Alan Dawrst’s worlds of suffering
At The Hoover Hog there is a fascinating interview with Alan Dawrst on utilitarianism and suffering:
In practice, the world really is a big pond with kids drowning all the time: There are billions of people suffering from preventable poverty, disease, and violence, billions of animals enduring dreadful lives on factory farms, and orders of magnitude more animals in the wild that are sick, hungry, or being eaten alive. My response is, “That’s terrible! What can I do to make things better?”
Alan Dawrst focuses on areas that are mostly ignored by ethicists and economists,
….areas that have been ignored can potentially offer high expected returns from being investigated (sort of like undervalued securities). But unlike the stock market, where most investors care a lot about their expected returns, there aren’t many people who try to consistently maximize the expected value of their actions even when the probabilities involved become really small and the payoffs really big. So there’s not much of an efficient market hypothesis for prevention of suffering.
The writer is also one of the few modern thinkers who has accepted Pascal’s wager.
Read the complete interview here.
