William MacAskill: belief

Transcript context

…But it’s like [Derek] Parfit’s paradoxes in moral arithmetic. The single action doesn’t seem that important. If you’re a single marksman in a firing squad, well, you didn’t kill the person, but in a way you still did. No single performance of a great opera is really going to matter much in my view. But the fact that we have a network of operas performing The Magic Flute, Fidelio, keeping alive these 18th, 19th century ideals of liberty, freedom, the Masonic temple, glorious music, the importance of the exalted and the divine — that seems to me intuitively a super-high return, though I don’t ever think I’ll be able to measure it. I actually think that if you think that even in expectation, your additional project, let’s say one of the opera, is not making a difference, then that actually suggests that this class of projects is being overfunded. You should just take that at face value. The value doesn’t get inherited from the fact that it already has done a lot of good. Take another example of voting, let’s say. There’s an evil candidate and a good candidate, we’ll suppose. Should I vote in the election? If I think, “Oh, maybe, actually, it could go either way,” then I think often the answer is “yes” because there’s some chance that your vote will be decisive. That’s worth enormous amounts of value. If, however, it’s already 95 percent towards the good candidate in terms of votes, and you’re just absolutely sure that voting for the good candidate will not make a difference, then I think the main argument, and by far the main argument, is undermined because it’s already over-determined that this good thing is going to happen, and so you adding your extra weight is not making the world any better. How should it matter for our moral calculations if we think we might be living in a simulation?…

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