As a non-Utilitarian, I find myself laughing at the comparison to Newton’s and Einstein’s work. and at the just-so story of developing the theory in order to deal with policy problems in societies (IMO it’s the reverse—there are a bunch of moral theories, and societies find the ones that justify their direction, and then mostly ignore the parts they don’t like).
Physics uses a TON of measurements and experiments (both natural via differential observation and controlled via intervention) to determine that the consistent math is also correlated with observations. Moral theories do part of this—they test against intuitions and extrapolations to find errors in the theory. But they don’t have the strong tie to observation, and don’t take failures or counter-observations as a need to improve the theory. This is probably because PEOPLE are inconsistent, and there is no formalization that applies to all of us.
That said, I like the post after the intro, and I fully agree that calling your mum (or otherwise acting locally) is among the more satisfying things you can spend effort on. I don’t think I’ve seen the justification that spending 10 minutes making one person happier for a short time is actually better than spending those 10 minutes separating your recycling types or modeling some aspect of AI risk.
As a non-Utilitarian, I find myself laughing at the comparison to Newton’s and Einstein’s work. and at the just-so story of developing the theory in order to deal with policy problems in societies (IMO it’s the reverse—there are a bunch of moral theories, and societies find the ones that justify their direction, and then mostly ignore the parts they don’t like).
Physics uses a TON of measurements and experiments (both natural via differential observation and controlled via intervention) to determine that the consistent math is also correlated with observations. Moral theories do part of this—they test against intuitions and extrapolations to find errors in the theory. But they don’t have the strong tie to observation, and don’t take failures or counter-observations as a need to improve the theory. This is probably because PEOPLE are inconsistent, and there is no formalization that applies to all of us.
That said, I like the post after the intro, and I fully agree that calling your mum (or otherwise acting locally) is among the more satisfying things you can spend effort on. I don’t think I’ve seen the justification that spending 10 minutes making one person happier for a short time is actually better than spending those 10 minutes separating your recycling types or modeling some aspect of AI risk.
So the argument is based on substitutability. If you don’t do (global good thing X) - and if it is truly important—someone else probably will.