Thx. I wonder if the rationalist has an advantage when it comes to suboptimal altruism? Imagine someone voluntarily choosing to make a suboptimal sacrifice for someone else (in other words, they sacrifice slightly more than the other person gains). Intuitively it seems like, within certain limits, this would be fully justified. I don't t…
Thx. I wonder if the rationalist has an advantage when it comes to suboptimal altruism? Imagine someone voluntarily choosing to make a suboptimal sacrifice for someone else (in other words, they sacrifice slightly more than the other person gains). Intuitively it seems like, within certain limits, this would be fully justified. I don't think they made any "all-things-considered error". The rationalist can explain this fact by saying that this person did what they had most reason to do given their own subjective weightings of their moral vs. prudential reasons (assuming these weightings qualify as "acceptable").
Oh, that's funny, I would have thought the very opposite! To me it seems completely obvious that disproportionate self-sacrifice is unwarranted (or contrary to reason), but we may permit it on grounds that others don't have standing to criticize you for it, or something like that. So I think the sentimentalist offers the better story here. I guess that suggests it's a nice test case for seeing which way one's own intuitions go!
Thx. I wonder if the rationalist has an advantage when it comes to suboptimal altruism? Imagine someone voluntarily choosing to make a suboptimal sacrifice for someone else (in other words, they sacrifice slightly more than the other person gains). Intuitively it seems like, within certain limits, this would be fully justified. I don't think they made any "all-things-considered error". The rationalist can explain this fact by saying that this person did what they had most reason to do given their own subjective weightings of their moral vs. prudential reasons (assuming these weightings qualify as "acceptable").
Oh, that's funny, I would have thought the very opposite! To me it seems completely obvious that disproportionate self-sacrifice is unwarranted (or contrary to reason), but we may permit it on grounds that others don't have standing to criticize you for it, or something like that. So I think the sentimentalist offers the better story here. I guess that suggests it's a nice test case for seeing which way one's own intuitions go!