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Constraints on, permissions to violate, Effective Altruism



To start off today's discussion, I refer the reader to my post in November discussing what "effective altruism" is and why I think we must judge that somewhere in its reasoning this philosophy goes horribly wrong. Effective Altruism: The short course (jamesian58.blogspot.com)

I won't re-tread that ground but I will observe that the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews site has a review of a new book on the subject.

The book is THE RULES OF RESCUE by Theron Pummer. The reviewer is Violetta Igneski.

Pummer argues (in Igneski's paraphrase) that "we are not always required to provide the most help possible," that is, maximally effective altruism. He does not reject EA, but wants to reconcile it with a non-consequentialist account of both moral constraints and moral permissions.  The constraints are things that you must NOT do, regardless of your utilitarian calculations, and the permissions are things that you CAN rightly do that are in some respect unhelpful. 

Pummer is a lecturer at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, above. 

I see nothing in the review about what seems to me the most dubious off-the-rails aspect of the theory, the theorizing about the distant future. I suppose somewhere in Pummer's constraints and permissions he ends up telling us that we need NOT make heroic sacrifices in the here and now just so that in the 33d century the human-species- eliminating robots fail in their take over. That, after all, would make sense of the book's subtitle, "Cost, Distance and Effective Altruism".

I hope I'm right in that supposition. Because I care much more about the flesh-and-blood people known to me than I do about those distant hypothetical folks I'll happily sacrifice to the robots. (Review the November post of that statement confuses you. First link above. Thanks.) 

Here is Pummer's website: https://theronpummer.com/ And, yes, that is pretty much the URL you would have guessed.

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