The Nonlinear Library EA - Some thoughts on moderation in doing good by Vasco Grilo
Jan 21, 2024
15:42
Welcome 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: Some thoughts on moderation in doing good, published by Vasco Grilo on January 21, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This is a crosspost for Some thoughts on moderation in doing good by Benjamin Todd, as published on 80,000 Hours' website on 5 May 2023.
Here's one of the deepest tensions in doing good:
How much should you do what seems right to you, even if it seems extreme or controversial, vs how much should you moderate your views and actions based on other perspectives?
If you moderate too much, you won't be doing anything novel or ambitious, which really reduces how much impact you might have. The people who have had the biggest impact historically often spoke out about entrenched views and were met with hostility - think of the civil rights movement or Galileo.
Moreover, simply following ethical 'common sense' has a horrible track record. It used to be common sense to think that homosexuality was evil, slavery was the natural order, and that the environment was there for us to exploit.
And there is still so much wrong with the world. Millions of people die of easily preventable diseases, society is deeply unfair, billions of animals are tortured in factory farms, and we're gambling our entire future by failing to mitigate threats like climate change. These huge problems deserve radical action - while conventional wisdom appears to accept doing little about them.
On a very basic level, doing more good is better than doing less. But this is a potentially endless and demanding principle, and most people don't give it much attention or pursue it very systematically. So it wouldn't be surprising if a concern for doing good led you to positions that seem radical or unusual to the rest of society.
This means that simply sticking with what others think, doing what's 'sensible' or common sense, isn't going to cut it. And in fact, by choosing the apparently 'moderate' path, you could still end up supporting things that are actively evil.
But at the same time, there are huge dangers in blazing a trail through untested moral terrain.
The dangers of extremism
Many of the most harmful people in history were convinced they were right, others were wrong - and they were putting their ideas into practice "for the greater good" but with disastrous results.
Aggressively acting on a narrow, contrarian idea of what to do has a worrying track record, which includes people who have killed tens of millions and dominated whole societies - consider, for example, the the Leninists.
The truth is that you're almost certainly wrong about what's best in some important ways . We understand very little of what matters, and everything has cascading and unforeseen effects.
Your model of the world should produce uncertain results about what's best, but you should also be uncertain about which models are best to use in the first place.
And this uncertainty arises not only on an empirical level but also about what matters in the first place (moral uncertainty) - and probably in ways you haven't even considered ('unknown unknowns').
As you add additional considerations, you will often find that not only does how good an action seems to change, but even whether the action seems good or bad at all may change ('crucial considerations').
For instance, technological progress can seem like a clear force for good as it raises living standards and makes us more secure. But if technological advances create new existential risks, the impact could be uncertain or even negative on the whole. And yet again, if you consider that faster technological development might get us through a particularly perilous period of history more quickly, it could seem positive again - and so on.
Indeed, even the question of how to in principle handle all this uncertainty is itself very uncertain. There is no widely accepted ver...
This is a crosspost for Some thoughts on moderation in doing good by Benjamin Todd, as published on 80,000 Hours' website on 5 May 2023.
Here's one of the deepest tensions in doing good:
How much should you do what seems right to you, even if it seems extreme or controversial, vs how much should you moderate your views and actions based on other perspectives?
If you moderate too much, you won't be doing anything novel or ambitious, which really reduces how much impact you might have. The people who have had the biggest impact historically often spoke out about entrenched views and were met with hostility - think of the civil rights movement or Galileo.
Moreover, simply following ethical 'common sense' has a horrible track record. It used to be common sense to think that homosexuality was evil, slavery was the natural order, and that the environment was there for us to exploit.
And there is still so much wrong with the world. Millions of people die of easily preventable diseases, society is deeply unfair, billions of animals are tortured in factory farms, and we're gambling our entire future by failing to mitigate threats like climate change. These huge problems deserve radical action - while conventional wisdom appears to accept doing little about them.
On a very basic level, doing more good is better than doing less. But this is a potentially endless and demanding principle, and most people don't give it much attention or pursue it very systematically. So it wouldn't be surprising if a concern for doing good led you to positions that seem radical or unusual to the rest of society.
This means that simply sticking with what others think, doing what's 'sensible' or common sense, isn't going to cut it. And in fact, by choosing the apparently 'moderate' path, you could still end up supporting things that are actively evil.
But at the same time, there are huge dangers in blazing a trail through untested moral terrain.
The dangers of extremism
Many of the most harmful people in history were convinced they were right, others were wrong - and they were putting their ideas into practice "for the greater good" but with disastrous results.
Aggressively acting on a narrow, contrarian idea of what to do has a worrying track record, which includes people who have killed tens of millions and dominated whole societies - consider, for example, the the Leninists.
The truth is that you're almost certainly wrong about what's best in some important ways . We understand very little of what matters, and everything has cascading and unforeseen effects.
Your model of the world should produce uncertain results about what's best, but you should also be uncertain about which models are best to use in the first place.
And this uncertainty arises not only on an empirical level but also about what matters in the first place (moral uncertainty) - and probably in ways you haven't even considered ('unknown unknowns').
As you add additional considerations, you will often find that not only does how good an action seems to change, but even whether the action seems good or bad at all may change ('crucial considerations').
For instance, technological progress can seem like a clear force for good as it raises living standards and makes us more secure. But if technological advances create new existential risks, the impact could be uncertain or even negative on the whole. And yet again, if you consider that faster technological development might get us through a particularly perilous period of history more quickly, it could seem positive again - and so on.
Indeed, even the question of how to in principle handle all this uncertainty is itself very uncertain. There is no widely accepted ver...