How to be a high impact philosopher

It’s a bit more mundane, but another candidate for ‘most important moral issue’ is to sort out whether there’s actually good reason to pick one moral system over another. Again it’s been addressed by 100s (probably + a few zeros) of philosophers, but solving the question might have such a profound effect that it’s worth the relatively tiny chance of success. Having said that, it does seem like various related organisations have been making inroads on a lot of these problems without having solved the above question, so maybe the chance of success is too low - or the payoff is.

On the latter point, it’s not obvious that the main value lies in ‘solving’ these issues. After all, many people would argue that some or all of them are already solved, and that the majority of people simply haven’t understood the solution. So while it might rankle philosophers, they might do better to think of the primary challenge of persuading people toward the most likely answers to the above issues rather than trying to look for a perfect solution/proof for them.

This basically seems to be where Peter Singer, Toby and you have had the most profound impact - not in advancing the dialogue of professional philosophers, but in persuading non-philosophers of the most important conclusions that (some) philosophers had already reached.

“How should we value future people, and merely possible people, compared with present people? (Relevant to abortion, animal suffering, extinction risk)”

Since this is also relevant to animals, analogous questions come into play about future/possible non-person individuals. Thus, perhaps the question to ask is how should we value future individuals, and merely possible individuals, compared with present individuals?

Thanks for this text. Very relevant. I do think topics like this should be actively presented to philosophy students when they’re thinking of pursuing a career in some branch of philosophy.

I have one comment though. Shouldn’t it, for each of the issues, at first be considerered an open question if working as a philosopher would do more good on that issue, compared to some alternative line of work. All the topics you mentioned already have a large number of philosophers at work and at least many core types of arguments have been uncovered. Wouldn’t a life spent as (one more) vegan outreach flyer activist do more good for animals than a life spent as (one more) philosopher? We must also keep in mind that it is possible for someone to engage with philosophical issues and arguments as an activist without pursuing a career in philosophy.

Thanks, Will! I agree with other commenters that the highest value for philosophers like Singer has been to popularize rather than to do novel research. Also, as Zander said, some people feel some of these questions are already solved. (I have pretty firm opinions on most of them.)

One question we might add to the list is to more generally understand what types of minds are sentient in the sense of having morally relevant emotions. This applies to the question of whether insects can suffer, as well as to various types of in silico minds that we may build in the next centuries.

Quibble: The number of people killed by governments in the 20th century was over 100 million (http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/total4.doc). This is more than 42 million abortions per year, although added up over all years, abortions clearly preponderate.

Thanks; I’ve been slowly developing a paper called “High Impact Philosophy.” :)

Abortion doesn’t get talked about much around here, but if anybody who’s reading this thinks it’s the best cause, the best way of reducing abortions is probably through funding developing-world contraception, not developed-world advocacy. In any case, there are bigger fish to fry (or to keep from being fried).

This is an excellent post. But one further question that may be worth thinking about is the connection between research progress and moral progress. The people who make the most important decisions on these topics may care little about what philosophers have to say about them; if so, the marginal impact of your work seems small.

In other words, the fact that philosophers discuss the practical question, “What ought I to do?” does not (on its own) make philosophy a practical career. We should try to figure out how philosophers can maximize their impact by translating research progress into moral progress – through teaching, political influence, media attention, and pollination into other fields. And it’s also worth thinking about the extent to which consensus among philosophers is key to achieving moral progress, and how likely philosophers are to reach consensus on some of these questions.

Hey, awesome! So many good responses! Two important questions to distinguish are:

1. Within philosophical research, what’s the most important work you could be doing?
2. Should you do philosophical research versus other things?

My post was really meant to be just about the former, but - as Jake, Brian, Martin and Zander have noticed! - the latter is really the more important question (though they are to an extent related - if there aren’t any extremely important questions to solve, then philosophy is a no-hoper). Now that I think about it, it makes sense for me to write a post on the latter question too, given the amount I’ve thought about the issue!!

I’ve also got much more to say on what I think are the most important unsolved problems in philosophy (a question I’ve worked on with Nick Beckstead), which Zander and Brian (and I’m sure Luke) wanted to add to. Would people like to see a post on that too?

Thanks again!

Thanks, Will. Yes, I think many of us would be very interested in your list of unsolved questions. (That is, “Please tell us all your problems!”)

Uh, should one discuss the relation between philosophers forming a consensus on some moral issue and actions by people in the world? If there is no relation between these, then no matter how importan the questions, their answers have no practical importance.

I’d say the story is that some small subset of philosophers who care a lot about altruism come to a consensus and communicate their conclusions to people who listen to them (such as 80,000 Hours members or others who read this blog), and then some of the people who hear about their conclusions accept them, and them some of those people act in ways that do more good.

Thanks Robin. Again, “high impact” in is meant to be a logically attributive adjective, not a logically predicative adjective. Being a big mouse doesn’t mean that you’re a mouse and you’re big, and, as I meant it, being a high impact philosopher doesn’t mean that you’re a philosopher and you’re high impact. It might be that no philosophers are high impact. (But Nick’s right: Note how influential folks like Singer, Bostrom and Ord have been on altruistically motivated people. They’re the working model.)

To keep you all in the loop, I’m planning to write 3 follow-on blog posts:

1. What are the most important unsolved moral problems?
2. How to be a high impact philosopher, part 2 - describing another way of filtering for important research questions.
3. Can philosophy be a high impact ethical career?

Great post Will, and I’m looking forward to the follow-on posts too.

I enjoyed reading the post. I’m curious if anybody knows much of the history that would describe high-impact philosophers and their high-impact philosophy as it relates more generally to the world. Singer (who deeply influenced me), Bostrom, and Ord are recent examples and therefore their impact is harder to judge. Are there other models from times past that we can look to?

“What moral status do non-human animals have, and how should we make inter-species comparisons of wellbeing? (Relevant to animal suffering)

At what stage does a human fetus become a person, with rights to life similar to that of an adult? (Relevant to abortion)”

Replace “non-human animals” with “arbitrary organisms” and omit “inter-species”, and the altered first question now subsumes the second, as well as an unstated third question: “what about artificial creatures?”, which may affect that “potential future people” consideration if/when “people” ever includes artificial intelligences, genetically modified humans, “uplifted” animals etc.

Peter Singer is somewhat of an exception. He does look at some of the evidence but often not seriously–he doesn’t understand some of the statistics used in research he cites or some of the statistical concepts like how saying “we didn’t find significant evidence from an effect” is not the same as saying “there is evidence/proof that there is no effect.”

So I think for abortion and poverty you’d want to learn statistics and economics (and some political sciences) to model aid will be spent and how demand and supply of abortions will be impacted by a new regulation and the like. For extinction you probably want to study a lot of physics. For animal issues maybe a mix of biology and economics/stats for an understanding of how legislation will/won’t protect animals (and the unintended side effects of it) as well as understanding the animals themselves. What tools will philosophy teach you?

(I’m told philosophy will teach you “critical thinking” like realizing some jobs are “replaceable” and that you have to analyze the marginal impact of what you add as, say, a doctor, not the average impact of the profession as a whole. But economists have known about the replacability for over 100 years, we call it the opportunity cost, it is the “unseen” in Bastiats famous “seen and unseen” essay. And the “marginal revolution” in economics took place in the late 19th century. AFAIK philosopher seem to have stumbled on these ideas in the 60-70s debates on act vs rule utilitarianism but the act utilitarians using them seem to have LOST that debate before some realization they were right in the past 5-10 years.)

The beginning of my comment got truncated a bit. It said I don’t see what studying philosophy adds to discussion of these issues. Philosophers often comment on free trade, animal rights legislation and the like without ever modeling their impact, getting any data, or even interviewing people.