Re:Effective altruism is not effective
by TeMPOraL on Thursday April 15, 2021 @12:23PM
(#26822508)
> Most humans look at a person and immediately bucket them into a cohort using some mix of physical attributes and prior beliefs of these attributes. Once we're in a cohort, relative probabilities can change.
That indeed happens, but going by the gut isn't a bullet-proof moral philosophy. Snap judgements are something we can evaluate and consciously calibrate when we're not in the heat of the moment.
> lots of intelligent philosophers have argued against utilitarianism and have brought up flaws in utilitarianism
Yeah, I read some of those, many are really solid objections. I'm not arguing that utilitarianism is the be-all, end-all moral philosophy - just that it's a surprisingly good heuristic that can be pushed quite far before it starts to go "off the rails". And primarily, I'm arguing that working with approximations and heuristics is something we know how to do - not being able to compute a perfectly precise answer isn't a valid argument against a method.
That indeed happens, but going by the gut isn't a bullet-proof moral philosophy. Snap judgements are something we can evaluate and consciously calibrate when we're not in the heat of the moment.
> lots of intelligent philosophers have argued against utilitarianism and have brought up flaws in utilitarianism
Yeah, I read some of those, many are really solid objections. I'm not arguing that utilitarianism is the be-all, end-all moral philosophy - just that it's a surprisingly good heuristic that can be pushed quite far before it starts to go "off the rails". And primarily, I'm arguing that working with approximations and heuristics is something we know how to do - not being able to compute a perfectly precise answer isn't a valid argument against a method.