Effective Altruists Should Read More Moral Philosophy
Unfortunately this does entail opening a book
As early as page 2, the 80,000 Hours book presents an argument for thinking about your career more than most people:
You have about 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years. This means your choice of career is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make. . . . If you could make your career just 1% higher impact, or 1% more enjoyable, it would be worth spending up to 1% of your career doing so. That’s 800 hours – five months of full‐time work.
You might be on track to start a career maximizing earnings by committing to success as a software engineer, but 800 hours studying for quant trading interviews could increase the chances of entering that field enough to increase lifetime earnings by much more than 1% in expectation. Most of your earnings are in the second half of your career and it’s easy to undervalue training or exploring that isn’t immediately profitable but has compounding returns.
In general, effective altruism has a strong track record of clear thinking on goal-directed behavior and often ends up taking the position that early commitment is inferior to unintuitively lengthy preparation, practice, and investigation. At the broadest level there’s the Long Reflection, a proposed civilizational stage where our species having eliminated its existential risks can take a breather and evaluate its options before making any irreversible moves. Will MacAskill on the 80,000 Hours Podcast:
I think there is an answer. I call it the long reflection, which is you get to a state where existential risks or extinction risks have been reduced to basically zero. It’s also a position of far greater technological power than we have now, such that we have basically vast intelligence compared to what we have now, amazing empirical understanding of the world, and secondly tens of thousands of years to not really do anything with respect to moving to the stars or really trying to actually build civilization in one particular way, but instead just to engage in this research project of what actually is a value. What actually is the meaning of life? And have, maybe it’s 10 billion people, debating and working on these issues for 10,000 years because the importance is just so great. Humanity, or post-humanity, may be around for billions of years. In which case spending a mere 10,000 is actually absolutely nothing.
In just the same way as if you think as an individual, how much time should you reflect in your own values before choosing your career and committing to one particular path.
Elsewhere MacAskill actually suggests “a million years or something” as possibly appropriate. Just as a year or two isn’t much in the larger scheme of your career, a terasecond or two is nothing at all to a species looking out at eons of stability.
But while EAs encourage unusually high reflection on career decisions, they’re surprisingly underinformed on moral decisions. In my experience, it’s common for EAs not to know the main arguments for and against moral realism, for particular meta-ethical conclusions, or for particular normative theories. The 2019 EA Survey found that 90% of EAs “identified with” (it’s not clear to me what exactly this means) consequentialism, but I don’t think most EAs could well articulate the best arguments for and against the most common ethical theories, or pass relevant ideological Turing Tests.
This matters because ethical conclusions help you decide what to value and which goals to pursue, which themselves inform specific career-related decisions. Discovering that a different ethical theory is correct could lead to dramatic swings in optimal career choice. Your life—the domain of your ethical choices—is even longer than your career, so the same arguments used for careers also justify dozens or hundreds of hours studying the best arguments in ethical theory to make sure you’re drawing the right conclusions.
Hastily-conceived book suggestions (I’ll always shill Michael Huemer):
Methaethics
Mark van Roojen's Metaethics: A Contemporary Introduction
MacAskill, Bykvist, and Ord’s Moral Uncertainty
Terrence Cuneo's The Normative Web
Michael Huemer’s Ethical Intuitionism
Normative ethics
Louis Pojman’s Ethical Theory
Rosalind Hursthouse’s On Virtue Ethics
Peter Singer’s Writings on an Ethical Life
W.D. Ross’s The Right and the Good
Applied ethics
Peter Singer's Practical Ethics
Michael Huemer’s Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism