Just discovering this now, but it really resonates. “A leap of faith” — I like that.

Great post!

Out of interest, can you give an example of an "instrumentally rational technique that require irrationality"?

Great post! It reminds me of this one: http://mindingourway.com/the-value-of-a-life/

This is really powerful, Claire, thank you for sharing it!

Let me be clear that I am not responding to how you should feel, but just brainstorming about an instrumental approach toward the most effective emotional tonality.

For an ideal emotional tonality, I wonder if it might be helpful to orient not toward feeling sorrow for the lives not saved or morally relevant experiences not had, but to feeling neutral about them, and only get positive experience from additional lives saved and morally relevant experiences had. This can tap into the power of positive reinforcement and rewards, which research shows tends to function better than negative reinforcement in motivating effective behavior. Since sadness is, science suggests, not motivating, Effective Altruists might be better off orienting to avoiding sadness, and focusing on experiencing joy over successes.

This presumes an ability to self-modify one's emotions, which is certainly doable, but quite effortful.

Again, this is not meant to be prescriptive, but just responding to what an ideal emotional tonality could be.

I think this is an incredibly powerful post, and definitely worth sharing. I wonder if there's a way to edit some of it to make it more front-facing, without losing out on any of the emotional power.

Graham Oddie, in his argument for moral realism, writes about the distinction between value and experience of value.

Feelings of empathy can be considered moral sense-data which grow more or less vivid depending on your distance and acquaintance with the object of moral concern. It's similar to objects appearing large when close but appearing small when far away.

In that respect, there's nothing inappropriate about feeling more strongly about nearby moral problems and less strongly about faraway moral problems if you recognize that the intrinsic value of the issue is unchanged by the factors which affect your mentality.

But if we truly cared just as much about distant others as we are naturally inclined to or as much as anyone down the street did, we might not do anything because moral beliefs alone rarely provide sufficient motivation to act (in my opinion). So I dunno, I agree with him in terms of moral epistemology, but not in terms of moral motivation. We can define, to some extent, how much we care and we can influence each other to care more or less.

It's rarely possible to care about all other people equally. The naive view where we would experience equal care and concern for the trials and experiences of each individual would be not just unfeasible but wholly undesirable.

At the end of the day, the correct framework for the consequentialist to adopt is to recognize that he/she must adopt not just the actions, but also the levels of empathy, dispositions and attitudes which best facilitate their productivity and contribution to the world.

This could involve caring about people in terms of instrumental rather than intrinsic value - caring about yourself the most because you are an effective altruist, caring about your friends and family somewhat less because they provide emotional support and stability to an effective altruist, and caring about distant others the least. This gives you the justification for possessing some attitudes and approaches to relationships which are similar to that of a normal person. You need not be constantly thinking of people in utilitarian terms, you can have a dual mental approach where your inner attitudes also remain similar to that of ordinary people if (and only if) those kinds of attitudes make you the most effective kind of person - see "Alienation, Consequentialism and the Demands of Morality" by Peter Railton.