Disclaimers

• This essay is an attempt to generalize a scattering of loosely held half-baked opinions. Please tear it apart charitably.
• The shorter your AGI timeline / more pessimistic you are about alignment, the more you should downgrade this essay’s thesis, since that would mean there’s just less time for right reasons to matter.

Summary

• Beliefs can be held for right or wrong reasons:
  • Right reasons stem from future-proof ethical principles, e.g. care for sentient beings.
  • Wrong reasons can neglect crucial considerations, be motivated by object-level views, or be subject to other biases.
• Holding a belief for the right reason increases the chance of leading to right action, even if one's belief turns out to be mistaken.
• The benefit of specifically promoting right reasons over the object-level beliefs we perceive to be right may be underrated in guiding long-term decisionmaking.

Examples of Right and Wrong Reasons

From the perspective that climate change is net negative, when accounting for knock-on effects on x-risks and wild animal welfare:

From the perspective that factory farming is net negative, when accounting for knock-on effects on wild animal welfare and long-term values:

From the perspective that the availability of abortion is net positive, when accounting for the interests of both the woman and the fetus, and knock-on effects on farmed animals, wild animals, and long-term values:

Right Reasons Can Lead to Right Actions

• People who oppose climate change because of its effect on x-risk could work in tandem with adjacent causes like global stability and civilizational recovery, and increase concern for x-risks in general.
• People who oppose factory farming because of animal welfare may be amenable to the possibility that factory farming reduces wild animal suffering in some ways. This can lead to promoting interventions which reduce wild animal suffering in the same ways without producing cruelty to farmed animals, and to long-term concern for wild animals.
• People who support abortion access while recognizing the moral significance of future people can support pro-natalist policies, which augment rather than harm women's autonomy, and could add future people much more quickly than restricting abortion access would.

Wrong Reasons Can Lead to Wrong Actions

• People who oppose climate change because of the belief that humans shouldn't interfere in nature may endorse biomass-based carbon offsets, which are plausibly harmful for wild animals.
• People who oppose factory farming because of its effects on climate change may encourage people to replace beef with chicken in their diets, which likely makes their diets worse for animal welfare.
• People who support abortion because of the belief that fetuses are morally valueless can be reluctant to endorse views where future sentient beings have moral significance.^[1][2]

Why Promote Right Reasons over “Right” Object-Level Beliefs?

• Promoting right reasons is better for epistemics than promoting object-level beliefs without emphasizing their underlying reasons. If climate change or factory farming turns out to be net positive when all things are considered, we'll be much more likely to figure that out if we hold the right reasons for our mistaken beliefs.
• Holding a wrong belief for the right reason makes it likelier that we'll still derive other right beliefs and actions from the right reason. For example, if climate change or factory farming turns out to be net positive, climate change opposers are still right to care about the effect of climate change on x-risk, and factory farming opposers are still right to care about the cruelty inflicted on farmed animals. We shouldn't just gleefully fire up our coal burners and barbecue grills. Instead, we should consider which knock-on effects caused climate change or factory farming to be net positive, and how to realize those downstream effects while mitigating the severe negative externalities of climate change and factory farming.
• If an object-level belief or action is controversial, it's often easier to convince people of the right reason than of the belief or action. Anecdotally, it's much easier for me to convince a meat eater to replace some of their chicken consumption with beef than to convince them to go vegan.
• Promoting right reasons is a low-cost way to improve the epistemics and alignment of any social movement, EA-adjacent or otherwise.

The next time someone tells you they're an environmentalist, an animal advocate, or an anti-abortion activist, challenge their crux. Do the reasons for their beliefs make sense? Perhaps their reasons should be different. If the right reasons come first, the right beliefs and actions can be much more likely to follow.

1. ^{^}

   "One of the most common reactions I’ve seen to the recent surge of interest in longtermism is to worry about its implications for abortion." Chappell, R. Y. (2022, August 22). Utilitarianism and Abortion. Retrieved February 20, 2023, from https://rychappell.substack.com/p/utilitarianism-and-abortion

2. ^{^}

    Anecdotally, several people have expressed to me that they have distanced themselves from longtermism because of its implications for abortion.