William MacAskill: evaluation

Transcript context

…But why not get off the train a bit earlier and just say, well, the utilitarian part of our calculations — it’s embedded within a particular social context, like, how do we arrange certain affairs of society? But if you try to shrink it down to too small — how should you live your life — or to too large — how do we deal with infinite ethics on all of nature — that it just doesn’t work. It has to stay embedded in this context. Universal domain as an assumption doesn’t really work anywhere, so why should it work for the utilitarian part of our ethics? Get off the train at stop 2, not stop 17. [laughs] Stop 17. I agree, there’s a hard choice there, and certainly, as someone who takes action in the real world as well, it’s very notable to me how much you end up just infusing your action with commonsense moral reasoning. It’s always unclear — is that on sophisticated consequentialist grounds? Or is it just that one is acting pluralistically? I think you should take it on a case-by-case basis. I think that, actually, the issue of wild-animal suffering sounds completely wild when you first — no pun intended — completely wild when you first hear it. But I think it’s not that many steps away from commonsense moral reasoning. I don’t have a pet; my friends have pets. They care greatly about the lives of their pets. That’s in their well-being. That’s just a very standard, commonsense moral view. Then next — does that well-being of your pet change? Does the moral worth of a creature change whether it happens to be your pet or is born in the wild? I think there’s a good argument for thinking “no.” Then the question of, “Well, if you think it’s good to invest in resources to improve the well-being of your pets, then yes, maybe it’s good to invest resources in improving the well-being of animals in the wild.” Then, I think the reaction that people have, which is like, “This is just so crazy” — partly, it’s not really thinking about it, but partly also, it’s just worries about interfering with nature having negative backfiring consequences, and I think those arguments are just good. Maybe you think, “Oh, predation is bad, so we’re going to stop predators.” But then that leads to other, worse consequences. I think it is true that you’re dealing with an environment that we don’t fully understand. From the wild-animal–suffering perspective, it may be very pro more research, more thinking about this. I’d be pretty wary of just paving over the jungle because, on the basis of our very nonrobust evaluation, we think that animal lives are, on average, negative. Let me ask you the question I asked Sam Bankman-Fried. Let’s say we take the known world of living beings, however large that may be, and the demon offers us a bet. We can double that world with probability 51 percent, but with 49 percent, it all goes away and disappears, and everything’s gone. Now, in expected value terms, that’s a good bet, right? Should we do that? Sam said yes. He’s like, “I’m going to bite that bullet. I want to bite this bullet,” he said. What’s your view?…

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