EA - Getting on a different train: can Effective Altruism avoid collapsing into absurdity? by Peter McLaughlin

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: Getting on a different train: can Effective Altruism avoid collapsing into absurdity?, published by Peter McLaughlin on October 7, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Thank you to Sam Atis, Robert Harling, Guive Assadi, Pranay Mittal, and Francis Priestland for comments on earlier drafts. The research for this post was supported by a grant from the FTX Future Fund Regranting Program. The train to crazy town Introduction Sam Atis, following on from some arguments by Scott Alexander, writes of ‘the train to Crazy Town’. As Sam presents it, there are a series of escalating challenges to utilitarian-style (and more broadly consequentialist-style) reasoning, leading further and further into absurdity. Sam himself bites the bullet on some classic cases, like the transplant problem and the repugnant conclusion, but is put off by some more difficult examples: Thomas Hurka’s St Petersburg Paradox: Suppose you are offered a deal—you can press a button that has a 51% chance of creating a new world and doubling the total amount of utility, but a 49% chance of destroying the world and all utility in existence. If you want to maximise total expected utility, you ought to press the button—pressing the button has positive expected value. But the problem comes when you are asked whether you want to press the button again and again and again—at each point, the person trying to maximise expected utility ought to agree to press the button, but of course, eventually they will destroy everything. The Very Repugnant Conclusion: Once [utilitarians] assign some positive value, however small, to the creation of each person who has a weak preference for leading her life rather than no life, then how can they stop short of saying that some large number of such lives can compensate for the creation of lots of dreadful lives, lives in pain and torture that nobody would want to live? Most people, like Sam, try to get off the train before they reach the end of the line, trying to preserve some but not all of utilitarianism. And so the question is: how far are you willing to go? As a list of challenges to utilitarianism, I think Sam’s post is lacking: he is very focussed on specific thought experiments, ignoring more theoretical objections that in my view are much more insightful. But as a provocation—how far will you go in your utilitarianism?—I think it’s an extraordinarily useful post. Sam takes it upon himself to pose the following question: ‘what are the principles by which we should decide when to get off the train?’ But something worries me about Sam’s presentation. Who said you could actually get off the train to crazy town? Each additional challenge to utilitarian logic—each stop on the route—does not seem to assume any new premises: every problem is generated by the same basic starting point of impartially weighing up all people’s experiences and preferences against each other. As such, there just might not be any principles you can use to justify biting this bullet but not that bullet—doing so might even be logically incoherent. Sam says that he does want to get off the train eventually, but it’s not clear how he would do that. Alexander’s original post suggests something closer to this view. He explains why he dislikes the Repugnant Conclusion and various other situations in which ‘longtermist’-style consequentialism goes awry, and then lays out the position he would take to avoid these conclusions ‘[i]f I had to play the philosophy game’. But, he writes, ‘I’m not sure I want to play the philosophy game.’ He’s not confident that his own partial theoretical compromise actually will avoid the absurdity (and rightly so), and he cares more about avoiding absurdity than he does about getting on the train. Mainstream commentators from outside Effective Altruism have made this point too. Step...