When it comes to personal virtue, the true neutral point for yourself shouldn’t be “doing everything right”, because you’re consigning yourself to living in negative-land. A better neutral point is “a random person in my reference class”. How are you doing relative to a typical [insert job title or credential or hobby here], in your effects on that community? Are you showing more discipline than the typical commenter on your Internet forum? That’s a good starting point, and you can go a long way up from there.
If you take this literally, it will push you away from good reference classes. Don’t join the Nazis, just because it is really easy to do more good than the average Nazi. Maybe choose a reference class that you can’t change your membership of, like beings that started off biochemically human. But I’m not sure you should sit on your solid gold yacht, proudly boasting that the amount you give to charity is slightly above the global median. And if you are paralysed in a freak accident, constantly bemoaning that you can do almost no good doesn’t seem sensible either. Reference classes are fiddly and prone to “reference class tennis”. (people batting different reference classes back and forth) Set the zero to optimize mental health.
To respond to the Godwin example, if your reference class is “Germans in the 1930s”, I assert that there are far more altruistically effective actions one can take than “be a sincere reformist Nazi”, to a much greater extent than “become entirely vegan” is a more altruistic option than “reduce meat/egg consumption by 2/3″.
I agree that choosing the right reference class is difficult and subjective. The alternative of “imagine if you never existed” is interesting, but has the problem of the valley of bad rationality: people realize “I’ve already caused a carbon footprint and animal suffering” long before they realize “the amount of work it takes to offset more than I’ve caused is actually not that much”. That leaves them feeling like they’re deep in the Negative Zone for too long, with the risks I’ve mentioned.
If you take this literally, it will push you away from good reference classes. Don’t join the Nazis, just because it is really easy to do more good than the average Nazi. Maybe choose a reference class that you can’t change your membership of, like beings that started off biochemically human. But I’m not sure you should sit on your solid gold yacht, proudly boasting that the amount you give to charity is slightly above the global median. And if you are paralysed in a freak accident, constantly bemoaning that you can do almost no good doesn’t seem sensible either. Reference classes are fiddly and prone to “reference class tennis”. (people batting different reference classes back and forth) Set the zero to optimize mental health.
To respond to the Godwin example, if your reference class is “Germans in the 1930s”, I assert that there are far more altruistically effective actions one can take than “be a sincere reformist Nazi”, to a much greater extent than “become entirely vegan” is a more altruistic option than “reduce meat/egg consumption by 2/3″.
I agree that choosing the right reference class is difficult and subjective. The alternative of “imagine if you never existed” is interesting, but has the problem of the valley of bad rationality: people realize “I’ve already caused a carbon footprint and animal suffering” long before they realize “the amount of work it takes to offset more than I’ve caused is actually not that much”. That leaves them feeling like they’re deep in the Negative Zone for too long, with the risks I’ve mentioned.