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markobalogh

0 karmaJoined Aug 2015

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Although certainly not the comprehensive or rigorous information you are looking for, google trends can provide some interesting insights on a broad scale. For example, while effective altruism is showing strong growth in terms of search frequency, it is still searched for 7 times less frequently than Peter Singer: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&q=Effective+altruism,+/m/05xnb&cmpt=q&tz=Etc/GMT%2B8&tz=Etc/GMT%2B8&content=1

One thing which I think you should consider is the idea that one's preferences become "tuned" to one's moral beliefs. I would challenge the sentence in which you claim that "even if [virtue ethics/kant] were winning, I would still go there and pull that lever"...for wouldn't the idea that virtue ethics is winning be contradicted by your choosing to pull the lever? How do we know when we are fully convinced by an ethical theory? We measure our conviction to follow it. If you are fully convinced of utilitarianism, for example, your preferences will reflect that---for how could you possibly prefer to not follow an ethical theory which you completely believe in? It is not possible to say something similar to "I know for certain that this is right, but I prefer not to do it". What is really happening in a situation like this is that you actually give some ethical priority to your own preferences---hence you are partially an ethical egoist. To map this onto your situation, I would interpret your writing above as meaning that you are not fully convinced of the ethical theories you listed---you find that reason guides you to utilitarianism, Kantianism, whatever it may be, but you are overestimating your own certainty. You say that you take EA actions in spite of what is morally right to do. If you were truly convinced that something else were morally right, you would do it. Why wouldn't you?

If I observe that you do something which qualifies as an EA action, and then ask you why you did it, you might say something like "Because it is my preference to do it, even though I know that X is morally right", X being some alternative action. What I'm trying to say---apologies because this idea is difficult to communicate clearly---is that when you say "Because it is my preference", you are offering your preference as valid justification for your actions. This form of justification is a principle of ethical egoism, so some non-zero percentage of your ethical commitments must be toward yourself. Even though you claimed to be certain that X is right, I have reason to challenge your own certainty, because of the justification you gave for the action. This is certainly a semantics issue in some sense, turning on what we consider to qualify as "belief" in an ethical system.