William MacAskill: evaluation

Transcript context

…I worry a bit this is verging into the absurd, and I’m aware that word is a bit question-begging. But if we think about the individual level — like what do you, Will, value? — you value, in part, the inefficient. It’s very hard to give people just pure utilitarian advice, because they’re necessarily partial. At the big macro level — like the whole world of nature versus humans, ethics of the infinite, and so on — it also seems to me utilitarianism doesn’t perform that well. The utilitarian part of our calculations — isn’t that only a mid-scale theory? You can ask, does rent control work? Are tariffs good? Utilitarianism is fine there, but otherwise, it just doesn’t make sense. Okay. There is what we might call the train to crazy town. We have all these starting moral intuitions. What I see as the project of moral philosophy is reconciling them, using theory and careful reasoning to make moral progress, which often involves creating simpler and explanatorily powerful theories that move away from your commonsense intuitions. Then the question is, how far are we willing to move? Very difficult methodological question. You brought up infinite ethics. That is something where I certainly, in practice, do not bite that bullet or follow that implication — where, for the listeners, the argument is, “Okay, the utilitarian wants to maximize the good,” understanding that’s total well-being. Now, perhaps in my book, I argue there’s enormous amounts of value at stake when we consider the long term, so we should reduce the risk of extinction and promote good values so that we make the most of that, make the most of all value in the long term. However, someone could expand the pie and say, “Well, that’s just piddling finite amounts of value. What about the possibility of creating infinite amounts of value? Because religious traditions say that one can create infinite amounts of value, that heaven is infinitely good. And you’re a good Bayesian. You don’t have credence zero in the idea of there being a God that could produce infinite amounts of value.” I would say, “No, I don’t.” If so, well, tiny — even if I put it one in a trillion that there’s such a God, multiply one in a trillion by infinite positive value, then that overall expectation is infinitely great, and that’s what we should be focusing on. I will acknowledge, I get off the train to crazy town before I’m at that point. There is — 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.…

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