- Maybe the noise hasn’t reached you yet.
- A utilitarian will focus on the overall effects on everybody’s welfare, so even if poverty or disease or extreme weather is causing real suffering to millions today, the utilitarian won’t necessarily act on that if they think the best way to maximize welfare is to act on the suffering of hundreds of billions of future people.
- MacAskill, who takes moral uncertainty too seriously to identify simply as a utilitarian, writes that “we should accept that the ends do not always justify the means; we should try to make the world better, but we should respect moral side-constraints, such as against harming others”.
Effective altruism’s most controversial idea
