Adding to Jesse’s comment, the “We’ve often heard things along the lines of...” line refers both to personal communications and to various comments we’ve seen, e.g.:
[link]: “Since this intuition leads to the (surely false) conclusion that a rational beneficent agent might just as well support the For Malaria Foundation as the Against Malaria Foundation, it seems to me that we have very good reason to reject that theoretical intuition”
[link]: “including a few mildly stubborn credence functions in some judiciously chosen representors can entail effective altruism from the longtermist perspective is a fool’s errand. Yet this seems false”
[link]: “I think that if you try to get any meaningful mileage out of the maximality rule … basically everything becomes permissible, which seems highly undesirable”
(Also, as we point out in the post, this is only true insofar as you only use maximality, applied to total consequences. You can still regard obviously evil things as unacceptable on non-consequentialist grounds, for example.)
Adding to Jesse’s comment, the “We’ve often heard things along the lines of...” line refers both to personal communications and to various comments we’ve seen, e.g.:
[link]: “Since this intuition leads to the (surely false) conclusion that a rational beneficent agent might just as well support the For Malaria Foundation as the Against Malaria Foundation, it seems to me that we have very good reason to reject that theoretical intuition”
[link]: “including a few mildly stubborn credence functions in some judiciously chosen representors can entail effective altruism from the longtermist perspective is a fool’s errand. Yet this seems false”
[link]: “I think that if you try to get any meaningful mileage out of the maximality rule … basically everything becomes permissible, which seems highly undesirable”
(Also, as we point out in the post, this is only true insofar as you only use maximality, applied to total consequences. You can still regard obviously evil things as unacceptable on non-consequentialist grounds, for example.)