EA - Effective Altruism Deconfusion, Part 2: Causes, Philosophy, and Social Constraints by Davidmanheim

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Effective Altruism Deconfusion, Part 2: Causes, Philosophy, and Social Constraints, published by Davidmanheim on February 5, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is part 2 of my attempt to disentangle and clarify some parts of the overall set of claims that comprise effective altruism, in this case, the set of philosophical positions and cause areas - not to evaluate them, but to enable clearer discussion of the claims, and disagreements, to both opponents and proponents. In my previous post, I made a number of claims about Effective Altruism as a philosophical position. I claimed that there is a nearly universally accepted normative claim that doing good things is important, and a slightly less universal but widely agreed upon claim that one should do those things effectively.My central claim in this post is that the notion of “impartial,” when determining “how to maximize the good with a given unit of resources, in impartial welfarist terms” is hiding almost all of the philosophical complexity and debate that occurs. In the previous post, I said that Effective Altruism as a philosophy was widely shared. Now I’m saying that the specific goals are very much not shared. Unsurprisingly, this mostly appears in discussions of cause area prioritization. But the set of causes that could be prioritized are, I claim, far larger than the set effective altruists typically assume - and embed lots of assumptions and claims that aren’t getting questioned clearly.Causes and PhilosophyTo start, I’d like to explore the compatibility or lack of compatibility of Effective Altruism with other philosophical positions. There are many different philosophical areas and positions, and most of them aren’t actually limited to philosophers. Without going into the different areas of philosophy in detail, I’ll say that I think all of axiology, which includes both aesthetics and ethics, and large parts of metaphysics, are all actually pretty central to the questions Effective Altruism addresses. These debates are central to any discussion of how to pursue cause-neutrality, but are often, in fact, nearly always, ignored by the community.Aesthetics and EA, or Aesthetics versus EA?For example, aesthetics, the study of beauty and joy, could be central to the question of maximizing welfare. According to some views, joy and beauty tell us what welfare is. Many point out that someone can derive great pleasure from something physically painful or unpleasant directly - working out, or sacrificing themselves for a cause, whether it be their children, or their religious beliefs. Similarly, many actually value art and music highly personally. Given a choice between, say, losing their hearing and never again getting to listen to music, or living another decade, many would choose music. Preference utilitarianism (or the equivalent preference beneficentrism,) would say that people benefit from getting what they want.Similarly, many people place great value on aesthetics, and think that music and the arts are an important part of benefiting others. On the other hand, a thought experiment that is sometimes used to argue about consequentialism is to imagine a museum on fire, and weigh saving, say, the Mona Lisa against saving a patron who was there to look at it. Typically, the point being made is that the Mona Lisa has a monetary value that far exceeds the cost of saving a life, and so a certain type of person, say, an economist, might say to save the painting. (An EA might then sell it, and use the proceeds to save many lives.) But a different viewpoint is that there is a reason the Mona Lisa is valued so highly - aesthetics matters to people so much that, when considering public budgeting between fighting homelessness and funding museums, they think the correct moral tradeoff is to spend some money ...