There are effectively laws protecting against cannibalism, as there are laws against murder, and against abuse or desecration of a corpse.

I'm afraid what's wrong with you is that, like any scholar of the 19th or 18th century, you believe that moral evolution has stopped right at the customs of your time

Where do you get this idea from? I explicitly stated in my comment:

Laws are informed of course by moral evolution, and I advocate for updating rules based on a utilitarian calculus.

I certainly don't think we've arrived at an end-point to moral development, and I also recognise that morals will change depending on what suits our civilisation (if we live in a system that effectively incentivises pro-social behaviour then this will hopefully enable increased freedoms) I'm just saying there's likely a limit in terms of our instincts, and addressing mental hardware on a biological level has its own ethical questions.

To be clear, I'm not a fan of deontology, and I don't think it's useful for deriving values, I think moral actions are largely a function of virtue ethics, but I think that we need some metric by which we measure virtues, and that lies in some form of consequentialism.

However, all these behaviours existed in human cultures of the past, and it wasn't criminal laws that made them disappear

I don't see that you have any support for this claim. Laws against cannibalism and child sexual abuse have undoubtedly made those practices less prevalent, that's how laws work. Laws are informed of course by moral evolution, and I advocate for updating rules based on a utilitarian calculus (unlike traditional deontology that gets these values out of a religious text or other such arbitrary source).

So there is only one valid ethic: virtue ethics

How do you determine what are virtues though? If there is not some consideration of consequences?

Do you think that we can culturally evolve to not need any behavioural guard-rails, given that we are not robots, but rather evolved primates whose instincts were shaped for a much more dangerous environment? I mean, it would be nice to believe that, but I don't see much evidence for it. Child abusers still exist in societies where cultural norms assume it to be wrong, child abusers largely know that what they are doing is wrong, and understand why, but are never the less compelled to do it—Don't you think it's a little naive to think that this can be changed simply by continued cultural evolution?

I'm not understanding the distinction you're making between the "experience" and the "response." In my example, there is a needle poking someone's arm. Someone can experience that in different ways (including feeling more or less pain depending on one's mindset). That experience is not distinct from a response, it just is a response.

Now you appear to be using a definition of "response" that is synonymous with "experience". Before you were using "experience" to describe "freaking out" which I would see as a "response" to an "experience" (an action you take after having experienced something). If this is a semantic issue, I don't need you to subscribe to my definitions, just know these are the definitions I'm using, and hopefully my meaning is clear.

However, in the links I included in my previous comment, I suggested there are people who explicitly reject the view that this is all that matters

I find these explicit rejections unconvincing. People often self-report inaccurately. The tendency to value beauty, for instance, is quite easily reducible to pleasure-seeking. We have biologically induced feelings of pleasure that are associated with beauty, that correlate with evolutionary advantages.

I have challenged you to genuinely try this with a moral tenet you and I would agree on. If you are genuinely interested in trying to understand my point, I think this is the best way for you to understand it.

And again, assuming the experience of pain is inescapable, why does it follow that it is necessarily bad?

The inescapable nature of the experience is not what makes it good or bad, otherwise I would have called it "Inescapable experience" and not stipulated "value-laden". A neutral value like the click of a finger is still inescapably value-laden, it's just the value is neutral (zero), and therefore not really relevant when extending into a moral discussion.

I believe I have already provided arguments to support the two questions you've asked, but in short:

1. It is definitionally bad—if pain and suffering was a good experience we would call it pleasure. I think your confusion might be to do with a sense that a "moral" good is necessarily something that is imposed on a person or action, I disagree with this directionality. My point is that "moral" goods are emergent extrapolations derived from inherently good or bad experiences.
2. This is the foundational claim of the theory, it cannot be proved, but it can be falsified. I'm saying this is a worthwhile framework of understanding that I believe is consistent with reality, and as such might actually be real. But like with any theory, this can only be provisionally verified by numerous examples of where it is consistent, and if it is inconsistent it should be able to be showed to be so.

I'm not asking you to falsify it, you are welcome to try if you want. I would prefer you took the challenge I've provided, as this will actually help you understand the proposition. I am offering an explanation and a framework that I think has high utility. Whether you adopt it or not is up to you. You don't have to falsify it to reject it.

I can see how encouraging this sort of "cause neutrality" might keep people cognisant of particular programs in a given field that is not, in general, highly ranked for effectiveness where nevertheless that particular program is very effective, perhaps?

I haven't actually observed this issue, the project of EA seems all about beginning neutral and ending up with a hierarchy—if it is swerving away from this approach then that seems antithetical to the general mission.

On a personal note, I generally try to direct my giving towards the least emotive topics (general funds for boring diseases), assuming that there will be an over-supply for more emotive areas.

One of the issues that negates growth in the ethical meat market is that it is essentially competing on two fronts. On one front you have people who don't consider the ethics of what they're eating, and on the other end you have people that care so much about animals that they don't eat animals at all.

This means that the market for ethical meat exists in a narrow band between these two groups, and may always struggle to reach critical mass. If, for instance, the ethical market is 10% but 5% of people are vegan, that's half your ethical market gone, meaning you lose many economies of scale, and also you lose an opportunity to grow, because the more concerned people become about animal welfare the more people will also become vegan or vegetarian, in one door, out the other. I'm not suggesting of course that vegans should eat meat in order to bolster the market, just that it's a tricky issue for this reason.

I think the video does a good job of trying to broaden that narrow band, by focusing on animal welfare rather than the body-count of animals. This might be a good approach. I can almost imagine a world where everyone is vegan, but I can much more easily imagine a world where 10% of people are vegan, but where 100% of the meat is ethically grown, which would be an immeasurably better situation than the one we have at present (until of course we consider the environmental impacts). So, although it's a tricky issue, it's worth pursuing.

Agreed, creating this sort of selection pressure against foundations less able or less willing to fork out for expensive conferences is likely to bias the conclusions of summit (potentially in exactly the wrong direction)—this gets exacerbated if scholarships are snapped up by unscrupulous organisations.

It is news to me that this isn't already the case, seems like an obvious positive, both for the potentially higher ratings (not being down-adjusted) and as instructive for the organisations themselves.

This is a beautiful piece of writing, thanks for telling your story and the work you do. I'm reminded of a quote by ZeFrank:

The thoughts that I have in my head that make me feel the most lonely, because I don't think that anyone else thinks them, are also the thoughts that have the most potential to make me feel connected.

I think this line is especially important:

Speaking as a trained crisis counselor, people on those lines absolutely want to talk to you. You are not a burden.

It must be difficult given the narrow perspective you outline to realise this, but I think it's really important to understand—not all others are merely transactional, human connection has a value of its own.

Again, lovely, important piece.

Thanks for this, a hadn't discovered this yet, what great resource (and thorough).

There is probably a self-selection pressure against conservatives in that generally conservatives support individual freedoms over collective cooperation, and all of these projects seem to require some sacrifice of individual freedoms in service of collective goals.

This is just a reality of dealing with long term issues, thinking collectively becomes a priority.

But I agree that actual outreach to conservatives is worthwhile, to avoid an echo chamber—and there may be conservative solutions that have not been fairly considered, after all individual freedoms are a good in themselves and can lead to unexpected benefits collectively too (like the free market in many respects).

I see this as somewhat of an uphill battle though, as I expect self-selection to be the main obstacle for conservatives who might be put off by collectivism, and feel they are already doing their part by contributing to their church. In saying this, I guess the solution would be to acknowledge these realities when designing outreach messaging.