#in which case he's a consequentialist and not a utilitarian even in his own view (less strong but I'd still consider it)

[thedaythatwas]

brainrot will have you doing crazy things like wondering if nagito komaeda is, broadly speaking, a consequentialist, or if his ethical framework meets the more stringent requirements of utilitarianism at 9 o’clock in the morning

[eternal-echoes]

It’s pretty absurd to have a pagan occultist who took LSD having shape your worldview. 

Even if one or two points he said is compatible with Christianity, you really shouldn’t take spiritual guidance from Evola since he’s pagan, which is what his writings are ordered towards. Idolatry weighs more than any other sin. 

Anyways, even not considering his paganism and drug use, some of his writings are irreconcilable with Christianity

“The Americans' 'open-mindedness', which is sometimes cited in their favor, is the other side of their interior formlessness. The same goes for their 'individualism'. Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy. The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind', puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.” - Julius Evola

Criticize American culture all you want, but this is not the way to do it. Descartes’ axiom “I think, therefore I am” is not a cultural or political statement. This is the statement about the mind-body problem, and here Descartes is talking about dualism, that the mind and body are separate. This is against Catholic Church’s teachings because we believe that in hylomorphic doctrine, that the soul and the body together forms one substance, rather than being separate entities. Besides, if you’re going to claim to be anti-modernity and anti-enlightenment, you really shouldn’t quote someone who is literally called the Father of Modern Philosophy. Frankly, I think this is why Evola isn’t read in the universities; not because he’s anti-communist or that he supports an authoritarian style of government, it’s because he quotes famous philosophers out of context. 

Here’s a Bible verse that contradicts that: 

“Thus the word of the Lord came to me: Son of man, I have appointed you a watchman for the house of Israel. When you hear a word from my mouth, you shall warn them for me. If I say to the wicked man, You shall surely die; and you do not warn him or speak out to dissuade him from his wicked conduct so that he may live: that wicked man shall die for his sin, but I will hold you responsible for his death. If, on the other hand, you have warned the wicked man, yet he has not turned away from his evil nor from his wicked conduct, then he shall die for his sin, but you shall save your life. If a virtuous man turns away from virtue and does wrong when I place a stumbling block before him, he shall die. He shall die for his sin, and his virtuous deeds shall not be remembered; but I will hold you responsible for his death if you did not warn him. When, on the other hand, you have warned a virtuous man not to sin, and he has in fact not sinned, he shall surely live because of the warning, and you shall save your own life.” - Ezekiel 3: 17-21

This is called the sin of omission. If you don’t warn your brother that his sins will lead him to Hell, God will hold you accountable for that. This stems from the teaching that we are all parts of the mystical Body of Christ so we should look out for each other. 

The striking difference between Christianity and Alt-Right/nationalism is how they view hierarchy. Namely, that at the core of Christianity is humility. 

“Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, 

Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God 

something to be grasped. 

Rather, he emptied himself, 

taking the form of a slave, 

coming in human likeness; 

and found human in appearance, 

he humbled himself, 

becoming obedient to death, 

even death on a cross. 

Because of this, God greatly exalted him

and bestowed on him the name 

that is above every name, 

that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend, 

of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 

and every tongue confess that 

Jesus Christ is Lord, 

to the glory of God the Father.” 

-Philippians 2: 6 - 11

For Christians, one’s position in hierarchy is never meant to be a source of pride. This came from God, so we should act in humility accordingly. Echoing Jesus’ words, “The greatest among you must be your servant,” we have to use our skills and talents in service of others. 

“Traditionalism is the most revolutionary ideology of our time.” - Julius Evola 

There was an instant in the Bible who criticized the Pharisees for putting too much importance on tradition: 

“Then the Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They do not wash their hands when they eat a meal.” He said to them in reply, “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and ‘Whoever curses father or mother shall die.’ But you say, ‘Whoever says to father or mother, “Any support you might have had from me is dedicated to God,” need not honor his father,’ You have nullified the word of God for the sake of your tradition. Hypocrites, well did Isaiah prophesy about you when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts’ “He summoned the crowd and said to them, “Hear and understand. It is not what enters one’s mouth that defiles that person; but what comes out of the mouth is what defiles one.” Then his disciples approached and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?” He said in reply, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. If a blind person leads a blind person, both will fall into a pit.” Then Peter said to him in reply, “Explain this parable to us.” He said to them, “Are even you still without understanding? Do you not realize that everything that enters the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled into the latrine? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile. For from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, unchastity, theft, false witness, blasphemy. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.” - Matthew 15: 1 - 20

Cultural traditional customs are not means for your salvation. Ultimately, what comes your heart, (i.e. your free-will), the virtuous acts that you do, are what will determine that will save your soul. Even traditions are subject to be judge by the standard of objective morality, which is the divine law of God. They are not ends in themselves.

“The Hindus and Far Easterners do not have the notion of ‘sin’ in the Semitic sense; they distinguish actions not according to their intrinsic value but according to their opportuneness in view of cosmic or spiritual reactions, and also of social utility they do not distinguish between ‘moral’ and ‘immoral,’ but between advantageous and harmful, pleasant and unpleasant, normal and abnormal, to the point of sacrificing the former - but apart from any ethical classification - to spiritual interests. They may push renunciation, abnegation, and mortification to the limits of what is humanly possible, but without being ‘moralists’ for all that.” - Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger

This is the most problematic quote I found from him. Because this is essentially about the sense of morality that Evola has, and following objective morality is our means to salvation. What he is saying here is that he believes what is good is determined by the outcome that the action will bring about, not if there is an intrinsic evil nature in the action regardless of the benefits. This is eerily similar to another Enlightenment thinker Jeremy Bentham: 

“It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong.”

Also of John Stuart Mill:

“The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.”

Evola may have different opinions on what it is that is good for people than Bentham and Mill and utilitarians insist that you cannot be impartial to any person or group of people when applying morality while that isn’t the case with Evola but nevertheless Christianity isn’t pragmatic or consequentialist; there are intrinsically evil things you can do no matter the net benefit it will bring about.  The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war quicker is not a legitimate reason because it killed thousand civilians in the process. The end do not justify the means. The results of your actions are irrelevant because violating the principles of God stains your soul. Our will have to correspond with the moral law, which is in the mind of God.

I honestly worry about some Christians who read Evola’s works. They seem to overestimate their own understanding of Christian theology to discern accurately what is and what is not reconcilable to Christianity in his works. Even for the few points he said that are harmless, Christians reading him are not getting the fullness of Christianity, just the diluted version of it. 

[noshitshakespeare]

What do you think are the "tragic flaws" of Shakespeare's tragic heroes? I normally see "pride" cited as Lear's tragic flaw, but I've also seen "poor judgement of character" cited for him. Which do you think it is? And are Hamlet and Othello's most fundamental flaws "indecision" and "jealousy," or is that a reductive view? Do you think the concept of the single tragic flaw (itself a distortion of Aristotle's original concept of the "hamartia") really applies to Shakespeare's protagonists at all?

I like the way you’ve phrased this question in a way that anticipates my response. 

To start with, Shakespeare isn’t really tied to concepts that define Greek tragedy. He occasionally uses the unities (Comedy of Errors, The Tempest), but there’s no hard evidence to suggest that he read Aristotle’s Poetics (which had only been rediscovered in the west about 100 years before Shakespeare’s time and didn’t have the status it does now). And his knowledge of Greek devices is just as likely to have come from Plautus or Seneca, or any other Greek or Roman drama he would have read at school.

But even had he been aware of the concept of hamartia I do think that the idea of a tragic flaw is rather too simplistic to be applied to Shakespeare’s works. If the tragedy boils down to a particular characters’ one flaw or action then it reduces the complexity of the play and fails to take into account the complications involved in a character’s situation. It’s not even clear what the single flaw might be in many cases, as you point out by providing two (of many) potential flaws for Lear. So for instance, if Lear’s flaw is ‘pride’ or ‘poor judgement’, that suggests that if he had accepted Cordelia’s expression of love at the beginning the tragedy might have been avoided. But the question is whether evasion is the correct answer. Such an approach doesn’t take into account that there is some pride involved in Cordelia’s refusal to give her father what she wants, it also doesn’t deal with the fact that there are tensions waiting to erupt in Lear’s court. To say that pride or poverty of judgement is a flaw also sweeps aside the serious questions the play raises about why Lear might have become such a flawed individual. It’s certainly not as simple as saying that that’s the way Lear is. As a king, he hasn’t had to exercise much character judgement, because people obeyed him. As Lear says later in his madness, ‘they told me I was everything’ (4.6.104); if Lear is proud, then it’s because he lives in a society that has encouraged pride, that has made him think that he is everything. Lear's poor judgement or pride highlights a much bigger problem of the corrupting influence of power and inequality.

For Hamlet, too, it’s not clear what decision could have been made that would have prevented the tragedy. I get frustrated by those who blame indecisiveness because most people believe that murder is unacceptable, and yet they blame Hamlet for not committing murder quickly enough, especially when he’s not even sure whether he ought to trust the ghost. It’s utterly bizarre. It might be that his not killing the king causes more deaths, but that’s consequentialist and utilitarian in a way that Hamlet could hardly have predicted. The tragedy isn’t about how many people die, but why they die. Again, Hamlet’s discomfort and indecisiveness raise questions about the injustice of his situation, the fact that he’s been placed between two mutually exclusive injunctions: to honourably revenge his father, and, as a Christian, to not kill. It also exposes something important about the sort of society that makes it necessary to kill one’s kin, whether that’s Hamlet or Claudius. Without power and hierarchy, there would be no need for murder or revenge (think Macbeth). The problem is much larger than Hamlet’s own choices. The more pressing issue is not whether he should have made a decision sooner, but the condition under which he is forced to make such choices. How can anyone be blamed for not being able to act decisively when there’s no correct answer?

Othello might seem more straightforward. Undoubtedly if Othello weren’t jealous, then the tragedy wouldn’t have occurred. But then again, What are the conditions of his jealousy? Othello is subject to a sense of inadequacy that comes from being a minority citizen and an army man rather than a courtier: ‘Haply for I am black / And have not those soft parts of conversation / That chamberers have...’ (3.3.267-69). This feeling of self-doubt is one of the things Iago exploits to encourage Othello's jealousy, and it's not entirely Othello’s own fault that he is this way when it has to do with social prejudices and the way he’s treated. The play shows the toxicity of such discrimination and the effect it can have on an individual, even one of such noble stature as Othello. Likewise with the concept of jealousy itself: Othello might be driven to jealousy, but the tragedy couldn’t have occurred without the internalised misogyny that makes a person believe that murder is a just punishment for adultery. Without a social framework which encourages jealousy, Othello could hardly have been affected. It might seem far-fetched to suggest that an early modern writer like Shakespeare is positing the possibility of a world where there is no jealousy, but he does make Emilia imagine a society in which adultery is justifiable, and even one where women aren’t solely blamed: ‘I do think it is their husbands’ faults / If wives do fall’ (4.3.85-86). So once again, while it doesn't excuse Othello’s responsibility entirely, a character’s flaw is only part of a greater current of forces beyond an individual’s control.

These are extremely short analyses for something I could go on about for much longer (and for pretty much every play), but essentially, I think Shakespeare’s tragedies reveal something more fundamental than individual responsibility: it points out the systemic problems that cause flaws and circumstances to begin with. 

[interspersus]

Comparing Moral Views: Utilitarianism and Kantianism: Mob Rule?

By Jade Gracie December 25, 2018 (Reposted for debate)

Sheriff Case Study

It is 1873 in the Wild West of America. The sheriff of a small remote town has arrested a man suspected of murdering a child. A mob gathers outside the courthouse and they threaten to break in and lynch the suspect without trial. If they don’t get their way they will riot and many people will be killed including the sheriff and his deputies. The sheriff ponders what to do as the first gunshot shatters a courthouse window.

Intro

Both Utilitarianism and Kantianism are complex and neither have definitive answers to how you should react to situations. For each of these moral views there are various possibilities depending on which kind of stance you take. In Utilitarianism there are many principles which on occasion appear to contradict one another. Attempts have been made to rank these ideas but still there is no certainty about what is rated the most important. There are also Act and Rule utilitarianism to take into account; Act looking at each situation separately and examining the consequences of each possible course of action, Rule believing there are set rules of general conduct to follow which tend to produce good consequences. It is similar for Kantianism as there also appears to be many conflicting ideas in it. However, within Kantianism there are certain rules which are thought to be negative and which Kantians attempt to abstain from at all times whether they are considered to produce good consequences or not.

John Stuart Mill

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism dates back to early Greek philosophers however the philosophers most famously associated with it are Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Utilitarianism is primarily concerned with providing a mechanism for deciding what to do in given situations. The consequentialist principle is the first factor to be considered in the utilitarian point of view. This is when the moral rightness of an act is determined by the consequences. This means that the sheriff should do what he thinks will have the best results. He could therefore do whatever he thought would save the most people which would mean handing over the accused man to the mob. If it is a certainty that the mob will riot the in giving the man up the sheriff is also preventing the death of many rather than only the death of one. He could also though judge the best results to be those which prevented the mob from killing a possibly innocent man and so his handing the man over on the basis of this principle would rely on whether the sheriff was certain of the mans guilt or not. If the man is handed over and was in fact innocent it would mean that a murderer is still on the loose who may not be found because the people would think they had already lynched him. The second of these principles is the hedonic principle. Hedonism refers to the view that pleasure or happiness is the only thing worth valuing. Although hedonism usually refers to people who like to spend their time eating, drinking, partying and being generally indulgent in pleasure, philosophers would term hedonism in a broader sense. In this term hedonism is not only in reference to bodily pleasures but also to intellectual and aesthetic pleasures such as reading and admiring art. Based on this the sheriff must do what he thinks would generate the greatest happiness; this would probably be handing the man over to the mob. This would result in the happiness of the mob who have got what they wanted in lynching the man and as they are the majority their entire happiness could be considered to exceed that of the accused man. The death of only the accused man would also save the grieving of more families especially if the accused man were to be found guilty and hanged anyway.

Jeremy Bentham

Bentham's Hedonic calculus

Bentham’s hedonic calculus attempts to make it easy to rate and compare conflicting pleasures. They are rated in terms of intensity - how intense the pleasure will be; duration - how long the pleasure will last; certainty - how likely the pleasure is to happen; Propinquity - how immediate or remote the pleasure is; fecundity - how common the experience is; Purity - how likely is it to be followed with pain; Extent - how many people will experience the pleasure. In this case the hedonic principle would be used to compare the pain of the accused man dying with the pleasure of the mob killing him. The mob lynching the accused man is certain to end in pain but, other than in the case of purity, it seems the other criteria are in favour of giving into the mob. Measuring the purity would though only result in not handing the man over if he were innocent and if not too many would die as a result of the mob and the attempts to allow him to go to trial. So in certain instances even this could favour handing the man over.

Act and Rule Utilitarianism

Within utilitarianism there are two lines of thought; act and rule. An act utilitarian would be more likely to hand over the accused man because this would be the best result after looking at all possible consequences. A rule utilitarian though would be less inclined to hand over the accused man to the mob because it may contradict rules followed by a rule utilitarian. One of these rules would be doing what is best to save a life and so the sheriff may see handing over the accused man as disobeying this rule despite the fact that it could result in more deaths. The other deaths which would result from a riot could not be certain as a consequence to the sheriffs actions and are not him own direct doing like handing the man over would be. Thus, he may think that it would be best to attempt to save the life he is certain is at risk rather than saving the lives which may not be in danger, at least not to his certain knowledge. This though would depend on whether he would be taking a hard of soft position. A hard line would be to say that rules must never be broken through fear of undermining the practice. A softer line would be to allow deviation from the fixed rules on special occasions when you know that the results may not be desirable; this would include saving a life so long as no one would be adversely affected. The hard line can seem severe at times but if you consider that the soft line has to take into account the individual case and setting aside the rule due to this surely it has become an act utilitarian view, to a degree at least. Thus, Utilitarians generally usually appear to favour handing the man over for the greatest happiness, least pain and because the resulting number of deaths is more certain. There are though some stances which would mean that the man would not be handed over by the sheriff.

Utilitarianism Problems

There are though many problems with Utilitarianism. It is difficult to measure the happiness generated from an action. Although Bentham’s calculus attempts to make it easier to compare pleasures it is not clear what of the criteria is most important or what answer should result in the greater units of pleasure. There is also the factor that some people find pleasure in pain; such as masochists. Also, people seem to enjoy vices such as smoking, drinking, gorging ourselves with food etc. but these pleasures could not be described as morally good as they have negative consequences. Utilitarianism being based on the consequences of an action also has many issues. An action may be taken based on the predicted outcome of happiness and in fact the results are negative consequences; is it fair to say the actions were entirely wrong if there were good intentions? It is also unclear if we should look more at the short or long term consequences or the local or global consequences. For both of these one consequence has to be favoured but which one is unknown. It is also possible that under utilitarian ideals justice and rights could be taken away from the people as tyranny from the majority could occur for the greatest happiness. Due to the idea of happiness of the majority the minority could be ignored. Mill though says in his book ‘On Liberty’ that liberty and freedom of speech are notions supported by utilitarianism as otherwise we would become lazy about defending our own views and it would prevent open discussion which is essential for enlightened social progress. Special obligations toward certain people such as friends and family is not an idea which is supported by utilitarianism but this may not be fair as this idea undermines the human nature of love and friendship. Finally, there is the idea that unrealistic moral demands are imposed by utilitarianism. It requires us to take many things into consideration and to always strive for the highest possible good. This means that we are confronted with an infinite amount of empirical data which must be collected and evaluated before a course of action is taken. Also, in taking the most favourable course of action we may find that we have to act in a way disadvantageous to ourselves.

Immanuel Kant

Kantianism

Kantianism is a normative moral theory by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant’s deontological stance begins with the sovereignty of reason. Kant was trying to uncover a moral system based purely on reason in the hope it would produce a moral philosophy that is objectively true and universally valid. Kant thought it was important to base our actions on a reason because that is the only way to ensure that our morality is objective and in no way selfish. So Kantians would argue that the sheriff should not let the mob have the man. Handing the man over is against the universal moral duties and rules when he has not been proven to have murdered the child and so he could be innocent. The good will sector of Kantianism states the goodness of an act doesn’t come from its consequences but from goodwill which is intrinsic to the act itself and which must always be good no matter the results. Thus, any deaths resulting from the mobs actions are not the fault of the sheriff whos actions will remain intrinsically good. Courage, power, and intelligence are irrelevant to Kantians as these things can be qualities of both good and evil deeds but goodwill is only a quality of a good deed. The endangering of his men though brings the goodwill into question. Is it fair to say his intentions were entirely good if he was putting other at risk in doing it? Duty is the only motive a Kantian believes to be good. Kantians believe that to act from duty is to do so because it is the right thing to do and not for any other reason. The duty of the sheriff would be to protect the accused man until he was found guilty and sentenced to a punishment and so he should protect him and not give him up to the mob no matter what the consequences as Kantianism looks at the motives and so the sheriff should follow and obey his duties. His duty could also be to protect the people of the town and his men on staff all of whom he could be putting at risk by not handing the man over. It is a question of which duty if most important. Again though, the actions of the mob are less the sheriffs responsibility so long as he has acted out of goodwill his actions are justified for Kantianism. However, if the man was guilty and especially if the sheriff could be sure of this it could arguably be a different matter. According to Kant those who do wrong should be punished and so if he was guilty and his punishment would be the death penalty anyway then perhaps the sheriff’s duty may lie primarily in the protection of his men. But, the categorical imperative would overrule this idea; the sheriff must protect the man and have him punished as he is sentenced to be not as the mob decides. The categorical imperative is, Kant believes, one basic test for identifying morally praiseworthy maxims of actions that require duty alone. Maxims are general rules of behaviour which can be applied to particular situations such as ‘never lie’ and ‘never kill’. The categorical imperative portion of Kantianism has 3 further parts to it; universal law formulation, end in itself formulation, and kingdom of ends formulation. The universal law formulation states that a categorical imperative must, in principle, be capable of being applied to any human being in the same circumstances and not just the individual being judged. In this case it would be fair to say the categorical imperative could be ‘protect those in your prison’ but not ‘protect those in your prison unless there is a mob who wants to lynch them and will kill you to do so’. End in itself formulation is the idea that you should never use people to suit your own need and you should treat them as individuals who need respect. This would mean that the sheriff should not hand over the accused man just so that he could protect himself or others. The accused man has equal rights to everybody else; at least until he is found guilty. The kingdom of ends formulation says that we must both act as though we are enforcers and abiders of the moral law, thus creating a community in which everyone is treated as an end and never simply as a means. It seems that generally Kantianism favours protecting the man although not necessarily always.

Kantianism Problems

Obviously though there are problems with Kantianism as well as utilitarianism. Is it entirely fair to have lesser consequences in favour of a person acting within the rules of Kant’s praiseworthy motives? He also ignores human nature and the motives we naturally have such as compassion. Kant states that duty is the only praiseworthy motive for an action but ignoring these other motives is unfair towards human nature and it is inhuman to assume these motives can be ignored. Kantianism thus totally ignores the consequences of actions and looks only at the motives of duty. The maxims also come under scrutiny as he appears to say that they are sometimes logically inconceivable and at other times conceivable but that no rational person would want to rely upon them. Other times they seem to be proposed as practically difficult to carry out or that they are self-defeating of their own aim. Some maxims are only relatively moral and don’t seem as though they should be conceived as universal such as ‘always eat healthy’. Although this could become a universal imperative can it truly be considered a moral principle? It is arguable that this is one of many maxims which is not worthy of becoming part of Kant’s moral law. Duties are a problem as they occasionally conflict. There is no guide about what to do when we are presented with a choice between two moral acts or between two immoral acts. Kantianism also ignores motives other than duty such as doing something because you loved someone; under Kant’s theory this is deemed selfish. Kant’s final problem is that it is left possible that somebody could act within the realms of a morally acceptable action just because the intentions were sound; even when they are causing great problems or working under misguided perceptions of duty. But this could be considered better than judging actions based on unpredictable results.

Summary

Thus, Kantianism would urge the sheriff to protect the accused man as it is his duty to do so while utilitarianism would allow the sheriff to hand him over to the mob in order to bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number. The consequences of the action would be the death of a possibly innocent man but the survival of himself, his deputies and possibly others. When weighing up the accused mans life with many more it seems obvious to a utilitarian that the sheriff should hand him over to protect others. Kantianism though looks at the motives of an action and states that an action must never be selfish and must only be committed out of duty. The sheriff has a duty towards the prisoner to protect him until he has had a trial and been found guilty or innocent. After the trial the sheriff had the duty to ensure any sentence placed upon the man is carried out as desired by the judge. If he was to hand the man over he would be acting selfishly as he would be treating the accused man as an object which he could exchange for his own life rather than treating him as a human being with equal rights to the mob until his trial. Both moral stances have problems but both also have great merits. It is just very difficult to follow moral rules rigidly in all situations.

Comments

Jade Gracie (author) from United Kingdom on November 16, 2018:

Utilitarianism would also support other methods of solving the problem. There is no logical need to jump to torture to solve that. Gentle methods of finding the answers exist too. Its just people assuming anger solves problems quicker. There is no guarantee that torture would work so why would that be the assumed best way of finding the answer? If it doesn’t work then its not justified so should really begin there...

Larry Allen Brown from Brattleboro Vermont on September 22, 2018:

A bomb is set to go off in Time's Square and a suspect is caught and brought to a room for interrogation; Trump style, and that means torture. But his 3 year old daughter is brought in with him and placed in a chair right in front of him. Right behind her stands a man with a pruning clipper and he spreads the girls fingers ready to lop off one at a time until the suspect talks.. The argument made about torture is a utilitarian argument based on consequentialist moral reasoning. Do we cut off the girls fingers one by one to save the lives of hundreds or even thousands in Times Square? If torture works, then that is all that's needed to know. The age and the gender of the victim is irrelevant to the logic of using torture to stop the bomb from going off. So do we cut off the little girls fingers to save hundreds of people? Oh and after cutting off her fingers, we can waterboard her too. Waterboarding a 3 year old whos fingers are cut off. That's pretty ugly....but maybe we stop the bomb. The utilitarian argument would say yes. Can you do that? Can anybody claim that the actions taken were moral and just? Can we really morally justify that action?

Kant would say no. Under no circumstances would you allow that.

Larry Allen Brown from Brattleboro Vermont on July 08, 2012:

"Even when two peoples influences seem to be almost identical the person may hve very different understandings themselves"

When the axe entered the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us.

Jade Gracie (author) from United Kingdom on July 07, 2012:

Ye, objectivity does seem almost impossible in terms of human examples. We are all open to interpreting our influences differently. Even when two peoples influences seem to be almost identical the person may have very different understandings themselves. Symbols can have infinitely different connotations to people and are rarely actually found to be understood in exactly the same way by any number of people. Objectivity is hard to find, we can't ever really understand what it is like to be anyone else but ourselves with our understandings of the world around us.

Jivan36 from Doylestown, PA. USA on July 07, 2012:

Of course not! Even when I learn things that may not be the happiest or most awe inspiring things ever, I still feel better for being "in the know", to use a contemporary expression. And even then, as the point of some of my own writings has been: that like beauty, happiness, inspiration, or really anything for that matter, is definitely in the "Mind's Eye" of the beholder. What an original thought, huh? (haha) That eye may be opened or closed to various degrees in accordance with the individual's susceptibility or imperviousness to the socio-cultural (and political, if any) pressures of his daily life. Such pressure can definitely affect even the most seemingly independent person to act in either a very self-serving manner, or for want of popularity, by appeasing those who they perceive the pressure emanating from. Perhaps that is why such Philosophies that are etched more firmly in a code or set of rules were adopted in many places; to neutralize any one single person's propensity for manifesting their own very polarized ideas or morals into misguided action. There seems to be little escape from subjectivism in many philosophies however, since man can always choose to interpret rules, codes or circumstances as he likes. So where are we then as the human race when it comes to recognizing any real concept of objectivity in anything?

Larry Allen Brown from Brattleboro Vermont on July 07, 2012:

What we're talking about here is "variations on a theme". We all share the same amount of difference. The longer you study this, the more you'll absorb and the broader your outlook will be. Your mind is opened and there’s no turning back. And would you want to if you could?

Jade Gracie (author) from United Kingdom on July 07, 2012:

thanks for your very comprehensive comment. Ye, I study anthropology and its fascinating the variation of societies. The morals and expectations of them all are so different yet usually can fall into similar categories like religion and politeness and common expectations. Each equal ad valid yet s different, its curious when you are only accustomed to one, and can only ever really fully understand the one society you grow up in.

Jivan36 from Doylestown, PA. USA on July 07, 2012:

Yes, very well done! Whether we always necessarily know or recall the specific formulative aspects of an "established" Philosophical viewpoint, we realize when we read about them that they involve basic, common themes that most humans live and struggle with every day. Across geographical and cultural boundaries, there may be some baseline similarities regarding the existence of justice and moral rightness, though one of my previous commentators makes the salient point that no two societies or cultures can be counted upon, nor expected to have, the same subjective ideas of what those concepts mean for them....and even among one society, there can be obvious derivations that occur within it due to any number of external conditions of their lives or traditionally held beliefs based on ancestral religion or mythology. I suppose my point is that is amazing how complex mankind is in it's capacity and inclination towards the drawing out of these different moral philosophies, of which you have examined just two, and yet they can all very much be based on, or revolve around, generally similar principles, but with completely different outcomes as a result of how they define themselves, both individually and as a collective consciousness.

Jade Gracie (author) from United Kingdom on July 06, 2012:

definitely, especially cross culturally, what applies here probably wont apply in South Africa. Humans seem totally variable depending on their surroundings and social upbringing. If only it was so easy.

Larry Allen Brown from Brattleboro Vermont on July 06, 2012:

That's exactly the problem. People aren't quite that simple, and trying to cram something as complex as human psychology into a cookie cutter solution is like driving a square peg into a round hole. One size fits all.

Jade Gracie (author) from United Kingdom on July 06, 2012:

wow, thanks for the comment. Never really appreciated the simplicity of Bentham's theory as a means of assessing all of humanity's drives. It is fairly good as far as simple generalised theories go. The problem really is that we aren't quite as simple as that, unfortunately i guess. His ideas though do seem to apply to most people in most situations. thanks for the comment

Larry Allen Brown from Brattleboro Vermont on July 05, 2012:

A very strong well written Hub on Bentham and Kant. When I first studied Bentham I was immediately looking at this very question that you pointed out: "Although Bentham’s calculus attempts to make it easier to compare pleasures it is not clear what of the criteria is most important or what answer should result in the greater units of pleasure. There is also the factor that some people find pleasure in pain; such as masochists. Also, people seem to enjoy vices such as smoking, drinking, gorging ourselves with food etc. but these pleasures could not be described as morally good as they have negative consequences." I thought of Jeffrey Dahmer.

One of the interesting things or the helpful things about Bentham is that he reduces his whole doctrine to a single paragraph, and he puts that paragraph right at the front of his Introduction to The Principles of Morals and Legislation. He says that, "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do." Again...I have to look at Dahmer as just one of many examples of people deriving pleasure out of pain, either theirs in a masochistic way, or others in a sadistic way.

That is, in a nutshell, Bentham's theory; very bold unequivocal statement. He's saying if you want to understand human beings in a causal explanatory sense all you have to know about them is that they're going to seek pleasure and avoid pain. And if you want to think about what ought to happen in the design of institutions they should be designed around that fact, to accommodate that fact. And he's going to develop a system of laws, a system of government that takes into account and is built upon this assumption about human nature, as he would have called it; human psychology, as we would call it today.

You've posted a really good Hub. Excellent work.

________

BY JADE GRACIE

[digidaddy]

My Answers to HW1case, Q2

Q2. Online students: Explain the case and discuss, one at a time, each question you devised about it, plus the 3 standard questions. Post this on your blog.

Answer:

1. If “basic building blocks of music” cannot be copyrighted, at what point can a song be protected by copyright?

- According to my research, a single piece of recorded music involves two distinct rights:

-- Protection of the underlying musical composition, aka the specific arrangement and combination of musical notes, chords, rhythms, harmonies, and song lyrics, which is referred to as “musical work,” “musical composition,” or sometimes “song”

-- Protection of the actual recording of a musical composition, which copyright law refers to as “sound recording,” or sometimes the “master” or the “recording”

2. Can music (composed noise) be copyrighted at all, or just lyrics?

- Musical copyright, whether as a musical work or sound recording, is created immediately upon creation and satisfaction of the following:

-- Must be an original work of authorship; and

-- Must be fixed in any tangible medium of expression, such as written sheet music, a MIDI file, or a digital (or analog) recording

3. What is the difference between sampling, being inspired by, and straight up copying music when creating new music?

- While copyright protects come when a new song is recorded, the new song must be original. Original in the sense of the work must be a product of the author’s own efforts, but there is no requirement of originality in the sense of being novel. Original only means that the work was created independently and possesses at least some level of creativity.

There are no hard “line in the sand” rules. Some courts have held that rhythms and harmonies are generally in the public domain (free for anyone to use), while melody is often determined to be the “original” and protected parts. There are a lot of details about sound processing, blending, balancing, and others as well as a lot of court cases dealing with this issue.

Resource (https://bit.ly/2Fav9Q9)

4. How can you apply deontological ethics (rule-based) to this case?

- Deontological ethics talk about the moral theories (rules) that guide and assess choices of what a person should do, and in that sense, it could be said that any type of musical copying, whether that be in melody, lyric, rhythm, or harmonies, should be bad. But since the law only states a general description of what is right and wrong when it comes to copyright, then that puts the judgement into the perspective of the judge or jury and can be changed by their personal morals or ethics.

- After reading some more about the deontological theories (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/) I see that there are some types that might apply directly to a case like this. Patient-centered deontological theory are characterized as theories focusing on people’s rights, and in my case’s point, the artists. It says “it is a right against being used by another for the user’s or other’s benefit... the using of another’s body, labor, and talent without the latter’s consent.” I think this fits perfectly with this case.

5. How can you apply utilitarian ethics (similar to consequentialist ethics) to this case?

- By reading another article by the same source (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/) I found that utilitarianism ethics are stated as holding to the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. It mentions consequentialist ethics (like in the question) where the choice is based on the best consequences of said choice. In my case, protecting the artist’s work could be very beneficial to the artist and his production team, but would also keep new works that are not even loosely based at all by his work to be halted and therefore kept from the public to enjoy. In that view, the most beneficial set of consequences might be for the happiness and enjoyment of the broader public, rather than the smaller group of the artist and his/her production team.

6. How can you apply virtue ethics (character-based) to this case?

- Virtue ethics is exactly based on that, virtues, or the behavior showing high moral standards. “A virtue ethicist to the fact that helping (a) person would be charitable or benevolent.” (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/) This one is harder to use in this case, but is easier to prove that it happened. By the judge overriding the verdict of the jury, he felt that this judgement was more benevolent than what the jury found, in his opinion. This ethics approach could be easily proven, but would be hard to win over people with, as opposed to the other two theories where rules or consequences are presented as evidence of “this is why we should do this thing” or “believe this way.”

[theconservativebrief]

In early 2015, I reported and wrote a profile of the Open Philanthropy Project, an offshoot of the charity recommender GiveWell, funded in large part by billionaires Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz.

Open Phil has changed a lot since this article’s writing; it’s given out tens of millions of dollars more in grants, issued and updated long explanations of its philosophy, and expanded (and diversified) its staff considerably. Tuna and Moskovitz’s reported net worth, which they hope to donate almost all of, has since grown to over $11 billion. Open Philanthropy is also formally its own organization, no longer tied to GiveWell.

With that being said, I think the piece still offers a useful glimpse into how Open Philanthropy operates, and into effective altruism as a worldview and a practice. So here’s the original piece, anachronisms and all.

I sat in a San Francisco conference room a few months ago as 14 staffers at the charity recommendation group GiveWell discussed the ways in which artificial intelligence — extreme, world-transforming, human-level artificial intelligence — could destroy the world. Not just as idle chatter, mind you. They were trying to work out whether it’s worthwhile to direct money — lots of it — toward preventing AI from destroying us all, money that otherwise could go to fighting poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

”Say you tell the AI to make as many paper clips as it can possibly make,” Howie Lempel, a program officer at GiveWell, proposed, borrowing a thought experiment from Oxford professor Nick Bostrom.

The super AI isn’t necessarily going to be moral. Even with positive goals, it could backfire. It could see the whole world as a resource to be exploited for making paper clips, for example.

”Just because it’s very intelligent doesn’t mean it has reasonable values,” Lempel said. “Maybe it starts turning puppies into paper clips.”

”Maybe it would turn the whole universe into paper clips,” cofounder and co-executive director Holden Karnofsky added.

Joining the GiveWell staff in the meeting was Cari Tuna, the president of Good Ventures, a foundation she and her husband, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, founded with their roughly $8.3 billion [2018 update: now $11.1 billion] fortune. The couple plans on giving most of that sum away.

”We want to burn down our foundation before we die, and ideally well before we die,” says Tuna. So she and Moskovitz joined forces with GiveWell to form the Open Philanthropy Project, whose mission is to figure out how, exactly, they should spend their billions to do as much good as possible.

That may mean giving cash to poor people in Uganda, or distributing anti-malarial bed nets, but it also might mean funding research into how to prevent AI from killing us all. Or it might mean funding the fight to end mass incarceration in the US. Or it might mean funding biological research.

Open Phil (as the staff calls it, eschewing the OPP acronym) doesn’t know which of these is the best bet, but it’s determined to find out. Its six full-time staffers have taken on the unenviable task of ranking every plausible way to make the world a much better place, and figuring out how much money to commit to the winners. It’s the biggest test yet of GiveWell’s heavily empirical approach to picking charities. If it works, it could change the face of philanthropy.

The team at Open Phil are effective altruists, members of a growing movement that commits itself to using empirical methods to work out how to do the most good it possibly can.

Effective altruism holds that giving abroad is probably a better idea than giving in the US. It suggests that giving to disaster relief is worse than giving elsewhere. It argues that supporting music and the arts is a waste. “In a world that had overcome extreme poverty and other major problems that face us now, promoting the arts would be a worthy goal,” philosopher Peter Singer, a proponent of effective altruism, writes in his new book, The Most Good You Can Do. In the meantime, opera houses will have to wait.

Effective altruism also implies it’s quite possible that even the best here-and-now causes — giving cash to the global poor, distributing anti-malarial bed nets in sub-Saharan Africa — are less cost-effective than trying to reduce the risk of the world as we know it ending. Hence, the chatter about AI. If it causes human extinction, then billions, trillions, even quadrillions of future humans who otherwise would have lived happy lives won’t. That dwarfs the impact of global poverty or disease at the present moment. As Bostrom writes in a 2013 paper, “If benefiting humanity by increasing existential safety achieves expected good on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than that of alternative contributions, we would do well to focus on this most efficient philanthropy.”

What’s radical about GiveWell and Open Phil is their commitment to do substantial empirical research before deciding on causes. Many other foundations pick issues based simply on the personal whims of the funder. If that whim is to fund medical science (as in the case of Howard Hughes), the world gains. But if it’s to fund a fancy art museum (as J. Paul Getty did with his fortune), then money that could have saved lives was, in the effective altruist view, frittered away.

”The vast majority of donors aren’t interested in doing any research before making a charitable contribution,” Paul Brest, former president of the Hewlett Foundation, wrote in an article praising effective altruism. “Many seem satisfied with the warm glow that comes from giving; indeed, too much analysis may even reduce the charitable impulse.” By contrast, effective altruists are obsessed with doing research into cause effectiveness. Open Phil has a literal spreadsheet ranking a number of different causes it might invest in.

That has earned effective altruism criticism from more traditional corners of philanthropy. Charity Navigator, which tries to ensure that charities’ money goes where they say it’s going, has been particularly opposed. Its CEO, Ken Berger, and consultant Robert Penna penned a venomous takedown in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, in which they replaced every mention of “effective altruism” with “defective altruism.”

”This approach amounts to little more than charitable imperialism, whereby ‘my cause’ is just, and yours is — to one degree or another — a waste of precious resources,” they write. In the comments of the piece, Penna clarified: “We do not believe that it is the role of anyone to say to another that his or her cause is not ‘worthy.’”

To effective altruists, this attitude reeks of moral nihilism. In response to Berger and Penna, Will MacAskill, who founded the effective altruist group 80,000 Hours and co-founded Giving What We Can, proposed a thought experiment. Say you’re standing before two burning buildings, one of which has a family of five trapped inside and the other of which is storing a $20,000 painting for a nearby museum. You only have time to save the family or the painting. What do you do? Save the family, right? Now, how is that different from choosing whether to save lives by giving to the Against Malaria Foundation or to make exhibits a little nicer by giving to the Metropolitan Museum of Art? It’s not, MacAskill claims, and that’s lethal to the argument for philanthropic pluralism: “[Berger and Penna] have to reject the idea that the family of five’s interest in continuing to live is weightier and more morally important than the museumgoers’ interest in viewing an additional painting.”

That’s the other thing about effective altruists: they’re utilitarians. Or, if not utilitarians obsessed with maximizing happiness, they’re consequentialists concerned with maximizing the good in whatever form it takes. “We want to give people more power to live the life they want to live. It’s a consequentialist moral framework,” GiveWell’s Karnofsky says. “Justice as an end in itself, liberty as an end in itself — those aren’t things we’re interested in.”

That lends itself to a particular political bent, which is left of center but technocratic, friendly to markets (when they can be shown to work), and, above all, cosmopolitan. Effective altruists, and GiveWell in particular, go to great lengths to emphasize that doing good abroad is just as valuable as doing it in America, and probably cheaper, as well. They’re sympathetic to the welfare state but far more jazzed about open borders.

Effective altruists tend to share a hyper-analytical personality type. Before visiting the GiveWell offices, I went to a Super Bowl party at Karnofsky’s house. We went around the room saying which team we were rooting for — the New England Patriots or the Seattle Seahawks — and why. Karnofsky said he was rooting for the Pats in light of then-recent allegations that they had purposely deflated their balls to win the AFC championship. Many detractors wanted them to lose as punishment for this offense, and Karnofsky thought it important to disabuse the public of the notion that the world can exact cosmic justice like that: “Trial by combat doesn’t work.” Tim Telleen-Lawton, a GiveWell analyst and roommate of Karnofsky’s, said he was rooting for a tie, as it was the most improbable outcome and thus the most exciting. My explanation — my dad’s a Seahawks fan, so I’m a Seahawks fan — felt a little under-reasoned by comparison.

My reasoning failures aside, the effective altruists’ tendency to rationally analyze everything is endearing, and I should disclose that I’ve been won over. I’m a cosmopolitan utilitarian, too. I’ve given to GiveWell’s recommended charities for years (GiveDirectly is my current favorite). I’m friends with many of the staffers outside work. I talked to Karnofsky and Berger about policy issues in the early going of Open Phil, even musing about what we should name the idiosyncratic set of positions we happen to share (“newtilitarianism” was rejected as an offense against the English language). And I was and remain deeply excited by the prospect of a dedicated team sharing my values doing empirical research to rank policy issues in order of importance — which is exactly what Open Phil is up to.

Open Phil may not care about justice as an end in itself, but it’s certainly interested in it as a means. Criminal justice reform is one of its top priorities at the moment, not because of the concerns over due process and constitutional liberties that motivate many groups working on the topic, but due to the Open Phil team’s hard-to-dispute observation that prison is really, really awful.

Most Americans live lives far better than those of people in developing countries, but the same can’t necessarily be said for prisoners. That makes interventions involving American incarceration look similarly promising to ones benefiting the global poor. In global health, it’s common to talk in terms of “disability-adjusted life years” (DALYs), which measure a disease’s burden by considering both how many years of life it denies victims and how much worse it makes their lives before they perish. A disease that cuts 10 years off your lifespan and causes 10 years of partial paralysis before that has a higher DALY toll than one that just cuts off 10 years, for instance.

As part of his investigation into the issue, Alexander Berger, the program officer overseeing Open Phil’s policy work, did a quick and dirty analysis of how many DALYs would be saved by reducing incarceration by 10 percent. He posited that the “disability weight” of being in prison (that is, how much it reduces the quality of a life-year) is 0.5. A year in prison is half as good as one on the outside. For context, that’s roughly the same disability weight as having terminal cancer. Once you take the abject awfulness of prison into account, reducing incarceration starts to look like a great way to save hundreds of thousands of DALYs.

Criminal justice is also one of the few points of bipartisan agreement in contemporary politics. Over the past decade or so, conservatives at the state level have come around to the view that prisons and the law enforcement complex are just another form of big government, and deserving of major cuts. There are a number of bipartisan proposals to reduce incarceration on the federal level, as well. It’s at a point where philanthropic involvement could help push through significant reforms.

Open Phil’s spreadsheet of causes ranks policy interventions based on their importance and tractability: how much good they’re capable of producing, and whether philanthropy can actually effect policies that produce that good. Even taking the DALY analysis into account, criminal justice is listed as only moderately important. But it’s unusually tractable.

To that end, Good Ventures is already spending a lot on criminal justice. It has given $3 million to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Public Safety Performance Project, which works with states to develop policies that “reduce incarceration and correctional spending while maintaining or improving public safety and concentrating prison beds on high level offenders,” to quote Open Phil’s review of the group.

GiveWell prides itself on trying to rigorously determine the magnitude of impact of the charities it recommends, and Open Phil took the same approach here. Pew claims incarceration will fall 11 percent in the states they’re working with, compared with rates if they hadn’t intervened; that suggests the project has led Americans to spend 858,000 fewer person-years in prison, at a cost of $29 per person-year. That’s pretty good; wouldn’t you spend $29 to avoid a year in prison? Or, in wonkspeak, $58 for a DALY?

But Open Phil’s review expresses skepticism about that magnitude, as “in many states where PSPP did not provide intensive assistance, prison growth reversed or stagnated on its own.” It concludes, however, “We believe that PSPP increased the probability of reform and/or the quality of reforms in at least several of the states in which it worked.”

This is about as rigorous an evaluation as Open Phil can do. But it’s still considerably less rigorous than analyses GiveWell does of charities. Just look at GiveWell’s analysis of the Against Malaria Foundation, its current top-rated charity. To evaluate the group, GiveWell has to know how effective the anti-malarial bed nets it distributes are. And it does know that: it cites five randomly controlled trials about the effect of bed nets on childhood mortality in its evaluation of the foundation. That means GiveWell knows how many bed nets it takes to save a life, and how big of a donation to the Against Malaria Foundation is needed to buy and distribute that many bed nets. It has a strong quantitative estimate of the real-world effects of giving to the group.

By contrast, Open Phil has very little sense of how many people are spared prison time due to a donation to the Public Safety Performance Project. There are no randomly controlled trials about the effectiveness of the program’s particular approach in enacting criminal justice reforms. While there are well-established best practices for evaluating service delivery programs like the Against Malaria Foundation, none exist for evaluating advocacy efforts.

”Advocacy, even when carefully nonpartisan and based in research, is inherently political, and it’s the nature of politics that events evolve rapidly and in a nonlinear fashion, so an effort that doesn’t seem to be working might suddenly bear fruit, or one that seemed to be on track can suddenly lose momentum,” Steven Teles, who has consulted for Open Phil, and Mark Schmitt once wrote in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. “Advocacy evaluation should be seen, therefore, as a form of trained judgment — a craft requiring judgment and tacit knowledge — rather than as a scientific method.” This, they argue, makes “evaluating particular projects — as opposed to entire fields or organizations — almost impossible.”

Open Phil concedes that it’s not able to estimate the effects of the Public Safety Performance Project’s work precisely. “We have not invested much time in explicit estimates of PSPP’s cost effectiveness,” their review concludes. “We highly value the unquantified benefits of learning from PSPP and we do not believe policy-oriented philanthropy is likely to consist of proven, repeatable interventions with easily quantified expected impact.”

They’re right, of course. You can’t know the exact effectiveness of a policy intervention. But because of that, doing the kind of cause comparisons that Open Phil needs to do could prove maddeningly difficult.

Key to Open Phil’s thinking about policy is the idea of leverage. Effective advocacy work isn’t necessarily that expensive, and when it works, its impact can be several orders of magnitude bigger. For instance, $100 million spent lobbying for a health reform bill could produce hundreds of billions of dollars in new health spending. Even if you don’t think the lobbying is guaranteed to work, it’s an attractive-looking investment.

That’s why Open Phil’s other main area of interest on policy is preventing recessions. This is an unusual point of focus for a foundation. Apart from extraordinary measures like the 2009 stimulus, the task of ensuring that the economy doesn’t fall into recession and inflation doesn’t spiral out of control is the almost exclusive province of the Federal Reserve. And the Federal Reserve is generally regarded as un-lobbyable. Since donors haven’t traditionally thought anything could influence the Fed, spending like that hasn’t happened.

That is changing to a degree. A number of think tanks and grant-making groups interested in monetary policy have cropped up since the financial crisis, including the George Soros–funded Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy (whose staff includes former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke). But the advocacy side is extremely sparse. In particular, there aren’t many voices calling for the Fed to worry less about inflation and more about unemployment, which is still a problem seven years after the crisis hit.

Cari Tuna, president of the Open Philanthropy Project and Good Ventures. Marvin Joseph/the Washington Post via Getty Images

There’s a lot of potential leverage here. Open Phil’s analysis notes that the most recent financial crisis cost the US economy around ten trillion dollars in lost output, not to mention the permanent harm it did to the economy’s ability to grow by reducing investment and forcing people out of the workforce. Even if you assume that a crash like that will happen only twice in a century, that means preventing huge recessions could have an annual impact in the hundreds of billions. The humanitarian benefits swamp those of reducing mass incarceration.

The great spreadsheet of causes lists the tractability of macroeconomic policy as “highly uncertain,” which makes finding grantees a bit of a challenge. So far Good Ventures has given $335,000 to support the Full Employment Project at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and $100,000 to back the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign, which aims to organize workers in favor of a looser, more pro-growth monetary policy. Both are, in their way, investments in advocacy.

But Open Phil is even less able to estimate the effectiveness of these investments than it is its investments in criminal justice reform. Pew’s Public Safety Performance Project at least produced an estimate for how many people its work kept out of jail, albeit one that’s nigh impossible to verify. But the Fed Up campaign and Full Employment Project are new endeavors. They don’t have track records to evaluate. That makes the work more exciting. But it also makes it hard to tell if the money is better spent here than elsewhere.

Policy is only one of four issue areas Open Phil covers. One is global health and development; research there isn’t a priority, since GiveWell has already learned a lot about what works. Another is science, where work is still preliminary. That leaves the fourth and final area: global catastrophic risks, or GCRs. Such as world-destroying AI.

The basic idea — originated by Oxford’s Bostrom in his paper ”Astronomical Waste” — is that human extinction or civilizational collapse would be so bad that even a small risk of it happening is worth expending considerable resources to reduce. There are likely billions, if not trillions or quadrillions, of humans who could live in the future, provided we don’t go extinct. Saving their lives is thus, on this view, massively more important than anything affecting people currently alive.

”Even if average future periods were only about equally as good as the current period, the whole of the future would be about a trillion times more important, in itself, than everything that has happened in the last 100 years,” Nick Beckstead, a GiveWell research analyst who works on Open Phil, wrote in his 2013 philosophy dissertation.

To that end, if there are dangers that pose a real risk of destroying civilization, and steps can be taken to reduce that risk, Open Phil is interested. And the stakes required are quite high, such that major concerns like antibiotic resistance don’t make the cut. “We looked at antibiotic resistance,” Karnofsky says. “What would a world without antibiotics look like? It’d look, like, not that bad. It’d look like the ‘40s or ‘50s. Most of the decline in bacterial diseases happened before we developed antibiotics at all, on any large scale. Most of it is a hygiene thing. Look, it’d really suck to lose antibiotics, a lot of people would die, but I don’t think it counts as a GCR for me.”

That’s not to say that plagues aren’t a major concern for Open Phil. On the contrary, “biosecurity,” or work to make it easier to prevent and control massive outbreaks of the kind that could end civilization, tops Open Phil’s list of GCRs. The risk is compounded by the advent of synthetic biology, a field that works on both creating artificial life and repurposing existing organisms for new ends.

But to count as a GCR, a pandemic would have to do more than kill merely millions of people. It’d need to kill enough people to threaten civilization as we know it, perhaps to such a degree that the survivors won’t be able to make it. “The way I’ve put it is a global disruption of civilization,” Karnofsky says. “Something that didn’t literally wipe out every single person but killed, like, 25 percent of the world’s population would be enormously destabilizing. Today we have this civilization that seems to be making some kind of progress. Based on my understanding of history, it’s very easy to not make that kind of progress.”

He has a point. The current post–Industrial Revolution era of steady economic growth and improving living standards is a gigantic historical aberration. Any shock that threatens to end it could make billions, if not trillions, of people worse off.

Open Phil’s position here is actually markedly less extreme than many effective altruists’. “There’s a certain set of people who basically care about global catastrophic risks because of the potential for existential risk,” Lempel, who manages Open Phil’s work on GCRs, says. “There’s an argument that goes something like, ‘An enormous proportion of all people who will ever live are potential people who will live in the future, and so all the utility that exists is in the future — so the difference between something really bad that winds up not making us go extinct is enormous relative to something that makes us go extinct, so we should only care about things that make us go extinct.’”

That view implies that biosecurity shouldn’t top the list. Massive outbreaks have the potential to do great harm, but they can’t kill everybody. “There are some people on submarines,” Lempel notes. “Those people are going to make it.” There are a couple of reasons Open Phil lists it anyway. For one thing, Lempel says, there’s not unanimity among the staff that future persons have heavy or perhaps even equal moral weight as people today. “Personally, speaking for Howie, and not speaking for GiveWell, I care about future generations a lot. That’s just my value set.” Lempel says. “I think that’s not a consensus at GiveWell. But when we weigh different values, it’s one value set that we are thinking about.”

Biosecurity also appeals because many of the philanthropic steps that will likely be involved — improving response to disease outbreaks in poor countries, increasing hospital sanitation, etc. — would be desirable even if you don’t care much about future people. And the fact that they’re implementable now also means they can be tested, increasing confidence in their ability to avert a future mass catastrophe and motivating continued funding.

”There’s a risk when you set something up that’s only used in case of a crisis,” Lempel says. “Some of the stuff you might think about for AI risk, for example, are things that might be used if there was a really malevolent AI that was developed. You could imagine setting up infrastructure to work on that, five years later nothing’s happened, and it loses its support.”

But Open Phil still has a ways to go before it starts making grants on the issue. “We do not feel that we have a strong sense of the interventions available to a new philanthropist in this field,” its cause evaluation concludes, “but we expect that most work would take the form of research and advocacy.” Biosecurity thus poses a very similar challenge as criminal justice reform and monetary policy. Estimating the magnitude of impact for a philanthropic intervention is difficult bordering on untenable.

Open Phil will be in a research phase for a while, but soon it will need to start spending down Tuna and Moskovitz’s billions more rapidly.

”The world is getting better, and that means that giving opportunities now are better than they’re going to be 10 or 20 or 30 years from now, hopefully,” Tuna says. “The good you do today compounds over time.”

That suggests Good Ventures’ money needs to be distributed sooner rather than later. That’s a quicker time horizon than many foundations use, and allows for a relatively rapid test of what large-scale giving on effective altruist grounds would look like. If it works, it could prove hugely influential for other donors. Already other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are signing on; Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger (who got an estimated $100 million from selling the company to Facebook) and his fiancée, Kaitlyn Trigger, have committed at least $750,000 to Open Phil, and Trigger is set to start working there part-time.

That means that at some point in the not-too-distant future, Open Phil will have to decide if criminal justice investments are a better bet than macroeconomic policy ones, and by how much; if macroeconomic policy investments are a better bet than biosecurity; and whether either is better than funding medical research. It will have to start comparing magnitudes — and that’s ridiculously difficult.

Think about what you’d need to know to do a really precise comparison of whether to invest in prison reform or in preventing geomagnetic storms. You’d need to know exactly how many people will be let out of prison due to your grant to the think tank you’re considering funding. You’d need to figure exactly how much worse life in prison is than life on the outside — is it half as good? three-quarters? — and what effect, in either direction, you’re having on crime.

You’d need to know the weather patterns of the sun for the next few centuries, in order to calculate the odds of a coronal mass ejection hitting us. You’d need to know exactly how much damage those ejections will do to our current grid. You’d need to know who needs to be paid what to make telecommunications and electrical systems robust against an ejection.

It’s an impossible task, and Open Phil admits as much. Because of the inherent difficulty in assigning numeric odds to everything from effects of policy investments to global catastrophic risks, it’s moved away from relying too heavily on quantification. “We’re excited about the project of making giving more analytical, more intellectual, and overall more rational,” Karnofsky once wrote. “At the same time, we have mixed feelings about the project of quantifying good accomplished: of converting the impacts of all gifts into ‘cost per life saved’ or ‘cost per DALY’ type figures that can then be directly compared to each other.”

A man receives a cash transfer in Jakarta, Indonesia. Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty Images

So far, so good. But you still need to be able to compare rough magnitudes. I know we can’t quantitatively compare geomagnetic storms to criminal justice reform with any rigor. But I strongly suspect we can’t even qualitatively judge one to be more effective, either. The human brain can only process so much data. Six people can only process so much data.

Quantification can obscure more than it helps, but qualitative evaluations are prone to all kinds of cognitive biases, to subconscious emotions, to instinctive individual political leanings. One striking feature of Open Phil’s policy list is that it looks like my own personal public policy wish list. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe what’s going on is that people with a similar personality type are latching on to one set of causes and ignoring others that are equally good but less amenable to our temperaments. The less quantitative the process gets, the higher the potential for arbitrary factors to corrupt it.

This is especially true when most of the people in the room look alike. Out of GiveWell’s staff of 18, just three (plus Tuna) are women. There is not a single person of color on staff. [2018 update: this is no longer true.] When your stated purpose is to rank the world’s problems by importance and solvability, this really matters. Consciously or not, it influences your views on the importance of, say, women’s education in poor countries, or reducing police mistreatment of minorities, or even criminal justice reform, which did make it onto the list, but not on racial justice grounds.

”There’s a group of staff members with whom I’m almost daily sharing articles on issues that are totally separate from GiveWell issues, like identity politics,” research analyst Eliza Scheffler says. “We’ll often talk about gender.” But there’s no reason, Scheffler says, not to consider identity issues as causes worth addressing. She recalls seeing a talk by a gay activist from rural Kenya, who was forced to undergo numerous rounds of reparative “therapy.”

”His life sounds horrible,” Scheffler says. “I think we need to be able to try to compare that … I worry that we’re missing out on negative utility, but I also feel pretty confident in the way we are approaching it.” She’s right. Cost-benefit analysis is not an inherently racist or sexist practice. But you need to be aware of costs to which your position in society might blind you.

”We’re not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and we’re working on it,” Karnofsky says. “Based on accepted offers, our incoming class will represent a step forward on this front — about evenly split on gender with a significant minority of people of color — though we recognize that we still have a long way to go.”

The sheer difficulty of the process raises the question of whether Good Ventures should just give to the causes GiveWell has already identified, and whose effectiveness is much easier to measure. For example, GiveDirectly, one of GiveWell’s top charities, gives cash directly to poor people in Kenya and Uganda. Cash transfers to the poor are among the most-studied topics in development economics — and if that weren’t enough, the charity was subject to a randomized evaluation that found major positive results for families receiving the cash. GiveWell knows what it does, and knows that it works. [2018 update: a more recent followup study of GiveDirectly was more mixed.]

”The things that we found so far in Open Phil, some of them I’m really happy that we’ve been able to provide funding to,” GiveWell cofounder Elie Hassenfeld says. “But I don’t yet feel like, ‘Oh wow, this is so amazing that GiveDirectly should never get another dollar.’ If anything, the fact that we have done the Open Phil work for a year or two and haven’t found anything that is so amazing makes me feel better about GiveWell than I did two years ago.” Karnofsky has expressed similar thoughts.

Tuna says she doesn’t understand her colleagues�� pessimism. “I am still optimistic that we can do better than just giving money to poor people,” she says. “But in the meantime, we’re doing a lot of just giving money to poor people.”

Still, whether there’s something better than giving money to poor people may not be the hardest question Open Phil faces. The really hard question is how they’d know.

Original Source -> You have $8 billion. You want to do as much good as possible. What do you do?

via The Conservative Brief