Moral Progress Isn't Just Moral Circle Expansion
Sometimes you want some moral circle contraction
The only justifiable stopping place for for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains.
Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle
A lot of noise is made about moral circle expansion, the increase in the number of things included in the space of moral concern, whose interests are taken to account in moral calculus. Underneath is a historical argument:
Historically, moral progress is associated with moral circle expansion.
So we can accelerate moral progress by expanding our moral circle now.
OpenPhilanthropy quotes Singer that “The circle of altruism has broadened from the family and tribe to the nation and race . . . to all human beings.” Michael Aird visualizes the expanding circle:
(I guess some circle larger still must contain the People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners.)
On this logic, if we’re somewhere around the “All People” part of the circle, we could apply the trend of moral progress being associated with an outward movement on this diagram as a reason for moving outward right now.
One class of objections considers not just the status of warranting moral concern but also the level of concern given, with arguments varyingly that immigrants, the elderly, children, etc. may have held higher regard in the past.
A simpler problem is that that direct moral circle expansion doesn’t always entail moral progress. Sometimes, moral circle expansion isn’t associated with moral progress. Other times, moral circle contraction is associated with progress.
Lists of potential examples of a contracting moral circle can be found by Gwern here: he mentions animals, prisoners, and fetuses, but most obvious of all is the value of everything that’s not sentient. Most people value the interests of things other than individual people or animals, like nations, institutions, norms, the purity of the environment, and the supernatural.
The EA Intro Program syllabus includes an entire week on “Expanding Our Compassion” that includes an exercise for the student to write a letter to a historical counterpart urging them to “expand their moral circle,” perhaps to include slaves or women. But there isn’t any prompt imploring an EA from antiquity—or indeed a modern cosmopolitan EA—to patriotically expand their moral circle to include the interests of their nation-state.
A response might be that traditions, institutions, or spirits aren’t sentient (perhaps by virtue of not being real) and so don’t have interests, but this isn’t fundamentally different from saying that slaves or animals don’t have interests for whatever reason. If the EA bailey is that anything should have its interests taken into account if and only if it is sentient (and maybe if it will be sentient later, like fetuses, people yet to be conceived, and people to be raised from the dead), then this isn’t an obviously false claim, but it can’t really be justified on a Whig-history account of moral progress.
Good post and I basically agree, but worth mentioning that false negatives for moral patienthood seem generally worse than false positives. I can laugh at those who think rivers or forests are intrinsically worthy of care, but this type of failure isn't nearly as consequential as e.g., failing to consider nonhuman animals or future people
I'm assuming you didn't make the chart, but still, it's bad. We already have indirect duties to ecosystems via self - all people. But in themselves, ecosystems aren't the kind of things we can have direct duties toward. Also after people, presumable would be "rational agents" like aliens and conscious AI, then animals, which would necessarily include alien animals. Currently the debate is within Animalia, not Animalia as such. Insects have brains but no nociceptors; oysters have nociceptors but no brain. Anyway, just wanted to be pedantic.