Holden Karnofsky: belief

Transcript context

…Gotcha. OK, so you had a recent post on the E.A. forum that I thought was really interesting. A quote from that is, “My view is that for the most part, people who identify as E.A. tend to have unusually high integrity–– but my guess is that this is more despite utilitarianism than because of it.” So what do you think is the explanation for this coincidence where a group of reasonable, non fanatical, high integrity people also happen to be a community of utilitarians? You might have a set of people who are who think of themselves as trying really hard to be like the kind of person they should be or really hard to bring their actions in line with their beliefs and their statements–– so that drives them to be kind of like honest a lot of the time and follow a lot of our common sense rules of morality. It also drives them to really try to get that ethics right and land on ideas like utilitarianism that are very systematic and pure and like give you sort of this clear theoretical guidance. So it could drive both those things. Whereas I believe that if you're a utilitarian, it's really unclear whether utilitarianism actually tells you to do things like avoiding lying. Some people think it does. Some people think it doesn't. I think it's very unclear. You've advocated for the moral parliament's approach when you're trying to make decisions. What is the right level of organization at which to use that approach? Should individuals be making decisions based on having multiple different moral parties inside them? Is that the right approach for entire movements but individuals should be specializing? What is the right level to be applying this approach at?…

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