motivation to simulate virtue rather than to wholly neglect what we know to be true and good.

1. Abstract Sympathy

As Bertrand Russell wrote in Education and the Good Life:

There is a purely physical sympathy: a very young child will cry because a brother or sister is crying. This, I suppose, affords the basis for the further developments. The two enlargements that are needed are: first, to feel sympathy even when the sufferer is not an object of special affection; secondly, to feel it when the suffering is merely known to be occurring, not sensibly present. The second of these enlargements depends largely upon intelligence. It may only go so far as sympathy with suffering which is portrayed vividly and touchingly, as in a good novel; it may, on the other hand, go so far as to enable a man to be moved emotionally by statistics. This capacity for abstract sympathy is as rare as it is important.

In my 2019 paper ‘Overriding Virtue’, I expand upon Russell’s idea:

The possibility of such abstract sympathy undermines the charge that it is necessarily “callous” to maximize net welfare at the cost of more proximate interests. On the contrary, such impartially benevolent preferences may instead reveal a deeper wellspring of emotional concern for others than is found in the merely ordinarily (concretely) sympathetic. Indeed, we should surely expect that the compassion of the ideally virtuous agent would extend more broadly than our own, flawed and imperfect compassion manages to do. Insofar as moral perfection is thought to involve a kind of universal love, it is very natural to conceive of the ideally virtuous agent as one who would feel the moral-emotional pull of others’ needs just as strongly even when they are distant from the agent herself. And it would certainly not be callous or lacking in compassion when such an ideally virtuous agent acted upon her expansive sense of compassion to protect a greater number of people despite their lack of proximity (just as there is nothing callous about saving the nearby many over the nearby few).

See also Beneficentric Virtue Ethics: “Prioritizing the homeless person before your eyes over distant children dying of malaria is not virtuous… It rather reflects a failure of empathy: you feel for those you see (good so far!), but not those you don’t (which is obviously less than morally ideal).” Similar things can be said of the common tendency to prioritize cute animals over equally intelligent ugly ones, etc. The positive concern is good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go as far as it should (or ideally would).

2. Abstract Benevolence as Backup Motivation

My paper continues:

Of course, we are not ideally virtuous agents. Even many of us who are moved by moral reasons to prefer saving the greater number may nonetheless find that this verdict conflicts with our strongest sympathetic impulses (which remain tethered to more proximate, salient needs). This raises interesting questions about how to evaluate our characters when we choose to save the distant many over the nearby few. Is this a virtuous choice, since it is done for good moral reasons and in recognition that this is what the ideally virtuous agent would do? Or is it disreputably callous, as we are in fact overriding our strongest sympathetic impulses, and letting harm come to those we see most vividly, merely for the sake of some “greater good” that we do not fully (i.e., emotionally) comprehend? To answer this question, consider the following character trait:

Abstract benevolence: The disposition to allow abstract, globally-oriented moral reasons to override or redirect one’s natural inclination to prioritize the most salient needs one faces, when this is necessary to address more objectively pressing needs.

I propose that abstract benevolence is a neglected virtue, specific to imperfect agents like ourselves, that serves to moderate the biasing effect of ordinary sympathy…

While it would be most ideal to be directly sympathetically moved by all needs in proportion to their objective merit (which is unaffected by factors like distance and cuteness), the next-best option is to possess sufficient abstract benevolence to do the ideal thing even in the absence of ideal feelings. Blindly indulging your actual feelings, regardless of how badly distorted they are, must surely come in a distant third.

Yarvin asserts that exercising abstract benevolence “wrecks” one’s “capacity for genuine sympathy,” but he offers no (non-fictional) evidence that this is true.1 Scott Alexander, in Against The Concept Of Telescopic Altruism, argues more convincingly for correlated altruism: “People who are nice to a far-off group are more likely to be nice to a nearby group, because all forms of compassion come from the same place.”

Fixing Incentives

I’m no fan of pretending that subjectively-fulfilling helping is guaranteed to be the most objectively helpful form of helping. I’m also not impressed by egoistic views that claim we have more reason to prioritize personal fulfilment over helping others more. I think those views are wrong.

But I agree it can be more challenging to motivate ourselves (and others) to act in ways that lack subjective appeal. Rather than conveniently revising our beliefs about morality to match our personal interests, I think we do better to try to reshape our incentives so that it becomes easier to act well. Taking abstract benevolence as a second-best virtue available to imperfect agents, the practical question becomes how to scaffold it. Examples might include:

(1) Taking the 🔸10% Pledge (previously recommended here) and publicizing this fact, as a precommitment device and costly signal.

(2) Take time to vividly imagine and reflect on the good done (in expectation) by your exercises of abstract benevolence.

(3) Surround yourself with people who have good values and who will reward you with social esteem for exercising abstract benevolence.

(4) Appreciate being part of a community with all the right enemies, spanning the political spectrum.

(5) Find meaning and satisfaction in all of the above.

This seems better than trying to directly optimize our “moral” actions for meaning and satisfaction. Especially when there are gadflies like me about, pointing out that a preference for hands-on helping is not really supportable by moral reasons… You may actually find that the most sustainable route to moral fulfilment is to first just focus on doing good efficiently, and then separately figure out how to find fulfilment in this.2

Conclusion

Critics imagine impartiality as “leveling down” our concern for those near, until we care as little for them as we do for the distant. The more ideal response, of course, is the opposite: “leveling up” impartiality. We’re absolutely right to care so much about our loved ones. Where we go wrong is in our deficient treatment of others:

We glimpse but a glimmer of the world’s true value. It’s enough to turn our heads, and rightly so. If we could but see all that’s glimpsed by various others, in all its richness, depth, and importance, we would better understand what’s truly warranted. But even from our limited personal perspectives, we may at least come to understand that there is such value in everyone, even if we cannot always grasp it directly. And if we strive to let that knowledge guide our most important choices, our actions will be more in line with the reasons that exist—reasons we know we would endorse, if only we could see them as clearly as we do the ones in our more personal vicinity.

That ideal of fully seeing (and feeling) others’ value is beyond most of us. But we can at least get closer to following the guidance of abstract sympathy when we muster abstract benevolence as a backup motivation. Refusing to act on concern that exceeds what you currently feel leaves your ethics vulnerable to emotional dictatorship. When we know there are good reasons our emotions are overlooking, we need to find other ways to ensure that our behavior is suitably reasons-responsive.

At the end we got a question from the audience about whether (some? most? all?) EAs have been shown to have bad practical judgment. We both disagreed with the questioner overall, but unless you’re planning to blindly defer to EAs’ practical views, the question doesn’t seem especially worth focusing on. As I wrote in ‘Why Not Effective Altruism?’:

Sometimes critics take themselves to be attacking a narrower target: “EA as it actually exists”, or some such. But these critics tend to be ignorant of the actually-existing diversity of opinion and approaches within EA (it’s a big tent!), and have a tendency to straw-man their targets. To address the narrow criticisms, one would need to get into the sociology of EA, and assess the extent to which critics’ characterizations accurately describe their targets. Such sociological questions are of limited philosophical interest. From the perspective of first-personal moral deliberation about how to live our lives, the important question is not whether we should blindly defer to actual EAs (of course we shouldn’t), but whether there is some version of the EA project that is worth pursuing. So that is the question that this paper will address.

My sense is that a lot of the critics are essentially focused on trying to lower the status of the EA brand rather than engaging in serious moral inquiry.1 Proponents of EA, by contrast, tend to focus less on the brand; their nominal aim is to work out (and then pursue) what’s most worth doing, and to encourage others to do likewise.2 I personally think the EA brand/movement has significant instrumental value for coordination and for motivating people, so I’d prefer to see its status raised and will happily defend its track record (as a whole, not in every instance). (See theses 32-39 of ‘What “Effective Altruism” Means to Me’.) And insofar as others associate me with EA, I’d of course prefer they had positive rather than negative associations. But I really do think all that social jockeying ought to be secondary to the question of what’s worth doing—and that EA principles are very helpful for answering that question and yet remain unduly neglected in practice.

A point I keep coming back to: Consider whether the world would be better off with more or less concern for effectiveness and impartial altruism on the margins, and the answer is obviously “more”.3 Critics’ refusal to acknowledge this important point (or else dispute it head-on) really bothers me. “I associate your brand with tech bros” is not a good reason to let children die of malaria! Folks who don’t like the EA brand should find another way to promote the principles underlying effective altruism.

Related posts (on why effectiveness and impartial altruism, respectively, are both controversial):

Optimizing helps the people we can help the most

My interest in this issue stems from hearing people oppose the efficient promotion of impartial welfare because they view it as “discriminatory” against demographic groups who we are less able to help. For example, my students often worry that optimization “abandons” those it would be expensive to help. (I respond that prioritization is temporary and suboptimal choices inevitably abandon even more.) More recently: Liz Harman objects to Effective Altruism because prioritizing by cost-effectiveness would systematically deprioritize disability accommodations (among other things) relative to more cost-effective philanthropic interventions. She takes this to constitute unjust discrimination against the disabled.1

Similar objections claiming discrimination against the elderly and disabled have long been levelled against the use of QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life Years) in medical resource allocation decisions. My (2016) paper Against ‘Saving Lives’: Equal Concern and Differential Impact defended QALYs against these objections. I think it’s an important, high stakes issue.

We have good moral reasons to prioritize a greater benefit to one over a lesser benefit to another. Nobody thinks that we should flip a coin to decide whether the last vial of medicine goes to cure a sore throat or severe sepsis. It’s not discrimination against people with sore throats to prioritize others with more at stake. But if we compare different life-extensions, people become extremely reluctant to acknowledge that some people may have more at stake than others.2 For a less sensitive example, even Singerian anti-speciesists can agree that we have vastly more reason to save the life of a typical human child than a chicken, because the future that death would deprive the child of is far richer and more significant.

Death is bad to the extent that it deprives you of a valuable future, so if not all futures are equally valuable, then not all deaths are equally harmful. If we want to prevent the most serious harms, e.g. in triage situations, it’s important to acknowledge this fact. And we should want to prevent the most serious harms. It’s precisely the failure to do this that constitutes unfairly neglecting or discounting the interests of those with most at stake. I thus think it’s the failure to take life-years into account that is ageist—against the young. Similarly, I’d argue that ignoring greater harms suffered by the global poor (e.g. malaria deaths) in order to provide lesser benefits to disabled Americans is, if anything, unjust discrimination against the global poor.

Two provisos

The case for optimizing is most important to appreciate when there are large differences in potential benefit (as when allocating life-saving medical resources between old vs young people, for example, or local vs global philanthropy). But there can be good pragmatic reasons to refrain from pursuing lower-stakes fine-grained optimization based on coarse demographic categories that only very weakly correlate with differences in well-being.

The simplest reason is just that many people find the idea upsetting, and the benefits are (we’re supposing) sufficiently small and unreliable that they may not be worth the cost of upsetting people so much. But a more interesting pragmatic objection is that it risks exacerbating stigma and undermining social solidarity—an objection that also applies to prioritizing by instrumental value to society:

There are many cases in which instrumental favoritism would seem less appropriate. We do not want emergency room doctors to pass judgment on the social value of their patients before deciding who to save, for example. And there are good utilitarian reasons for this: such judgments are apt to be unreliable, distorted by all sorts of biases regarding privilege and social status, and institutionalizing them could send a harmful stigmatizing message that undermines social solidarity. Realistically, it seems unlikely that the minor instrumental benefits to be gained from such a policy would outweigh these significant harms. So utilitarians may endorse standard rules of medical ethics that disallow medical providers from considering social value in triage or when making medical allocation decisions. But this practical point is very different from claiming that, as a matter of principle, utilitarianism’s instrumental favoritism treats others [unjustly]. There seems to be no good basis for that stronger claim.

I can’t predict the actual social consequences here with any confidence. But I can at least imagine harmful social effects outweighing the benefits, and if you find such concerns credible then that would seem a sufficient explanation for why such a policy is worth opposing. Conversely, if there wouldn’t be such costs then I’d no longer see good reasons to oppose the policy. (Comments welcome if you think I’m missing something!)

A proviso to the proviso: Interestingly, many people agree that it makes sense to prioritize saving health workers during a pandemic, perhaps because their social value in this context is so undeniable. This may be some evidence that the reason against considering social value in everyday triage is pragmatic rather than principled—other judgments of social value are extremely contested (e.g. across political and cultural groups), so it would risk creating a lot of wasteful and unnecessary conflict, better avoided by principles of liberal neutrality.3

Let’s move on, then, to considering systematic accounts of unjust discrimination.

Why Disparate Impact Fails

Liz seemed to assume that disparate impact (when causally connected to a protected characteristic) suffices to establish unjust discrimination, but I think it’s easy to show that this can’t be right. Here’s a toy case. You’re in a lifeboat, and have time to either save one person swimming alone to the west, or else save five people swimming together to the east. Almost everyone will agree that you should save the five. But suppose the one is from a minoritized ethnicity where cultural practices encourage swimming alone. The five, by contrast, are from a different culture which encourages swimming in groups. Now it is in some causal sense because of their ethnicity that the one is drowning in a group of smaller number than the five. Does that make a policy of saving the greater number racist? Surely not. It’s systematically detrimental to those from the culture that encourages swimming alone, but there’s still nothing unfair or nefarious about it.

Some cultural practices might shape the causal landscape in a way that renders one less eligible for impartial priority, by making helpful interventions do less good than competing alternatives. Some disabilities may have similar effects. Those are unfortunate causal properties. They do not thereby transform principled impartiality into unjust discrimination. So even a policy that systematically disadvantages an innocent group because of (reasons causally downstream of) their group membership is not necessarily unjustly discriminatory.

The Discounted Interests Account

To a first approximation, I think we unjustly discriminate when we unjustifiably discount someone’s interests for morally irrelevant reasons (such as demographic categories). This easily captures outright bigotry of the “cartoon villain” variety: Nazis, etc. And it clearly excludes the impartially beneficent optimizer, who counts everyone’s interests equally and so does not discount any.

But it’s important to note that unjust discrimination extends beyond cartoon villains. Liz pressed me on examples of so-called “rational” discrimination: e.g. employers in a racist society refusing to hire ethnic minorities so as not to risk losing the business of their racist customers.

I think the discounted interests account can accommodate such cases. The costs to minorities of being systematically denied employment opportunities far outweigh the benefits that employers gain from being allowed to so discriminate.4 So even if the employers aren’t motivated by malice, it still reveals a morally problematic disregard for others’ legitimate interests. There’s a straightforward objection on impartial welfarist grounds to this sort of discrimination: it does more harm than good. Legal prohibiting such discrimination may have the added benefit of improving social norms over time so that future generations of customers are less likely to be racist.

To extend this objection to effective giving, one would have to claim that the total harm (or foregone benefit) to disabled Americans when people instead choose to prioritize cost-effective global giving outweighs the total good this global giving does for its beneficiaries. But that is not a credible claim (assuming that the giving in question truly is effective at saving and improving lives) — the global poor have much more at stake here.

Effective giving does not do more harm than good. It does not indicate any kind of disregard for the disabled or any others who would be helped by interventions ranked lower on the priority list. (The priority list counts all people equally; interventions are ranked lower just when they help people less per unit cost.) And opposing effective altruism does the opposite of promoting the long-term social change we most need on present margins.5

Conclusion

Unjust discrimination treats people in a way that’s incompatible with counting them equally. This is clearest in cases of direct bigotry, unreasonably treating demographic features as inherent grounds for discounting someone’s interests. But it may also extend to economically “rational” accommodations of others’ bigotry (and other cases like racial profiling), which still come out as a clear “net negatives” to overall social welfare when you give due weight to the concentrated costs.

What we should not say is that disparate impact per se constitutes unjust discrimination—not even when the disparity is causally downstream of group characteristics. You might have thought that a policy which systematically disadvantages an innocent group because of (reasons causally downstream of) their group membership must surely be unjustly discriminatory on that basis. It sounds surprising to reject this! But I take my demographic lifeboat case to be a clear counterexample to that principle. If common features of a group make it more costly or less effective to help them (relative to helping other equally-deserving candidates), it is not unjustly discriminatory to take the opportunity costs into account when you cannot help everyone.

So while it’s true that optimization disadvantages those we’re less able to help cost-effectively (because it systematically prioritizes interventions that help more), this does not ground any moral objection. Like helping the greater number in the demographic lifeboat case, the disparity simply falls out of applying impartial principles to an unequal world. We should, by all means, work towards finding more cost-effective ways to help everyone, including those who are currently difficult to help. But it would not be fair to the global poor or to others with the most at stake for us to prioritize lesser benefits to others over greater benefits to them in the name of acting indiscriminately.

This framing makes Blue sound like the obvious and ethical choice. But the same payoff matrix is found in Roko’s Blender:

Everyone in the world has to decide whether to step into a giant blender. If at least 50% of the people do step into the blender, it will be unable to overcome their inertia to get started, and everyone survives. If less than 50% of the people step into the blender, then they all get blended up into paste and die. People who do not step into the blender suffer no adverse effects. (Blue = step into the blender, Red = don’t do that)

Other analogies I’ve seen include Blue = take a poison pill (everyone gets an antidote iff1 a majority take the pill), or Blue = pick up a loaded gun (and shoot yourself in the head iff only a minority of the population made the same choice).

As far as the objective payoffs go, the relevant conditions to note are:

• Everyone who picks red is guaranteed to survive, but if a majority pick red then every blue-picker dies. If a majority pick blue then everyone survives.

• The only conditions under which your choice makes a difference to the outcome are:

  • If an independent majority pick red, then your picking blue increases the death count by 1 (yourself).

  • In the unlikely event that your vote determines the majority, picking blue saves half the population.

  • (If an independent majority pick blue, then your choice doesn’t matter.)

Since picking blue can either make things better or worse, depending on what others choose, the “correct” answer depends on your empirical predictions about human psychology. (One sees online partisans arguing either that there’s “no reason” to pick blue, or that red is simply “selfish”, and I don’t think either claim is correct. It’s not selfish to recognize that your own life has value, and there are clearly altruistic reasons to pick blue if you expect enough others to do so. What I think the red-partisans get right is that there’s a sense in which the “first”2 people to pick blue are being deeply irrational and creating a problem that a society of logically perfect beings would avoid. But one has to deal with humanity as it is, not as we’d wish it to be, and saving others from lethal “mistakes” is a good thing to do if you can manage it.)

In Blender-style framings that make the blue option intuitively extremely unappealing, you should obviously choose red. (Blue is gratuitous suicide when you can easily predict that only a tiny minority will choose it.) In the original version, where the framing makes Red sound “selfish” and Blue “cooperative”, you might predict that the result will be close, in which case it would be impartially worthwhile (in expectation) to pick blue.3 So there’s no purely logical answer to the problem. It depends on your expectations about others’ behavior, which should probably be extremely sensitive to framing effects.

Note that both options are universalizable: Red has the feature of being safe (for you) no matter what others choose, which seems likely to appeal to people thinking about this from within a game-theory frame. Blue has the feature of being more forgiving of imperfect coordination: you still get the optimal outcome if most-but-not-all successfully coordinate on it. Framing effects can change which feature is more salient. Insofar as these roughly pattern-match to rational vs empathetic vibes, you can see how it’s a great case for polarizing people into rival mutually-contemptuous camps. “Everyone should think like me and those who don’t are stupid or evil” is a perennially popular form of self-expression :-)

This strikes me as an objectionably incurious and unphilosophical attitude to take towards the biggest concerns that intelligent colleagues and interlocutors have about one’s view. Rather than finding excuses to ignore them, it seems much more philosophically valuable to seriously engage with the objections and explain in detail how one hopes to defang them. (You can survey a selection of my efforts along these lines by following the above links.) “That seems like a tendentious framing” is a promissory note, not a complete objection. The real work is in developing one’s case in a way that has some hope of communicating one’s perspective to someone who didn’t share it to begin with.

Philosophical dialectic is often best understood as a matter of rival proponents vying for the hearts and minds of the uncommitted in their audience. Accordingly, it is not necessary to convince committed opponents. That would rarely be a realistic ambition. Better to aim at the goal of highlighting a neglected cost or else convincing a neutral party that the costs attributed to your view are not so bad as they might at first have seemed.

My opening scenario might sound absurd—who has ever dismissed the Transplant objection for invoking deontic concepts?—but the funny thing is that it happens all the time when you flip the positions around. I’ve written before about how the most common response to my recent work on deontology’s dispreferability problem is to dismiss it as “question-begging”, either for invoking the concept of preferability at all, or for “framing” the scenario in a way that highlights the welfare costs of deontology (shocker, I know; what’s next, a counterexample to utilitarianism that highlights its apparent neglect of individual rights?)

It’s hard to express how deeply baffling I find these dismissals on a metaphilosophical level. Like, what do the critics think good philosophical objections look like? Can they point to any objection to deontology that they recognize as philosophically serious and worth engaging with? (If not, doesn’t that seem awfully revealing?)

The problem: People are lazy and motivated to find excuses to dismiss objections to their views rather than doing the philosophical work of engaging and countering objections. As a result, many are quick to accuse arguments of being “question begging” whenever they are personally unconvinced. They forget that all arguments in philosophy—even the very best ones—leave some people unconvinced.

My solution: apparently, writing blog posts with the twin goals of (i) instilling a sense of intellectual shame at the prospect of indulging in such irrationality, and (ii) encouraging explicit reflection on better criteria for identifying when arguments are question-begging vs. worth engaging.

What it means to beg the question

Question-begging arguments transparently presuppose their conclusion. Of course, there’s a logical sense in which every valid argument presupposes its conclusion: logical validity just is the property of having the premises logically necessitate the conclusion. So if you’re unwaveringly committed to not-C, we can already tell that you must be (at least implicitly) committed to rejecting some premise of any valid argument for C. It would be awfully silly to dismiss every valid argument on this basis!

The transparency condition is key. Informative philosophical argument is possible because we are not logically omniscient. Nobody has fully thought through all the implications of their views. We are naturally drawn to a variety of claims, many of which are subtly inconsistent in ways we don’t appreciate until a clever argument brings the problem to our attention.

As I like to reiterate every few years:1

Sometimes people assume that an argument they personally find unconvincing is thereby “question-begging” or otherwise worthless. This is a mistake. A determined opponent can always just reject a premise; that’s inevitable. Arguments can’t force people to change their minds, so that isn’t a realistic expectation.

We do better to think of arguments as highlighting neglected costs (of rejecting the conclusion), and inviting those who nonetheless reject our conclusions to (i) seriously consider which costs they’re willing to accept (i.e. which premises to reject), and (ii) suggest any counterarguments that mitigate the apparent cost of their preferred move (or perhaps even show it to be a “feature” rather than a “bug”). In a successful dialectic, everyone leaves with a clearer view of the costs and benefits of the competing views on offer.

A question-begging argument is one that offers no such illumination. The conclusion is so transparently contained within the premises that there is no conceivably “neglected” consideration there to highlight—nothing that might, for example, help to sway a “fence-sitter” who was as-yet-undecided about whether to accept the conclusion. Any such fence-sitter would necessarily be just as undecided about the question-begging premise.

Put another way: An argument is an invitation to grapple with a problem: some people may have been tempted to hold all of {P1, … Pn, not-C} but this turns out to be an inconsistent set. Something has to go! (The arguer encourages switching to accepting C, but this directionality is a rhetorical artifact. The real philosophical work is just identifying the inconsistency, and readers may judge for themselves how they prefer to resolve it.)

To charge an argument with being “question-begging” is to deny that it raises any interesting problem. It is to say, “You philosophical nincompoop, how could you be so muddle-headed as to imagine that anyone would ever be tempted by that inconsistent set? Nobody would ever be tempted by P1 unless they already accepted C. So there’s no problem here; nothing to grapple with and nothing to learn. Stop wasting our time!”

This charge will often come across as quite insulting. A question-begging argument is an abject philosophical failure, a total waste of time, unworthy of a moment’s consideration or discussion. It offers no opportunity for rationally updating or revising one’s views. If someone offers a question-begging argument as a source of potential interest and insight when it really has zero potential for either, you may start to have serious doubts about their philosophical competence!

Of course, everyone gets muddled sometimes; mistakes happen, and questions get begged. Hardly the end of the world. And it’s helpful to accurately identify when it has happened; it’d be a shame to waste our time thinking about non-problems when there are so many more interesting problems out there we could be grappling with! But accurate identification is key. Before lobbing such a bomb, pause and ask yourself: Do you really think the argument is vacuous, or do you merely mean to make the weaker claim that you expect committed opponents to remain unconvinced? (Then consider whether the latter goes without saying.)2

Intellectual Virtue and Intellectual Empathy

If you’re reading this blog, you probably like to think of yourself as a generally rational, appropriately open-minded (discerning, not dogmatic) person. You recognize that reasonable people can disagree with your philosophical views, and accordingly that there are non-question-begging objections — objections worth considering and engaging with — that you remain personally unpersuaded by. Persuading you in particular can hardly be a necessary criterion for philosophical merit.

Accurate diagnosis of question-begging arguments thus requires a kind of intellectual empathy: an ability to consider whether others—neutral fence-sitters, for example—might reasonably be swayed by the argument even though you aren’t. If so, then it seems like there’s something there worth responding to. By attempting to inoculate your audience against the superficial appeal of (what you see as) a misguided argument, you will be prompted to add new depth to our collective philosophical understanding. That’s a good and welcome thing. (If you are rather the one who is mistaken, further steps in the dialectic may bring this to light in a way that wouldn’t be so clear if everyone just dismissed and ignored everyone they disagreed with.)

As I previously put it:

Recall that the problem with “question-begging” arguments is that they offer no substantive illumination. They are philosophically vacuous. So to assess whether a target work is indeed “question-begging”, one must ask questions like: (i) whether anyone could reasonably be swayed by it; or (ii) whether it highlights some previously-neglected cost or challenge that those who wish to reject the conclusion would need to grapple with. If the answer to either of these questions is yes—as it very often is—then it is not “question-begging”. It is, instead, merely contestable.

Remember that being contestable is a good sign in philosophy. If a paper weren’t contestable, that would seem another kind of vacuity or insubstantiality.3 Good philosophy is substantive, which is why truly question-begging papers are not worth publishing or engaging with (there is literally no substance there with which to engage). But, as noted above, the practice of rejecting papers for containing contestable claims also promotes vacuity. In other words: false charges of begging the question are bad for the same reason that begging the question is bad. Both errors deprive us of interesting, substantial philosophy, and ought to be avoided for precisely that reason.

Degrees of transparency

The strongest objection to the above is that I frame it as an “all or nothing” matter: if an argument offers any illumination at all (to anyone?), then it isn’t strictly question-begging. But what logical connections are or aren’t obvious will vary from person to person. A sufficiently confused person might be aided by (what the rest of us would consider) even the most blatantly question-begging arguments. Conversely, all the arguments we find illuminating would seem transparently question-begging to a logically omniscient being (who has nothing left to learn from philosophical reflection). Should we conclude that it’s all just a matter of degree, then?

Given the role that charges of “begging the question” play in policing philosophical dialectics and assessing philosophical value, I think it’s most helpful to keep it as a threshold concept. (An unappealing alternative would claim that every argument is question-begging to a greater or lesser degree, presumably leading to much quibbling over what degree of condemnation is warranted in each case!) We might appeal to a standard of “reasonable interlocutors”. If a sufficient proportion of reasonable, philosophically competent and well-informed fence-sitters could be expected to find the argument informative and persuasive, then it isn’t question-begging. This makes the standard contingent, and one that might change over time (as the philosophical community becomes more or less wise). But it maintains my central distinction between simply being unpersuasive to committed partisans — a property shared by many fine arguments! — and being uninterestingly question-begging.

Terminology aside, the substantive point I especially want to emphasize is that arguments we personally find unpersuasive can still be philosophically interesting, valuable, and worth engaging with rather than dismissing. So, insofar as “begging the question” is understood to warrant hasty dismissal, it isn’t a charge that we should take to be warranted simply due to being personally unpersuaded by an argument. And insofar as we think people tend to err on the side of dismissing too much, we should encourage norms of caution when it comes to diagnosing opposing arguments as begging the question. (I suspect that most such dismissals turn out to be mistaken.)

Conclusion

We should generally want to encourage more cross-camp engagement rather than less. So we should embrace norms on which it’s intellectually virtuous to seriously engage with objections that one’s critics and interlocutors take seriously, even when you think they’re bad objections. Two points to especially bear in mind:

(1) If your critics are philosophically competent, it’s unlikely that their arguments are really “question begging”, even if they’re unlikely to convince a committed opponent. Good arguments may serve more modest dialectical goals.

(2) Before dismissing an objection as “question begging”, check whether you recognize any objections to your view as philosophically serious. If nothing meets your absolute standards, shift to a comparative question: “How does this new objection compare to the standard fare?” If your critic’s objection is plausibly among the best available, then it’s worth (publishing and) addressing!

Clarifying Naturalism

Metaphysical naturalism is the view that all real properties ultimately reduce to natural ones: the kinds of properties studied by the empirical sciences. For example, metaethical naturalists identify the property of moral rightness with whatever natural property makes an act right (e.g. maximizing happiness). A physicalist about the mind holds that consciousness just is some physical or functional property of our brains. Non-naturalists and property dualists, by contrast, view these cases as involving correlated but distinct properties: the underlying natural ones give rise to some further (irreducibly moral or mental) feature.

These reductive views appeal to many. They’re ontologically parsimonious. They align (vibes-wise) with the extraordinary success of the scientific worldview. And they avoid “spooky” posits like irreducible moral facts or non-physical qualia.

One obvious cause for hesitancy: it’s extremely natural to hold that the natural right-making properties explain why an act is right, and that physical or functional properties explain why we are conscious. But things don’t explain themselves. The intuitive picture only makes sense if we have two distinct properties, one of which systematically gives rise to the other, in law-like fashion. Reductive accounts struggle to make sense of these natural thoughts.

That’s just a quick intuitive concern. A stronger objection can be found by exploring the deeper structural problem for reductionists: they can’t make sense of the fact that debates about the distribution of mental and moral properties are substantive. If physicalism is true, it’s a terminological question whether AIs and octopuses are conscious. If metaethical naturalism is true, fundamental moral disputes similarly bottom out in mere semantics. Let me explain.

Delineating the Sun

Imagine two microphysically-omniscient astronomers disagreeing about precisely which collection of atoms constitutes the Sun. Their proposals overwhelmingly overlap—they just differ slightly on where to draw the boundary. Maybe one includes a particular borderline atom in the Sun’s outermost fringes and the other doesn’t.

This is clearly a merely terminological disagreement. The two parties diverge on whether the label ‘Sun’ picks out the minimal collection S, or the slightly larger collection S*. There’s no further issue at stake about which they disagree. There’s no special further property of really being the Sun that one collection of atoms has and the other lacks. Once you know the physical facts—where the atoms are, how they’re behaving—there’s nothing more left to discover. The remaining question is just about how to use a word.

My key claim is that disagreements about the distribution of minds and moral properties are not like this. We’re trying to track independent reality, not just disputing empty labels.

Disputing Consciousness

Would you still be conscious if your neurons were replaced by functionally identical silicon chips? What if the functional role of your neurons were instead realized by billions of people communicating via walkie-talkies (as in Ned Block’s “Chinese Nation” thought experiment)?

These seem like substantive open questions. We know all the relevant physical facts: by stipulation, the silicon brain is functionally identical, just made of different stuff. If physicalism is true, and the physical facts are all the facts there are, then there’s nothing more to wonder about. The physicalist can ask the semantic question of whether ‘consciousness’ picks out functional property P₁ or biological property P₂. But given that we already know the physical setup (the silicon brain has P₁ but not P₂), there’s nothing in reality left open—just a terminological choice to make.

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