3 ms·
I'm not yrimaxi, and I'm very much in the EA camp, but I suspect a lot of people bounce off the implication that there isn't really such a thing as supererogati
by rossnordby 6y ago
I'm not yrimaxi, and I'm very much in the EA camp, but I suspect a lot of people bounce off the implication that there isn't really such a thing as supererogation.
A lot of EA messaging tries to work around this by trying to avoid guilt trips or demanding that you do everything you possibly can, since asking too much is a good way to end up with nothing. See Giving What We Can and similar.
But a lot of the justifications for this kind of approach can very easily imply a much higher bar than anyone can meet. Taking global health as an example- millions of preventable deaths a year, and if you work yourself to the bone for years, you can only hope to partially mitigate it.
Even if the messaging says, "hey, just do what you can sustainably and don't worry about being perfect, because that's way better than nothing," the logic behind it is based on nothing more than observations of actions and their consequences. There's not a specific threshold where your job is actually done, and 'failure' to meet the impossible bar generally means mass death.
For someone outside EA, it is very easy to go from that observation to "these people are telling me I am basically a mass murderer for not helping, and even if I help, I'll still in practice be a mass murderer because I'll help suboptimally, gee thanks."
Even if very few identifying with the EA community would endorse that phrasing or the implied moral judgment, I can see how people could end up feeling that way. Not sure what to do about it.
- yrimaxi 6y agoMaybe you are pursuing a different point than mine, but my own point was about alienation, not supererogation. I don’t put EA proponents on such a lofty pedestal.
- rossnordby 6y agoYup, started writing my response before I saw yours, definitely a different point. I do think that the implied burden is still alienating in a sense and that's what motivated my post (the philosophy can just feel really bad in some ways when you get into the nitty gritty, and many people don't respond well to that), but you were clearly talking about a different kind of alienation.
- yrimaxi 6y agoI guess it’s affirming to think that people reject one’s ethical outlook because it would necessitate such an awe-inspiring commitment or burden. Rather than for more analytic reasons.
- rossnordby 6y agoIt doesn't actually require awe-inspiring commitment and dramatic personal sacrifice, and such grand gestures would likely end up unsustainable. I just suspect that the ideas themselves will tend to sound really hoity toity and holier than thou, which isn't helpful in persuasion. Case in point- I was deliberately trying to avoid that, and it appears I failed badly. (Edit: reading my first post, it's definitely the case that I did not make the connection here explicit- the rejection isn't merely 'oh no I can't handle the TRUTH', but more like, 'ugh, these guys'. A big part of it is social in nature, stacked on top of the underlying problem of asking too much.) A huge part of EA is driven by analysis of effectiveness. If I want to be effective, I have to figure out how to be effective. If someone provides a valuable insight on how to be more effective, it's not a rejection of my ethical outlook, but rather useful information.