3.1 Radical empathy

In the mid-5th century BC, in the Greek city of Megara, a soldier named Pythion was buried under a stone that praised him. It said he had killed seven men and broken seven spear points in their bodies. It also said, approvingly, that he had brought grief to no one.

To the people who carved it, there was no contradiction. The seven men were enemies, and enemies didn't count.

Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded GiveWell and was then running Open Philanthropy, opens an essay called Radical Empathy with this epitaph. His point is not that ancient Greeks were unusually cruel. It is that ordinary, respectable people in almost every society have drawn the line around who matters in places that later generations found appalling. Foreigners, enslaved people, women and people of other races were each, at various times, placed outside the circle by conventional wisdom. Those who argued otherwise were often dismissed as strange.

Karnofsky's conclusion is that conventional wisdom and gut feeling are unreliable guides to who deserves moral concern. He suggests a deliberate effort to extend empathy to beings who may deserve it, even when that feels unusual. He calls this radical empathy.

He is careful about where this leads. He says he is unsure whether chickens deserve moral concern, and that thoughtful people disagree. He isn't persuaded by arguments for caring about insects or computer programs, but warns against dismissing strange arguments too quickly. He is also clear that the point is not to seek out unusual causes for their own sake. The point is to avoid ignoring real suffering because it belongs to someone we find easy to overlook.

So which beings might we be overlooking now? The most discussed candidates are animals raised for food, mainly because of how many of them there are.