This kind of wrangling is a major reason why I don't like utilitarianism. Once you accept the premise - happiness is a morally desirable outcome - you're dropped down a chute that leads here. (And worse places, or course, like the idea that pleasure-hell is the most moral outcome, and that failure to take actions leading to everybody chained up in a wirehead dungeon is evil.) Art, culture, and flavor is more valuable than whatever gives effective altruists utility.
Please don't take me as any kind of authority on effective altruism! Most EAs reject most versions of utilitarianism, too. For example (in response to recent controversies), one of the movement's founders said recently:
"But for all that, it was, and remains, a very controversial theory. It has no limits on what actions can be taken if they promote the overall good. And no limit on what morality can demand of you. It offers no role for the intentions behind an act to matter, and makes no distinction between not helping people or actively harming them. Moreover, it allows no role for ultimate values other than happiness and suffering.
And ultimately, I don’t endorse it. The best versions are more sophisticated than the critics recognise and better than most people think. But there are still cases where I feel it reaches the wrong conclusion. And it is very brittle — imperfect attempts to follow it can lead to very bad outcomes.
However, there are also key parts of utilitarianism that are not controversial. It is not controversial that outcomes really matter."
Most of effective altruism (aka the boring part media couldn't do clickbait on) is really just about alleviating human suffering.
I'm realising now that this post probably exacerbated the problem (of this perception of EA). I will reflect on this further.
It's possible to go overboard against effective altruism. Nevertheless, its defenders fall back on the fact that it's altruism - which leaves one to wonder: why not just promote altruism, rather than effective altruism (which may or may not be more effective than anything else)?
The same is ultimately true of utilitarianism. You quote one of the founders (I'm not sure who) talking about outcomes, but this isn't unique to utilitarianism. Even Kant wants us to think about outcomes when he says we should act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. Kant's idea was always that "I will steal in order to possess property" entails "other rational thinkers will steal in order to have property," which results in the *outcome* that property is meaningless. When utilitarianism asks us to do strange things like center our weighting system on pleasure and pain, or, worse, to import Christian ideas about valuing distant individuals the same as individuals nearby, it goes beyond the very common idea that outcomes matter.
Ultimately, any philosophy must be *productive;* it must tell us something new, and even surprising. When physics tells us that time passes differently for different observers, and that only the speed of light is an absolute, this is very surprising. When physics tells us that at the very small scale, it is possible for particles to tunnel through otherwise insurmountable barriers or to (partially) occupy multiple discrete states simultaneously, this is very surprising. Yet these findings are verifiable, and have practical consequences, as GPS would require constant updates if relativistic effects were ignored, and quantum tunneling provides a limit to the smallest size of a transistor.
When has philosophy successfully surprised us? If we want to start with intuitions, we will never get any further than intuitions. I don't like Kant's moral system at all, but Kant at least had some kind of process that ran independently of intuition. Utilitarians rely on intuition from the outset, and then when their conclusions go awry, they either insist that we should ignore our intuitions when they contradict the conclusions, or, they fall back on the idea that our initial intuitions are still valid. Are they?
As someone who has an idea of what it means to build a beautiful building, the clients who commissioned the monuments were the visionaries of their time and the buildings were gifts to future generations to make more out of them.
I wasn't thinking of a monument's function to symbolise & be a reminder of important concepts, but I should have.
Now I'm wondering how effective they are at it. Most people (myself included, obviously) tend to no longer actively look at them when they pass them by every day. On the other hand, when I visited the Panthéon, I must have looked for half an hour at its "vivre libre ou mourir". Does the average message immortalised in a monument tend to withstand well the test of time, or will future generations see it as outdated? What was supposed to be the meaning of the Sphinx?
This kind of wrangling is a major reason why I don't like utilitarianism. Once you accept the premise - happiness is a morally desirable outcome - you're dropped down a chute that leads here. (And worse places, or course, like the idea that pleasure-hell is the most moral outcome, and that failure to take actions leading to everybody chained up in a wirehead dungeon is evil.) Art, culture, and flavor is more valuable than whatever gives effective altruists utility.
Please don't take me as any kind of authority on effective altruism! Most EAs reject most versions of utilitarianism, too. For example (in response to recent controversies), one of the movement's founders said recently:
"But for all that, it was, and remains, a very controversial theory. It has no limits on what actions can be taken if they promote the overall good. And no limit on what morality can demand of you. It offers no role for the intentions behind an act to matter, and makes no distinction between not helping people or actively harming them. Moreover, it allows no role for ultimate values other than happiness and suffering.
And ultimately, I don’t endorse it. The best versions are more sophisticated than the critics recognise and better than most people think. But there are still cases where I feel it reaches the wrong conclusion. And it is very brittle — imperfect attempts to follow it can lead to very bad outcomes.
However, there are also key parts of utilitarianism that are not controversial. It is not controversial that outcomes really matter."
Most of effective altruism (aka the boring part media couldn't do clickbait on) is really just about alleviating human suffering.
I'm realising now that this post probably exacerbated the problem (of this perception of EA). I will reflect on this further.
It's possible to go overboard against effective altruism. Nevertheless, its defenders fall back on the fact that it's altruism - which leaves one to wonder: why not just promote altruism, rather than effective altruism (which may or may not be more effective than anything else)?
The same is ultimately true of utilitarianism. You quote one of the founders (I'm not sure who) talking about outcomes, but this isn't unique to utilitarianism. Even Kant wants us to think about outcomes when he says we should act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. Kant's idea was always that "I will steal in order to possess property" entails "other rational thinkers will steal in order to have property," which results in the *outcome* that property is meaningless. When utilitarianism asks us to do strange things like center our weighting system on pleasure and pain, or, worse, to import Christian ideas about valuing distant individuals the same as individuals nearby, it goes beyond the very common idea that outcomes matter.
Ultimately, any philosophy must be *productive;* it must tell us something new, and even surprising. When physics tells us that time passes differently for different observers, and that only the speed of light is an absolute, this is very surprising. When physics tells us that at the very small scale, it is possible for particles to tunnel through otherwise insurmountable barriers or to (partially) occupy multiple discrete states simultaneously, this is very surprising. Yet these findings are verifiable, and have practical consequences, as GPS would require constant updates if relativistic effects were ignored, and quantum tunneling provides a limit to the smallest size of a transistor.
When has philosophy successfully surprised us? If we want to start with intuitions, we will never get any further than intuitions. I don't like Kant's moral system at all, but Kant at least had some kind of process that ran independently of intuition. Utilitarians rely on intuition from the outset, and then when their conclusions go awry, they either insist that we should ignore our intuitions when they contradict the conclusions, or, they fall back on the idea that our initial intuitions are still valid. Are they?
As someone who has an idea of what it means to build a beautiful building, the clients who commissioned the monuments were the visionaries of their time and the buildings were gifts to future generations to make more out of them.
A better usage is a relative term.
I agree, they definitely were visionaries, and I didn't mean to denigrate their achievements, sorry if it came across like that!
Do you mean a gift that enables them to make more out of themselves? Or the buildings?
Let's take the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, built 100 years after the battle,
every pore breathes the reminder never to allow something like this again-, the building adapted to the situation.
The financiers aware that it would be last longer than their own existence.
I wasn't thinking of a monument's function to symbolise & be a reminder of important concepts, but I should have.
Now I'm wondering how effective they are at it. Most people (myself included, obviously) tend to no longer actively look at them when they pass them by every day. On the other hand, when I visited the Panthéon, I must have looked for half an hour at its "vivre libre ou mourir". Does the average message immortalised in a monument tend to withstand well the test of time, or will future generations see it as outdated? What was supposed to be the meaning of the Sphinx?