My understanding is that some philosophers do actually think 'consequentialism' should only refer to agent-neutral theories. I agree it's confusing - I couldn't think of a better way to phrase it.
My guess would be yes. I too would really like to see data on this, although I don't know how I'd even start on getting it.
I imagine it would also be fairly worthwhile just to quantify how much is being lost by people burning out and how hard it is to intervene - maybe we could do better, and maybe it would be worth it.
I certainly agree that outside EA, consequentialism just means the moral philosophy. But inside I feel like I keep seeing people use it to mean this process of decision-making, enough that I want to plant this flag.
I agree that the criterion of rightness / decision procedure distinction roughly maps to what I'm pointing at, but I think it's important to note that Act Consequentialism doesn't actually give a full decision procedure. It doesn't come with free answers to things like 'how long should you spend on making a decision' or 'what kinds of decisions should you be doing this for', nor answers to questions like 'how many layers of meta should you go up'. And I am concerned that in the absence of clear answers to these questions, people will often naively opt for bad answers.
To be fair, in both cases there is also some encouragement to adapt the talks, although I am not persuaded that this will actually happen much, and that when it does, it might still be obvious that you're seeing a variant on a prepared script.
My understanding is that some philosophers do actually think 'consequentialism' should only refer to agent-neutral theories. I agree it's confusing - I couldn't think of a better way to phrase it.
My guess would be yes. I too would really like to see data on this, although I don't know how I'd even start on getting it.
I imagine it would also be fairly worthwhile just to quantify how much is being lost by people burning out and how hard it is to intervene - maybe we could do better, and maybe it would be worth it.
I certainly agree that outside EA, consequentialism just means the moral philosophy. But inside I feel like I keep seeing people use it to mean this process of decision-making, enough that I want to plant this flag.
I agree that the criterion of rightness / decision procedure distinction roughly maps to what I'm pointing at, but I think it's important to note that Act Consequentialism doesn't actually give a full decision procedure. It doesn't come with free answers to things like 'how long should you spend on making a decision' or 'what kinds of decisions should you be doing this for', nor answers to questions like 'how many layers of meta should you go up'. And I am concerned that in the absence of clear answers to these questions, people will often naively opt for bad answers.
I get the impression many orgs set up to support EA groups have some version of this. Here are some I found on the internet:
Global Challenges Project has a "ready-to-go EA intro talk transcript, which you can use to run your own intro talk" here: https://handbook.globalchallengesproject.org/packaged-programs/intro-talks
EA Groups has "slides and a suggested script for an EA talk" here: https://resources.eagroups.org/events-program-ideas/single-day-events/introductory-presentations
To be fair, in both cases there is also some encouragement to adapt the talks, although I am not persuaded that this will actually happen much, and that when it does, it might still be obvious that you're seeing a variant on a prepared script.