HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
fozz 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
I don't think the FTX/SBF debacle relates to EA at all.
I think it does. The standard conservative critique of utilitarianism is that it externalizes responsibility and incentivizes sociopathic behavior. Robbing Peter to pay Paul buy bed-nets and donate to Democratic causes is not only acceptable but morally laudable if it increases net utility. This characterization may be dismissed by members of the EA community as an uncharitable strawman, but as Bankman-Fried has just demonstrated this is not a strawman at all.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul buy bed-nets and donate to Democratic causes is not only acceptable but morally laudable if it increases net utility.
Robbing isn't the right thing, because, among other problems, it's not sustainable. It sows clear distrust & it won't ultimately help you win in pursuit of your value. It works once or twice, but falls apart in an iterative game. (But yes, robbing from the rich in order to feed impoverished children is obviously ethically solid in a vacuum.)
Instead, people ought to be compelled to freely give to the most effective charities via rational arguments & through the example of others. It needs to grow organically into a cultural norm. And, again, robbing is an unstainable norm.
See Singer's 'Child Drowning in a Shallow Pond' thought experiment for the key premise of EA.
EA contains the rational argument for why each person is morally responsible for every other person, regardless of geographic or relational/genetic proximity.
Caplan is in fact anti-Singerian on this issue, whatever his other faults or positions. Here, @VelveteenAmbush has linked to this piece where Caplan demonstrates Singerian logic:
Most strikingly, Singer and Lazari-Radek apply this doctrine of secrecy to bite the bullet of the Forced Organ Donation hypothetical:
One of the most common objections to consequentialism is based on a hypothetical situation in which a surgeon has to do a delicate brain operation on a patient who happens to be the ideal organ donor for four other patients in the hospital, each of whom will die shortly unless they receive, respectively, a heart, a liver, and – for two of them – a kidney. The doctor is highly skilled, and is confident of her ability to carry out the brain surgery successfully. If she does, her patient will lead a more or less normal life.
We agree that the consequentialist must accept that, in these circumstances, the right thing for the surgeon to do would be to kill the one to save the four, but we do not agree that this means that consequentialism should be rejected. We think, on the contrary, that the appearance of unacceptability here comes from the fact that this is one of those rare cases in which the action is right only if perfect secrecy can be expected. Moreover, it is not an action that should be recommended to others.
[...] We may be influenced by the consequences of inviting children to question the justification for obeying moral rules, and if the consequences are going to be sufficiently bad, we may condemn those who, like Socrates, encourage the young to question the basis of morality.
From this perspective, the same obviously goes for morally immature adults. Which, for a strict utilitarian, probably sum to 99%+ of humanity.
To repeat, in our debate, Singer disavowed his early extreme view that everyone who fails to donate all of their surplus wealth to the global poor is a wrong-doer. But he did so with no hint of an explanation. He definitely didn’t distance himself from utilitarianism or any of the factual premises behind his original argument. Given his explicit endorsement of esotericism - and his hard-line stance on the Forced Organ Donation hypothetical - the conclusion that Singer is feigning moderation for the greater good isn’t merely probable. It is all but certain.
The point is roughly as you say: utilitarians are only honest inasmuch as it is strategically expedient in a particular case. They cannot credibly precommit to a rule, for the simple reason that their prime directive is increasing utility; in a hypothetical scenario where they receive compelling evidence that breaking a rule would achieve that end with no cost-prohibitive second-order effects, they are ethically bound to break that rule. Of course, they can counter that deontologists are equally vulnerable to inconvenient hypotheticals (Kant's axe-wielding murderer), if not more so; but it is what it is. A utilitarian can, at most, say «I will not defect against the conventional morality to opportunistically increase utility, so long as I am not double dog sure it won't backfire». They couch it in different words: Yud says that only God gets to be a naive utilitarian (tbh based), Scott inserts his fretful caveats, Kelsey Piper has another set, @fozz appeals to sustainability in iterative games (an argument that's vulnerable to simple rug pulls) and Singer says, essentially, that the better breed of humans get to be our secret masters, our empathy-filled shepherds (or as Chesterton would've put it, omnipotent moral busybodies. I wonder what Lewis or Dostoyevsky would have made of it).
But that's what it amounts to: means justifying ends with the ends being greatest good for the greatest number, doing as much diligence as possible given the situation; and praying that you're not too high on your own supply or on performance-enhancing drugs to miss a critical hole in your too-clever-by-half plan, or a whistleblower.
P.S. I modestly propose a improvement on ethical dilemmas, to put a finer point on the real issue. (Probably this already exists in the literature).
You're a surgeon, you have five patients, you can kill one for his organs to save four yadda yadda. The twist is: you have an intern who's a deontologist. Luckily, the intern has a well-suppressed but rapidly lethal condition, let's say diabetes or epilepsy or extreme allergy, that allows you to easily cause her death (e.g. by swapping available insulin with saline, or releasing your pet Asian giant hornet you secretly keep for this exact scenario) and claim innocence.
A) Assuming the intern will discover and ruin your plan otherwise, do you kill her before the operation begins?
B) You may kill the Neurological Patient on your own, but you'll need the intern's help to finish all transplantations in time. If you let her go home, you'll be able to obscure the paperwork, but two of your beneficiaries will surely die. If you solicit her help, she will inevitably check medical records of all patients involved later, discover that the Neurological Patient had a trivial condition and, given your skill, was unlikely to die without your intent, figure it out and report you, causing a scandal, sending you behind bars and preventing all possible future utilitarian transplantations, perhaps not just in this clinic but globally.
I hadn't seen that bit from Caplan before. So thank you. My familiarity with him comes mostly from his stuff on government and open borders where his views seem to skew much closer to Singer's. One of his bug-bears in the Myth of the Rational Voter is the "irrational bias" against various global economic metrics in favor of localism. In essence, complaining about how people seem to care more about their jobs than the increase in net global utility GDP that could be achieved by outsourcing those jobs to China/India.
I don't harbor much love for Caplan nor do I agree a great deal with his proposals (and e.g. his debate with Scott wrt the economic incentive model of mental illnesses was... asinine). It is not clear how he resolves this issue. Probably he accepts the fundamental premise of increasing utility, particularly in the narrow sense of multiplying total material/financial wealth, the domain where this framework is most applicable; but as a libertarian (and not-wholly-insane-person) he balks at the generalized conclusion where even intentional murder becomes justified.
Alternatively, he may disapprove of Singer's remarkable openness on this topic.
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Notes -
I don't think the FTX/SBF debacle relates to EA at all.
EA is a set of ethical arguments.
That some guy within the sphere of people associated with EA might be greedy/stupid was already in my model.
It doesn't have the slightest effect on the ethical arguments.
I think it does. The standard conservative critique of utilitarianism is that it externalizes responsibility and incentivizes sociopathic behavior. Robbing Peter to
pay Paulbuy bed-nets and donate to Democratic causes is not only acceptable but morally laudable if it increases net utility. This characterization may be dismissed by members of the EA community as an uncharitable strawman, but as Bankman-Fried has just demonstrated this is not a strawman at all.Robbing isn't the right thing, because, among other problems, it's not sustainable. It sows clear distrust & it won't ultimately help you win in pursuit of your value. It works once or twice, but falls apart in an iterative game. (But yes, robbing from the rich in order to feed impoverished children is obviously ethically solid in a vacuum.)
Instead, people ought to be compelled to freely give to the most effective charities via rational arguments & through the example of others. It needs to grow organically into a cultural norm. And, again, robbing is an unstainable norm.
See Singer's 'Child Drowning in a Shallow Pond' thought experiment for the key premise of EA.
EA contains the rational argument for why each person is morally responsible for every other person, regardless of geographic or relational/genetic proximity.
As another user user put it "real effective altruism has never been tried" and "Compelled" is a telling choice of words
Singer, Caplan, and their apologists are exactly the sort of high IQ idiots I had in mind.
Caplan is in fact anti-Singerian on this issue, whatever his other faults or positions. Here, @VelveteenAmbush has linked to this piece where Caplan demonstrates Singerian logic:
The point is roughly as you say: utilitarians are only honest inasmuch as it is strategically expedient in a particular case. They cannot credibly precommit to a rule, for the simple reason that their prime directive is increasing utility; in a hypothetical scenario where they receive compelling evidence that breaking a rule would achieve that end with no cost-prohibitive second-order effects, they are ethically bound to break that rule. Of course, they can counter that deontologists are equally vulnerable to inconvenient hypotheticals (Kant's axe-wielding murderer), if not more so; but it is what it is. A utilitarian can, at most, say «I will not defect against the conventional morality to opportunistically increase utility, so long as I am not double dog sure it won't backfire». They couch it in different words: Yud says that only God gets to be a naive utilitarian (tbh based), Scott inserts his fretful caveats, Kelsey Piper has another set, @fozz appeals to sustainability in iterative games (an argument that's vulnerable to simple rug pulls) and Singer says, essentially, that the better breed of humans get to be our secret masters, our empathy-filled shepherds (or as Chesterton would've put it, omnipotent moral busybodies. I wonder what Lewis or Dostoyevsky would have made of it).
But that's what it amounts to: means justifying ends with the ends being greatest good for the greatest number, doing as much diligence as possible given the situation; and praying that you're not too high on your own supply or on performance-enhancing drugs to miss a critical hole in your too-clever-by-half plan, or a whistleblower.
P.S. I modestly propose a improvement on ethical dilemmas, to put a finer point on the real issue. (Probably this already exists in the literature).
You're a surgeon, you have five patients, you can kill one for his organs to save four yadda yadda. The twist is: you have an intern who's a deontologist. Luckily, the intern has a well-suppressed but rapidly lethal condition, let's say diabetes or epilepsy or extreme allergy, that allows you to easily cause her death (e.g. by swapping available insulin with saline, or releasing your pet Asian giant hornet you secretly keep for this exact scenario) and claim innocence.
A) Assuming the intern will discover and ruin your plan otherwise, do you kill her before the operation begins?
B) You may kill the Neurological Patient on your own, but you'll need the intern's help to finish all transplantations in time. If you let her go home, you'll be able to obscure the paperwork, but two of your beneficiaries will surely die. If you solicit her help, she will inevitably check medical records of all patients involved later, discover that the Neurological Patient had a trivial condition and, given your skill, was unlikely to die without your intent, figure it out and report you, causing a scandal, sending you behind bars and preventing all possible future utilitarian transplantations, perhaps not just in this clinic but globally.
Again, will you DO IT or not?
I hadn't seen that bit from Caplan before. So thank you. My familiarity with him comes mostly from his stuff on government and open borders where his views seem to skew much closer to Singer's. One of his bug-bears in the Myth of the Rational Voter is the "irrational bias" against various global economic metrics in favor of localism. In essence, complaining about how people seem to care more about their jobs than the increase in
net global utilityGDP that could be achieved by outsourcing those jobs to China/India.As for the rest, consider it endorsed.
I don't harbor much love for Caplan nor do I agree a great deal with his proposals (and e.g. his debate with Scott wrt the economic incentive model of mental illnesses was... asinine). It is not clear how he resolves this issue. Probably he accepts the fundamental premise of increasing utility, particularly in the narrow sense of multiplying total material/financial wealth, the domain where this framework is most applicable; but as a libertarian (and not-wholly-insane-person) he balks at the generalized conclusion where even intentional murder becomes justified.
Alternatively, he may disapprove of Singer's remarkable openness on this topic.
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