William MacAskill: belief

Transcript context

…Your response sounds very ad hoc to me. Why not just say, in matters of the very large, utilitarian kinds of moral reasoning just don’t apply. They’re always embedded in some degree of partiality. The 51 percent–49 percent bet is not great for our partiality toward ourselves, and we just can’t go there. It’s not that there’s some other theory that’s going to tie up all the conundrums in a nice bundle, but simply that there are limits to moral reasoning, and we cannot fully transcend the notion of being partial because moral reasoning is embedded in that context of being partial about some things. I think we should be more ambitious than that with our moral reasoning. I think, if we did moral reasoning many times in the past that we’re simply saying, “Look, there are many of these different considerations. It’s all pluralist at some point. Even though I can’t give it a good argument, the utilitarian-esque reasoning seems so compelling when you’re talking about saving one life versus ten.” And we think, “Oh, clearly the ten is more important, including 50/50 chance of saving ten lives versus one.” It’s like, okay, you should go with the math. Over time that would save more lives. Then you say, “Oh, no, at some scale that sort of reasoning breaks.” That’s what seems ad hoc to me. If you’re saying, “Oh, well, these arguments are pushing you in a certain direction,” but then at some scale — what exactly is the scale? Is it a thousand lives? A million lives? A billion lives? It seems like nothing qualitatively different has happened. Whereas the thing that I want to say is a qualitative difference, something to do with when we’re juggling probability against value. That’s where maybe the pure just multiplication . . . Or there’s something going wrong with expected value theory, and I can constrain the issues to that. Whereas if I’m just saying, in general, when the scales get big, develop utilitarian-esque reasoning — that seems unmotivated to me. I don’t think it’s just probabilistic questions. You’re very familiar with the repugnant conclusion.…

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