3 Reading Summary

Radical Empathy

• Significant Influence on doing most-good

  • Recognizing the Importance of Deciding who is worthy of moral consideration

    • Potential implications for doing most good

      • Scale of Human Beings:

        • 8bn (2024)

      • Scale of Non-Human Sentient Beings Farmed for Human Food:

        • Land Animals: 80 bn killed by humans every year (2021)

        • Fish 1.6 trillion every year killed for food (2016)

• Moral Concern & Moral Patienthood

  • Moral Patient

    • Those that have experiences worthy of consideration

  • Moral Concern

    • Considering the well-being-impact of actions towards other Moral Patients

• Skills constructive for Clarity of Moral Concern

  • Humility

    • Acknowledging the possibility that one's knowledge might be wrong

    • Acknowledging of uncertainty

    • Openness to update one's beliefs

  • Recognizing Track-record

    • Not trusting conventional wisdom

      • Society in the past as well as presently (2024) is committing moral discrimination

        • e.g., Slavery, Racism, Sexism, non-sentientism

  • Bravery

    • e.g., Abolitionist & feminist movement

  • Empathy

    • Ability to imagine one-self in another's subjective experience while recognizing having experiences that are worthy for moral concern

      • e.g., imagining the pain of an imprisoned, tortured human, pig, and recognizing that their experience is worthy of improving upon

  • Logical Reasoning

    • e.g., Jeremy Bentham (1747-1832) recommended the abolishment of slavery

• Criteria for Moral Concern

  • Independent of geography, nationality, race

  • Dependent of capacity for pain & pleasure i.e., sentientism

• Strange Implications following Clarity

  • Moral concern for e.g., insects, algorithms (e.g., AI)