The beneficentrism concept has actually slightly improved my life, unironically. It's helped me see what I have in common with e.g. religious views on ethics more clearly and feel more like we're all in this together. Also, I think that I now finally properly understand the point Sam Harris was making in the Moral Landscape which got pan…
The beneficentrism concept has actually slightly improved my life, unironically. It's helped me see what I have in common with e.g. religious views on ethics more clearly and feel more like we're all in this together. Also, I think that I now finally properly understand the point Sam Harris was making in the Moral Landscape which got panned by a lot of professional philosophers because it was interpreted as making baseless claims about meta ethics. But it wasn't, Sam Harris was (less precisely than you) pointing out the truth of Beneficentrism!
Thanks, that's nice to hear! And an interesting charitable interpretation of Harris. (I, too, always thought he was making baseless claims about metaethics...)
It's a bit complicated. If you read the entire book, and the arguments and intuition pumps that he brings up, I think it's clear that he is pushing towards a conclusion that morality always, in some shape or form, cares about the well-being of conscious beings, which is basically beneficentrism, but because at the time he didn't really get metaethics, he sometimes also makes baseless metaethical claims about what this normative ethical fact means. And he's since gotten wiser about all of this, and spoken to serious moral philosophers. So I think with some edits, the book is basically a very good persuasive argument for the undeniable truth of beneficentrism.
The beneficentrism concept has actually slightly improved my life, unironically. It's helped me see what I have in common with e.g. religious views on ethics more clearly and feel more like we're all in this together. Also, I think that I now finally properly understand the point Sam Harris was making in the Moral Landscape which got panned by a lot of professional philosophers because it was interpreted as making baseless claims about meta ethics. But it wasn't, Sam Harris was (less precisely than you) pointing out the truth of Beneficentrism!
Thanks, that's nice to hear! And an interesting charitable interpretation of Harris. (I, too, always thought he was making baseless claims about metaethics...)
It's a bit complicated. If you read the entire book, and the arguments and intuition pumps that he brings up, I think it's clear that he is pushing towards a conclusion that morality always, in some shape or form, cares about the well-being of conscious beings, which is basically beneficentrism, but because at the time he didn't really get metaethics, he sometimes also makes baseless metaethical claims about what this normative ethical fact means. And he's since gotten wiser about all of this, and spoken to serious moral philosophers. So I think with some edits, the book is basically a very good persuasive argument for the undeniable truth of beneficentrism.