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Cause X Guide
JulianAbernethy5y3
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Wouldn't that be part of improving global health and/or wellbeing? To me this would be one meta level below the general cause areas.

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How do most utilitarians feel about "replacement" thought experiments?
JulianAbernethy5y3
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I have to admit I only skimmed the paper, can you explain to me what "bullet" I ought to bite? It seems like a neutral proposition to say, what if we replace "us" with beings of greater well being.

My best guess is that our intuition for self-preservation and our intuition that killing sentient beings is bad most of the time should make me feel like that it would be a horrible idea? I'd rather throw the intuitions out than the framework, so to me this seems like an easy question. But maybe you have other arguments that make me not want to replace us.

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Simon_Knutsson
5y
To bite the bullet here would be to accept that it would be morally right to kill and replace everyone with other beings who, collectively, have a (possibly only slightly) greater sum of well-being. If someone could do that. The following are two similar scenarios: Traditional Utilitarian Elimination: The sum of positive and negative well-being in the future will be negative if humans or sentient life continues to exist. Traditional utilitarianism implies that it would be right to kill all humans or all sentient beings on Earth painlessly. Suboptimal Paradise: The world has become a paradise with no suffering. Someone can kill everyone in this paradise and replace them with beings with (possibly only slightly) more well-being in total. Traditional utilitarianism implies that it would be right to do so. To bite the bullet regarding those two scenarios would be to accept that killing everyone would be morally right in those scenarios.
Ask Me Anything!
JulianAbernethy5y1
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Hello Will,

I have a question about longtermism and its use within the EA movement. While I find your (strong) longtermism hypothesis quite plausible and convincing, I do consider some "short-termist" cause areas to be quite important, even in the long term. (I always go back to hearing that "you have to be a shorttermist to care about wild animal suffering" which striked me as odd).

Because of that, I liked that the classic longterm cause area was called x/s-risk prevention, because that was one way to create value in the longterm. I t... (read more)

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