commonplace book redux

I think what the […] the people who are concerned about the excessive sacrifice argument are likely to say here is like, “Well, in so far as you’re right about morality being this extremely demanding thing, it looks like we’re going to have reason to talk about a second thing as well, which is maybe like watered down morality or pseudo morality, and that the second thing is going to be something like […] what we actually plan to act according to or what is reasonable to ask of people, or what we’re going to issue as advice to the government given that they don’t have morally perfect motivations or something like that and then, by the way, the second thing is the thing that’s going to be more directly action guiding in practice. So yeah, you philosophers can go and have your conversation about what this abstract morality abstractly requires, but nobody’s actually going to pay any attention to it when they act. They’re going to pay attention to this other thing. So, by the way, we’ve won the practical argument. I think there’s something to that line of response.

Hilary Greaves, 80,000 Hours Podcast, 23 October 2018