EA - What you prioritise is mostly moral intuition by James Ozden

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What you prioritise is mostly moral intuition, published by James Ozden on December 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Note: A linkpost from my blog. Epistemic status: A confused physicist trying to grapple with philosophy, and losing.Effective Altruism is about doing as much good as possible with a given amount of resources, using reason and evidence. This sounds very appealing, but there’s the age-old problem, what counts as “the most good”? Despite the large focus on careful reasoning and rigorous evidence within Effective Altruism, I speculate that many people decide what is “the most good” based largely on moral intuitions.I should also point out that these moral dilemmas don’t just plague Effective Altruists or those who prescribe to utilitarianism. These thorny moral issues apply to everyone who wants to help others or “do good”. As Richard Chappell neatly puts it, these are puzzles for everyone. If you want to cop-out, you could reject any philosophy where you try to rank how bad or good things are, but this seems extremely unappealing. Surely if we’re given the choice between saving ten people from a terrible disease like malaria and ten people from hiccups, we should be able to easily decide that one is worse than the other? Anything else seems very unhelpful to the world around us, where we allow grave suffering to continue as we don’t think comparing “bads” are possible.To press on, let’s take one concrete example of a moral dilemma: How important is extending lives relative to improving lives? Put more simply, given limited resources, should we focus on averting deaths from easily preventable diseases or increasing people’s quality of life?This is not a question that one can easily answer with randomised controlled trials, meta-analyses and other traditional forms of evidence! Despite this, it might strongly affect what you dedicate your life to working on, or the causes you choose to support. Happier Lives Institute have done some great research looking at this exact question and no surprises - your view on this moral question matters a lot. When looking at charities that might help people alive today, they find that it matters a lot whether you prioritise the youngest people (deprivationism), older children over infants (TRIA), or the view that death isn’t necessarily bad, but that living a better life is what matters most (Epicureanism). For context, the graph below shows the relative cost-effectiveness of various charities under different philosophical assumptions, using the metric WELLBYs, which taken into account the subjective experiences of people.So, we have a problem. If this is a question that could affect what classifies as “the most good”, and I think it’s definitely up there, then how do we proceed? Do we just do some thought experiments, weigh up our intuitions against other beliefs we hold (using reflective equilibrium potentially), incorporate moral uncertainty, and go from there? For a movement based on doing “the most good”, this seems very unsatisfying! But sadly, I think this problem rears its head in several important places. To quote Michael Plant (a philosopher from the University of Oxford and director of Happier Lives Institute):“Well, all disagreements in philosophy ultimately come down to intuitions, not just those in population ethics!”To note, I think this is very different from empirical disagreements about doing “the most good”. For example, Effective Altruism (EA) is pretty good at using data and evidence to get to the bottom of how to do a certain kind of good. One great example is GiveWell, who have an extensive research process, drawing mostly on high-quality randomised control trials (see this spreadsheet for the cost-effectiveness of the Against Malaria Foundation) to find the most effective ways to hel...