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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44943 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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This might provoke a reaction here: Effective altruism is the new woke

Effectively, both longtermism and woke progressivism take a highly restricted number of emotional impulses many of us ordinarily have, and then vividly conjure up heart-rending scenarios of supposed harm in order to prime our malleable intuitions in the desired direction. Each insists that we then extend these impulses quasi-rigorously, past any possible relevance to our own personal lives. According to longtermists, if you are the sort of person who, naturally enough, tries to minimise risks to your unborn children, cares about future grandchildren, or worries more about unlikely personal disasters rather than likely inconveniences, then you should impersonalise these impulses and radically scale them up to humanity as a whole. According to the woke, if you think kindness and inclusion are important, you should seek to pursue these attitudes mechanically, not just within institutions, but also in sports teams, in sexual choices, and even in your application of the categories of the human biological sexes.

I do think it could be worthwhile to have a discussion about the parallels between EA and wokeism, but unfortunately the author's actual comparison of the two is rather sparse, focusing on just this one methodological point about how they both allegedly amplify our moral impulses beyond their natural scope. She also runs the risk of conflating longtermism with EA more broadly.

To me, an obvious similarity between EA and wokeism is that they both function as substitutes for religion, giving structure and meaning to individuals who might otherwise find themselves floating in the nihilistic void. Sacrifice yourself for LGBT, sacrifice yourself for Jesus, sacrifice yourself for malaria nets - it's all the same story at the end of the day. A nice concrete goal to strive for, and an actionable plan on how to achieve it, so that personal ethical deliberation is minimized - that's a very comforting sort of structure to devote yourself to.

I'd also be interested in exploring how both EA and wokeism relate to utilitarianism. In the case of EA the relation is pretty obvious, with wokeism it's less clear, but there does seem to be something utilitarian about the woke worldview, in the sense that personal comfort (or the personal comfort of the oppressed) will always win out over fidelity to abstract values like freedom and authenticity.

In light of William McCaskill (who I find to be a pretty likeable guy!) being on Econtalk this week, my wife and I were talking a bit about longtermism this week and we share the same intuition that it's just not compelling at all. Part of this is probably just that I'm not a utilitarian, but there's something more there too - it just doesn't resonate emotionally with me in any way. Likewise, I just don't care about what happens in faraway lands very much. I don't actually think those people in the far future or off in Ukraine lack moral value; I think they have the same moral value that I or my neighbors have. The thing is, I want to live in the kind of neighborhood (and family, and city, and nation, and so on) where concentric loyalties far outstrip this sort of longtermist view. I could probably draw up some utiltarianish explanation for why I think this, but again, I'm not a utilitarian and I'm not even an egalitarian. I'm comfortable relying on the moral intuition that my neighbor is approximately infinitely more important to me than someone living on the Mongolian steppe in 2738 without feeling any real need to justify that position. On the bright side, I'm reasonably confident that the steppesman would think the same of me if he ever became aware of the history of my part of the world.

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