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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Future-proof ethics, published by Holden Karnofsky on February 2, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This piece kicks off a series on how we might try to be reliably “ahead of the curve” on ethics: making ethical decisions that look better - with hindsight, after a great deal of future moral progress - than what conventional wisdom would recommend. I examine the idea that a combination of utilitarianism (“the greatest good for the greatest number”) and sentientism (“if you can experience pleasure and/or suffering, you matter ethically”) gives us a good chance for “future-proof ethics," a system that is reliably ahead of the curve. About half of my motivation here is to explain some of the strange-seeming views on ethics that are common in the effective altruism community, so that people who aren’t intrinsically interested in moral philosophy can better see the motivation and appeal of such views. Outside of the effective altruist community, I think people tend to drastically under-appreciate some of the good reasons to embrace utilitarianism and sentientism. But the other half of my motivation is to help effective altruists see the limits of this sort of ethical system, and see reasons to doubt that it is as “future-proof” as I suspect some casually imagine it is. In order to do that, I need to first lay out what the motivations and ambitions of this sort of ethical system are, before examining how confident we should be that this system will live up to its hopes. Ethics based on "common sense" seems to have a horrible track record. That is: simply going with our intuitions and societal norms has, in the past, meant endorsing all kinds of insanity. To quote an article by Kwame Anthony Appiah: Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics. Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today. Is there a way to guess which ones? This post kicks off a series on the approach to ethics that I think gives us our best chance to be "ahead of the curve:" consistently making ethical decisions that look better, with hindsight after a great deal of moral progress, than what our peer-trained intuitions tell us to do. "Moral progress" here refers to both societal progress and personal progress. I expect some readers will be very motivated by something like "Making ethical decisions that I will later approve of, after I've done more thinking and learning," while others will be more motivated by something like "Making ethical decisions that future generations won't find abhorrent." Being "future-proof" isn't necessarily the end-all be-all of an ethical system. I tend to "compromise" between the ethics I'll be describing here - which is ambitious, theoretical, and radical - and more "common-sense"/intuitive approaches to ethics that are more anchored to conventional wisdom and the "water I swim in." But if I simply didn't engage in philosophy at all, and didn't try to understand and incorporate "future-proof ethics" into my thinking, I think that would be a big mistake - one that would lead to a lot of other moral mistakes, at least from the perspective of a possible future world (or a possible Holden) that has seen a lot of moral progress. Ind...