Comments
Great paper! Though I believe one particular value ought to be cultivated above all though it only gets a passing mention in the article.
Kindness (Agape love).
Summary: Practicing "uncalculated" "less-impactful" goodness in frequent, small ways, should prove very helpful in the practice of larger-scale impactful calculated goodness .
- It is common and "easy" to practice/cultivate
- I posit that a greater level of kindness leads to much greater ease of overcoming the psychological obstacles to cultivating the listed utilitarian virtues. Conversely, someone unkind by nature will have a much harder time to cultivate them
- The IMPACT of becoming kinder thus can affect all other areas, and therefore is likely to be a highly -effective- way of increasing global well-being.
- Increased Kindness has a ripple effect not simply on ourselves and our ability to do more good, but on others as well in ways that are difficult to quantify.
- Kindness applied daily, by a large segment of the population (or even a small one, arguably, if they are otherwise effective), with minimal effort, could dramatically impact the world, in ways that a similar effort in any one of the other virtues are unlikely to approach.
Which leads to a counter-intuitive hypothesis:
Kindness, cultivated in daily life, applied to causes that may appear/be less-effective, but that come to us/that we come across during the daily bustle, could actually have the greatest impact on the world.
I expect there are diminishing returns, and only a (small?) portion of one's resources ought to be dedicated to the effort. Anecdotal evidence however (EDIT: Actually I believe there is research on the topic presented in 80 000 hours?) seems to indicate that at least the emotional energy resource level increases significantly through acts of kindness, providing additional returns on the investment.
Again:
Practicing "uncalculated" "less-impactful" goodness in frequent, small ways, should prove very helpful in the practice of larger-scale impactful, calculated goodness.
Great! I broadly endorse the above virtues and can't say much on the object level. On meta-level, I am curious about how do you think about the impact of this paper. I have certain guesses:
Thanks for your comment. The comparison to Bleeding Heart Libertarians is good and instructive; thanks for that. Yes, one goal of our paper is to show that utilitarianism as practiced in the real world isn't about breaking rules and similar. Instead, when you actually apply utilitarianism, you need virtues that most people would feel positively about - like truth-seeking and collaboration. And yes, we do hope that that gives a different and more positive image of utilitarianism.
We also want to give recommendations to people who already believe in utilitarianism inside and outside the EA community, yes.
We are also at the early stages of an empirical project focused on getting a better psychological understanding of these virtues.