Affective Altruism

Affective Altruism

 

Redirecting another post over here because I apparently have no willpower and could not stop myself from piling on to it until the end product became unacceptably oversized for YouTube’s community tab. It’s fine though, this one probably merits a spot on here anyway.

 

Will MacAskill back on the Making Sense podcast:

https://samharris.org/podcasts/228-doing-good/

Too much of this turned out to be a rerun of their 2016 edition, so I’ll spare you a retelling of the more substantive objections I’ve already aired in the wake of that first conversation. Right now I want to delve into an altogether different observation that keeps bugging me about these two. I’m finally able to recall how the same something managed to irritate me during the first go-round as well. It’s one of those vague somethings that never fully crystallized for me, until a few days ago.

 

Particularistic Utilitarianism Demystified

My post on the infighting within contrastive utilitarian theories was an attempt to salvage a principled or generalized handle on heterodox modes of utilitarianism. I sided decisively with Average, Negative and Preference antidotes to Total, Positive and Classical orthodoxies. The result was a spirited endorsement of one system; Negative Average Preference Utilitarianism. This would be fine were it not propped up under the guise of Moral Principlism. Given subsequent forays into Moral Particularism, I averred –– albeit far too latently –– that any isolated system of ethics cannot be reconciled with Principlism in good conscience, since the machinery of Principlism is itself worrisome. This naturally extends to NAPU’s compliance to Principlism, meaning aspects of that (otherwise dandy) entry could benefit from modification. As usual, I'd rather just do a new post and not addend old ones.

Indications of tension between NAPU and Principlism/Generalism arise in that very post though, due to my encouraging swift and unapologetic abandonments of NAPU in favor of Classical Negative Average Utilitarianism whenever the moral patient is a non-human animal. If NAPU is abandonable on this score, it follows that CNAU would be as well for the obverse reason. This blog's oft-discussed compartmentalization of human vs. non-human moral patients animated a garish undercurrent of particularism; refusing to hold the Preference side hostage to prescriptive invariability. Having grown fonder of variability in the months that followed, I was pleased to see glimmers of it in the post that's now under refinement. Problem is, the post dealt with the three keystones of internal disputation enclosed by utilitarian ethics, with particularism open-for-business in just one of those [Preference vs. Classical]. This makes it easy for readers to gather that Negative and Average utilitarianisms are unfailingly wiser than Positive and Total utilitarianisms. They aren't. What I should have argued is that they are wiser arguably more often, not in principle, as I intend to show.