2014 Survey of Effective Altruists

But HU wouldn't necessarily say that someone's preference for something else than pleasure or pain would be mistaken - if it's interpreted within a subjectivist framework, HU is just a description of preferences that are different.

I really don't think that this is correct. If this were true, first of all, hedonistic utilitarianism would simply reduce to preference utilitarianism. In actual fact, neither view is merely about one's own terminal values.

If someone, personally, cares only about pain and pleasure, but acknowledges that other people may have other things as terminal values, and thinks that The Good lies in satisfying everyone's preferences maximally — which, for themselves, means maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, and for other people may mean other things — then that person is not a hedonistic utilitarian. They are a preference utilitarian. Referring to them as an HU is simply not correct, because that's not how the term is used in the philosophical literature.

On the other hand, if someone cares only about pain and pleasure — both theirs and other peoples' — and would prefer that everyone's pleasure be maximized and everyone's pain be minimized; but this person is not a moral realist, and has no opinion on what constitutes The Good or thinks there's no fact of the matter about whether an act is right or wrong; well, then this person is not a utilitarian at all. Again, describing this person as a hedonistic or any other kind of utilitarian completely fails to match up with how the term is used in the philosophical literature.

As for ethical subjectivism — uh, I don't think that's an actual thing. I'd not heard of anything by that name until today. I don't like going by wikipedia's definitions of philosophical principles, so I tried tracking it down to a source, such as perhaps a major philosopher espousing the view or at least describing it coherently. No such luck. Take a look at that list of references on its wikipedia page; two are to a single book (written in 1959 by some guy I've never heard of — have you? — and the shortness whose wikipedia page suggests that he wasn't anyone interesting), and one is to a barely-related page that mentions the thing once, in passing, by a different name. I'm not convinced. As best I can tell, it's a label that some modern-day historians of philosophy have used to describe... a not-quite-consistent family of views. (Divine command theory, for one.)

But let's attempt to take it at face value. You say:

Someone could be an ethical subjectivist and say that utilitarianism is the theory that best describes their particular attitudes, or at least that subset of their attitudes that they endorse.

Very well. Are their attitudes correct, do they think? If they say there's no fact of the matter about that, then they're not a utilitiarian. "Utilitiarianism" is a quite established term in the literature. You can't just apply it to any old thing.

Of course, this is Lesswrong; we don't argue about definitions; we're interested in what people actually think. However in this case I think getting our terms straight is important, for two reasons:

1. When most people say they're utilitarians, they mean it in the usual sense, I think. So to understand what's going on in these discussions, and in the heads of the people we're talking to, we need to know what is the usual sense.

2. If you hold some view which is not one of the usual views with commonly-known terms, you shouldn't call it by one of the commonly-known terms, because then I won't have any idea what you're talking about and we'll keep getting into comment threads like this one.

Someone could be an ethical subjectivist and want to maximize world utility, but such a person would not be a utilitarian, because utilitarianism holds that other people should maximize world utility. If you merely say "I want to maximize world utility and others to do the same", that is not utilitarianism - a utilitarian would say that you ought to maximize world utility, even if you don't want to, and it's not a matter of attitudes. Yes, this is arguing over definitions to some extent, but it's important because I often see this kind of confusion about utilitarianism on LW.

That doesn't mean utilitarianism is subjective. Rather, it means any subjective idea could correspond to objective truth.

(Assuming that we wish to choose one in the first place, of course - I do think that there is merit in just accepting that they're all flawed and then not choosing to endorse any single one.)

Well, that's been my policy so far, certainly. Some are worse than others, though. "This ethical framework breaks in catastrophic, horrifying fashion, creating an instant dystopia, as soon as we can rewire people's brains" is pretty darn bad.

Ditto for Vaniver and Said.

I approve of virtuous acts, and disapprove of vicious ones.

In terms of labels, I think I give consequentialist answers to the standard ethical questions, but I think most character improvement comes from thinking deontologically, because of the tremendous amount of influence our identities have on our actions. If one thinks of oneself as humble, that has many known ways of making one act differently. One's abstract, far mode views are likely to only change one's speech, not one's behavior. Thus, I don't put all that much effort into theories of ethics, and try to put effort instead into acting virtuously.

There is no such centralized place, no; I've alluded to my views in comments here and there over the past year or so, but haven't gone laid them out fully. (Then again, I'm a member of no movements that depend heavily on any ethical positions. ;)

Truth be told — and I haven't disguised this — my ethical views are not anywhere near completely fleshed-out. I know the general shape, I suppose, but beyond that I'm more sure about what I don't believe — what objections and criticisms I have to other people's views — than about what I do believe. But here's a brief sketch.

I think that consequentialism, as a foundational idea, a basic approach, is the only one that makes sense. Deontology seems to me to be completely nonsensical as a grounding for ethics. Every seemingly-intelligent deontologist to whom I've spoken (which, admittedly, is a small number — a handful of people here in LessWrong) has appeared to be spouting utter nonsense. Deontology has its uses (see Bostrom's "An Infinitarian Challenge to Aggregative Ethics", and this post by Eliezer, for examples), but there it's deployed for consequentialist reasons: we think it'll give better results. I've seen the view expressed that virtue ethics is descriptively correct as an account of how human minds implement morality, and (as a result) prescriptively valid as a recommendation of how to implement your morality in your own mind once you've decided on your object-level moral views, and that seems like a more-or-less reasonable stance to take. As an actual philosophical grounding for morality, virtue ethics is nonsense, but perhaps that's fine, given the above. Consequentialism actually makes sense. Consequences are the only things that matter? Well, yes. What else could there be?

As far as varieties of consequentialism go... I think intended and foreseeable consequences matter when evaluating the moral rightness of an act, not actual consequences; judging based on actual consequences seems utterly useless, because then you can't even apply decision theory to the problem of deciding how to act. Judging on actual consequences also utterly fails to accord with my moral intuitions, while judging on intended and foreseeable consequences fits quite well.

I tend toward rule consequentialism rather than act consequentialism; I ask not "what would be the consequences of such an act?", but "what sort of world would it be like, where [a suitably generalized class of] people acted in this [suitably generalized] way? Would I want to live in such a world?", or something along those lines. I find act consequentialism to be too often short-sighted, and open to all sorts of dilemmas to which rule consequentialism simply does not fall prey.

I take seriously the complexity of value, and think that hedonistic utilitiarianism utterly fails to capture that complexity. I would not want to live in a world ruled by hedonistic utilitiarians. I wouldn't want to hand them control of the future. I generally think that preferences are what's important, and ought to be satisfied — I don't think there's any such thing as intrinsically immoral preferences (not even the preference to torture children), although of course one might have uninformed preferences (no, Mr. Example doesn't really want to drink that glass of acid; what he wants is a glass of beer, and his apparent preference for acid would dissolve immediately, were he apprised of the facts); and satisfying certain preferences might introduce difficult conflicts (the fellow who wants to torture children — well, if satisfying his preferences would result in actual children being actually tortured, then I'm afraid we couldn't have that). "I prefer to kill myself because I am depressed" is genuinely problematic, however. That's an issue that I think about often.

All that seems like it might make me a preference utilitiarian, or something like it, but as I've said, I'm highly skeptical about the possibility or even coherence of aggregating utility across individuals, not to mention the fact that I don't think my own preferences adhere to the VNM axioms, and so it may not even be possible to construct a utility function for all individuals. (The last person with whom I was discussing this stopped commenting on Lesswrong before I could get hold of my copy of Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, but now I've got it, and I'm willing to discuss the matter, if anyone likes.)

I don't think it's obvious that all beings that matter, matter equally. I don't see anything wrong with valuing my mother much more than I value a randomly selected stranger in Mongolia. It's not just that I do, in fact, value my mother more; I think it's right that I should. My family and friends more than strangers; members of my culture (whatever that means, which isn't necessarily "nation" or "country" or any such thing, though these things may be related) more than members of other cultures... this seems correct to me. (This seems to violate both the "equal consideration" and "agent-neutrality" aspects of classical utilitarianism, to again tie back to the SEP breakdown.)

As far as who matters — to a first approximation, I'd say it's something like "beings intelligent and self-aware enough to consciously think about themselves". Human-level intelligence and subjective consciousness, in other words. I don't think animals matter. I don't think unborn children matter, nor do infants (though there are nonetheless good reasons for not killing them, having to do with bright lines and so forth; similar considerations may protect the severely mentally disabled, though this is a matter which requires much further thought).

Do these thoughts add up to a coherent ethical system? Unlikely. They're what I've got so far, though. Hopefully you find them at least somewhat useful, and of course feel free to ask me to elaborate, if you like.

Out of curiosity, what was your reason for asking about my ethical views in detail? I did somewhat enjoy writing out that comment, but I'm curious as to whether you were planning to go somewhere with this.

If I could ask two quick questions, it'd be whether you're a realist and whether you're a cognitivist. The preponderance of those views within EA is what I've heard debated most often. (This is different from what first made me ask, but I'll drop that.)

I know Jacy Anthis - thebestwecan on LessWrong - has an argument that realism combined with the moral beliefs about future generations typical among EAs suggests that smarter people in the future will work out a more correct ethics, and that this should significantly affect our actions now. He rejects realism, and think this is a bad consequence. I think it actually doesn't depend on realism, but rather on most forms of cognitivism, for instance ones on which our coherent extrapolated view is correct. He plans to write about this.