William MacAskill: evaluation

Transcript context

…We’re still in a lot of trouble. Yes, I was wanting to clarify that for the listeners. I didn’t say it earlier because I was quite aware that you could pull me back with just, “Okay, give me some probability or something.” Then I think it starts to get more defensible. Anyway, so there are these paradoxes, so take the paradoxes of population ethics. Again, for the listeners, any view that you have in population ethics has extremely unintuitive implications. That’s actually been formally proven. The repugnant conclusion is the idea that a world consisting of a very, very, very, very large number of beings, all with lives just barely above zero, just barely worth living — because it has more aggregate well-being, is better than 10 trillion lives of wonderful bliss. It turns out, actually, that’s like, in my view, the least bad of the bullets that you have to bite within population ethics. Sometimes this is taken as a problem for consequentialism. That’s what you’re suggesting. But every moral view has to have a view on population ethics. Every moral view has to decide under what conditions should we think it’s a good thing to bring a new flourishing life into existence, not just consequentialist moral views. The view you’d have to be promoting is something much more thoroughgoing, which is just that there are limits to moral reasoning, perhaps that we should be okay with just inconsistent moral views. I’m not quite sure exactly what your view would be there, but it’s not just that we have to throw consequentialism out of the way. It’s like we actually have to throw moral consistency out the window, or something. Should the EA [effective altruism] movement be anti-abortion?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.