I think there's really two kinds of things we're talking in colloquial terms about when we talk about ethics or morality, and I wish we had clear, commonly understood terms to distinguish them:
1. What obligations do you have to meet to be a member of [community] in good standing?
2. What is good and bad in the world in general?
I think common sense morality is mostly focused on #1, but to the extent it does focus on #2 it uses similar terms.
A someone who is EA sympathetic (and became vegetarian and doing monthly donations based in part on EA arguments), but also isn't a pure consequentialist, searing consequentialist rhetoric about maximizing the good didn't work on me. Neither did framing it as a hobby. What worked was framing it as supererogatory. I may not be an evil person for not doing more, but don't I want to contribute more? Don't I also want to decrease how much suffering my actions cause? There's a little guilt born of this, but it's not crushing guilt either.
Yep. "Hobby" is probably too narrow and maybe trivializing. The general category of "thing you choose to pursue for your own reasons" is what I'm trying to point to.
Strongly agree. I think avoiding this obligation framing is esp. easy when you do not think good-maxxing is an obligation anyway. I personally am not sure what it philosophically means to call something a moral obligation (where does it come from? what follows from violating it, if anything?). Also, the obligation framing implies moral blame, which I think may not be real. Blame often requires some form of free will (may or may not be real). And moral luck complicates things further. I am not sure anyone is to "blame" for any action, or that any of us have any obligations at all.
For the reasons above, I dislike using Singer's drowning-child thought experiment or similar framings. I think the situation we're all currently in is more akin to walking along a shore and seeing drowning children everywhere, as far as the eye can see. In that case, the intuition that we are obligated to keep jumping in and saving children is weaker than the intuition that we must save the child in Singer's version.
> I present EA as a hobby: “we try to figure out how to best improve the balance of suffering and happiness in the world and then do that.”
I personally like and use "finding the best ways to help others," which I think induces positive feelings. I personally visualize physically helping someone when I hear it, whereas "doing the most good" feels too abstract. It also avoids a very difficult follow-up: "How do you define good?" I started using this framing after reading this study by Rethink Priorities: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y6zMpdwkkAQ8rF56w/framing-ea-doing-good-better-did-worse. They found that "doing good better" performed badly and "find the best ways to help others" was better. I think your explanation nails why! Thanks for writing this.
Right. Non realists about obligation. My impression is that many EAs are scalar utilitarian or adjacent, which is a realist position, just not one of duties/obligation. Which also explain why people use the language of 'good', even if you may argue it's counterproductive.
"In fact, I think most EAs are non-realists who think the opportunity framing better tracks reality"
I'm confused. Do you mean non realists about morality? About obligation in particular? Is this tracking reality a moral reality? Some other kind of reality?
The word reality maybe not ideal. I just mean that what’s actually going on with ethics is that people are doing what they want to do, rather than interpreting the world as imposing specific duties on them
I think there's really two kinds of things we're talking in colloquial terms about when we talk about ethics or morality, and I wish we had clear, commonly understood terms to distinguish them:
1. What obligations do you have to meet to be a member of [community] in good standing?
2. What is good and bad in the world in general?
I think common sense morality is mostly focused on #1, but to the extent it does focus on #2 it uses similar terms.
A someone who is EA sympathetic (and became vegetarian and doing monthly donations based in part on EA arguments), but also isn't a pure consequentialist, searing consequentialist rhetoric about maximizing the good didn't work on me. Neither did framing it as a hobby. What worked was framing it as supererogatory. I may not be an evil person for not doing more, but don't I want to contribute more? Don't I also want to decrease how much suffering my actions cause? There's a little guilt born of this, but it's not crushing guilt either.
Yep. "Hobby" is probably too narrow and maybe trivializing. The general category of "thing you choose to pursue for your own reasons" is what I'm trying to point to.
Strongly agree. I think avoiding this obligation framing is esp. easy when you do not think good-maxxing is an obligation anyway. I personally am not sure what it philosophically means to call something a moral obligation (where does it come from? what follows from violating it, if anything?). Also, the obligation framing implies moral blame, which I think may not be real. Blame often requires some form of free will (may or may not be real). And moral luck complicates things further. I am not sure anyone is to "blame" for any action, or that any of us have any obligations at all.
For the reasons above, I dislike using Singer's drowning-child thought experiment or similar framings. I think the situation we're all currently in is more akin to walking along a shore and seeing drowning children everywhere, as far as the eye can see. In that case, the intuition that we are obligated to keep jumping in and saving children is weaker than the intuition that we must save the child in Singer's version.
> I present EA as a hobby: “we try to figure out how to best improve the balance of suffering and happiness in the world and then do that.”
I personally like and use "finding the best ways to help others," which I think induces positive feelings. I personally visualize physically helping someone when I hear it, whereas "doing the most good" feels too abstract. It also avoids a very difficult follow-up: "How do you define good?" I started using this framing after reading this study by Rethink Priorities: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y6zMpdwkkAQ8rF56w/framing-ea-doing-good-better-did-worse. They found that "doing good better" performed badly and "find the best ways to help others" was better. I think your explanation nails why! Thanks for writing this.
Right. Non realists about obligation. My impression is that many EAs are scalar utilitarian or adjacent, which is a realist position, just not one of duties/obligation. Which also explain why people use the language of 'good', even if you may argue it's counterproductive.
"In fact, I think most EAs are non-realists who think the opportunity framing better tracks reality"
I'm confused. Do you mean non realists about morality? About obligation in particular? Is this tracking reality a moral reality? Some other kind of reality?
The word reality maybe not ideal. I just mean that what’s actually going on with ethics is that people are doing what they want to do, rather than interpreting the world as imposing specific duties on them
Years ago, I heard Will M on a podcast. He framed it as the way to be a Hero.