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Notes -
Erik Hoel on Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the Repugnant Conclusion - https://youtube.com/watch?v=PCnkJ1y9kys
Russ Roberts talks with Erik Hoel. They both think overall that effective altruism does good, but they think it, and strong/exclusive forms of act utilitarianism have some strong problems. Most of what they mention will not be new to many people here, they talk about the repugnant conclusion, and the difficulty of predicting results, and comparing the utility of different outcomes. They mention Yudkowsky discussion of a huge number of trivial harms being compared to one severe harm (specifically a googleplex people getting hiccups compared to one person being torn apart and killed by a shark). Despite the fact that most of it wasn't new to me I still found it to be an interesting discussion.
I think I agree with them on what I called strong/exclusive act utilitarianism (they didn't use that term they just called it utilitarianism). What I mean by strong/exclusive is that you don't consider other moral principles, and that you give an extremely heavy weight to utilitarian calculations. OTOH I don't think totally ignoring consequences, or even specifically utility is a good idea either. I think your actions should aim for outcomes with higher utility. I have a mixed moral view both deontological and consequential. Sometimes the two conflict. When that happens I don't have some well developed overarching theory to choose between them its more of an intuitive thing. If an act I consider to be immoral on deontological grounds is necessary to prevent some horrible catastrophe, I'd probably say it still is immoral but you should do it anyway.
I feel like utilitarianism - perhaps most any moral system - is at its best when it's serving to restrain some other moral system from going off the rails, and at its worst where it would go off the rails itself.
Utilitarianism is at its best when it's reining in the likes of "if it saves even one life, it's worth any cost!" through saying "whoa, there: that's crazy, and here's why."
Utilitarianism is at its worst when it's proposing "so here's why we need to tile the entire universe with-" and needing something else to rein it in in turn.
It would be nice if I had some clear, consistent standard to say what "sane" was, but I don't, and I fear there's some impossibility theorem lurking in these parts. I hope not, though.
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