peter_hurford comments on 2014 Survey of Effective Altruists - Less Wrong

27 Post author: tog 05 May 2014 02:32AM

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Comment author: RobbBB 05 May 2014 04:07:59AM 5 points [-]

I'd rather see 'consequentialist' supplemented or replaced by specific questions that get at substantive ethical or meta-ethical disputes in EA and philosophy. 'Utilitarian' and 'deontologist' mean lots of different things to different people, and on their strictest definitions they don't entail a lot of their most interesting or widely cited ideas. Perhaps have an exploratory question one year asking non-utilitarians to write in their main objection to utilitarianism, then convert that into a series of questions the following year.

Comment author: peter_hurford 05 May 2014 05:50:36PM 2 points [-]

This was something I suggested to Tom because I'd be interested too. But ultimately we thought that only a small group of EAs would really have substantive ethical opinions and we thought to trim things for survey length. We added a box asking for clarifications at the end of the survey to provide more of this outlet.