“Seeking Ripple Effects” by Richard Y Chappell🔸

This is a link post. Most debate week responses so far seem to strongly favor animal welfare, on the grounds that it is (likely) vastly more cost-effective in terms of pure suffering-reduction. I see two main ways to resist prioritizing suffering-reduction: (1) Nietzschean Perfectionism: maybe the best things in life—objective goods that only psychologically complex “persons” get to experience—are just more important than creature comforts (even to the point of discounting the significance of agony?). The agony-discounting implication seems implausibly extreme, but I’d give the view a minority seat at the table in my “moral parliament”.[1] Not enough to carry the day. (2) Strong longtermism: since almost all expected value lies in the far future, a reasonable heuristic for maximizing EV (note: not the same thing as an account of one's fundamental moral concerns) is to not count near-term benefits at all, and instead prioritize those actions that appear the [...] ---Outline:(01:13) Assessing potential ripple effects(03:39) Three “worldview” perspectives worth consideringThe original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI. --- First published: October 8th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pZT9FjRehCouvrRXz/seeking-ripple-effects --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.